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Did my daughter, as the child of two hyper-literate people with doctorates, have some kind of leg up? I doubt it. Some kids pick up reading with minimal guidanc

Did my daughter, as the child of two hyper-literate people with doctorates, have some kind of leg up? I doubt it. Some kids pick up reading with minimal guidance as early as 3; she wasn’t one of them, nor had she given indication of any impending breakthrough. Besides, Engelmann’s book is designed for kids of average intelligence and has worked with legions of them over the decades. In a word, yes, she likely had a leg up. The credit mostly goes to her, not you or the book you used. As the father of a boy with an extremely strange developmental reading profile (couldn't read a thing at age seven even after much one on one tutoring, to reading at an eighth grade level at nine) I learned a few things talking to many other parents and professionals. The most important is that no one method works for all children, as they each learn to read in their own way. My boy was definitely a "whole word" learner, and phonetics was a complete disaster for him. Other kids are clearly the other way round, and many kids do a combination of both. Secondly, intelligence has nothing to do with it. Dyslexia is caused by many factors, but general intelligence really isn't one of them.

jnty 7y ago
Yes - this definitely reads a bit naively, like people saying they "don't have an accent". She almost certainly had a leg-up compared to other kids, even if it was just related to how much she overheard her parents talk or having them make an active effort to chat to her. Other kids have to make do with much less. To realise that sounds link together into certain words, you have to know the words in the first place.
dcolkitt 7y ago
> Secondly, intelligence has nothing to do with it. Dyslexia is caused by many factors, but general intelligence really isn't one of them. I'd say that's an overstatement and not congruent with existing research in developmental psychology. To preface it's important to distinguish between two reading skills. "Decoding" is the ability to parse the symbols into words. "Comprehension" is the ability to understand the content after its decoded. Among children aged 7-8, there's a 40% correlation between general intelligence and "decoding". With comprehension there's an astounding 62% correlation with intelligence. Those are about the highest correlations you'll see anywhere in social science. Reading skills become progressively more loaded on comprehension relative to decoding, as students progress into higher grades. Therefore you see the general phenomenon that reading ability at younger ages is only moderately correlated with intelligence, whereas for teenagers and adults its extremely correlated. [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1da5/7f319c9f6976b6b9501be19d76b4ae66a256.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1da5/7f319c9f6976b6b9501be1...

jnty 7y ago

Yes - this definitely reads a bit naively, like people saying they "don't have an accent". She almost certainly had a leg-up compared to other kids, even if it was just related to how much she overheard her parents talk or having them make an active effort to chat to her. Other kids have to make do with much less. To realise that sounds link together into certain words, you have to know the words in the first place.

dcolkitt 7y ago

> Secondly, intelligence has nothing to do with it. Dyslexia is caused by many factors, but general intelligence really isn't one of them. I'd say that's an overstatement and not congruent with existing research in developmental psychology. To preface it's important to distinguish between two reading skills. "Decoding" is the ability to parse the symbols into words. "Comprehension" is the ability to understand the content after its decoded. Among children aged 7-8, there's a 40% correlation between general intelligence and "decoding". With comprehension there's an astounding 62% correlation with intelligence. Those are about the highest correlations you'll see anywhere in social science. Reading skills become progressively more loaded on comprehension relative to decoding, as students progress into higher grades. Therefore you see the general phenomenon that reading ability at younger ages is only moderately correlated with intelligence, whereas for teenagers and adults its extremely correlated. [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1da5/7f319c9f6976b6b9501be19d76b4ae66a256.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1da5/7f319c9f6976b6b9501be1...