Hidden Reading Problems in ESL
Learners
This article reports a case of a native
speaker of Spanish who has severe reading
and spelling difficulties in English. These
difficulties resemble those found in surface
dyslexia. It is argued that he also has the
same difficulties in Spanish, but the regular
spelling system of Spanish prevented his
difficulties from becoming apparent. We
consider the possibility that the writing system
of a speaker's L1can strongly influence
the way he/she habitually handles words
both in the Ll and in an L2, and the implications
of this view for teaching English as a
second language are discussed.
In a recent paper, Masterson, Coltheart and Meara (1985) reported a
case of a native speaker of Spanish with unexpected dyslexic symptoms in
English. That case raises some important issues for teachers of ESL, and
the purpose of this paper is to bring these implications to the attention of
people working in the profession. The paper is organised into two sections.
Part one summarizes the clinical data from the case. Part two
discusses the implications of the case in some detail.
PART ONE
FE is a native Spanish speaker, born in 1953 in Colombia, South
America, who came to study in the UK at the age of 18. His family
background is middle class, and he has no history of birth trauma,
physical illness, or any form of delayed mental development. He does,
however, have severe difficulty with English spelling, and in 1981, he
approached his doctor about this problem, because it was feared that his
poor spelling might prevent him from passing his final examinations.
Subsequent tests (administered in English) showed that he was of
"superior" intelligence (an IQ of 125 on the Raven tests; Raven 1977). A
small discrepancy was found between his scores on verbal and non-verbal
tests (the latter were higher), and he also showed a slight short term
memory deficit in that his ability to remember strings of digits is rather
less than it ought to be. Both these deficits would be expected in an L2
speaker, however.
HIDDEN READING PROBLEMS
A series of screening tests were administered to FE in English in order
to test for signs of dyslexia. These tests are summarized below:
a) reading aloud regular and irregular words in English.
English words can be divided into two broad categories: those
where the pronunciation can be determined by the application
of a set of rules which relate spelling to pronunciation (regular
words), and a set of irregular words whose pronunciation is
basically idiosyncratic and unpredictable unless you know the
word. FE made a total of 21 errors on a standard list of 78
words, with twice as many errors on irregular words as on
regular ones.
b) spelling to dictation.
FE made 51 errors out of 100 on the Schonell Spelling Test,
(Schonell 1966) but the majority of these errors were phonological
(e.g., SERCH for SEARCH, COFF for COUGH, and
HIGHDROLIC for HYDRAULIC.)
c) comprehension of written homophones.
Homophones are words that sound identical to each other,
but are spelled differently (e.g., BEECH and BEACH, MEET
and MEAT, etc.). FE's ability to handle these pairs was tested
by reading aloud to him a definition of one member of a pair.
He was then required to choose the correct answer from a set
of four words: the two homophones and two controlled distractor
words. FE made 41 errors on a list of 100 words, and a
significant proportion of these errors consisted of his choosing
the wrong member of the homophone pair.
These results suggest that, with respect to English, at least, FE shows
some of the classic symptoms of developmental dyslexia, i.e. a dyslexia
which is not due to traumatic brain injury. He is of above average
intelligence; there is no evidence of neurological abnormality; his spoken
English is adequate in every respect, but both reading and spelling are
impaired. More specifically, the diagnostic tests suggest that the source of
FE's difficulty is that he relies too heavily on a strategy of recoding the
written forms of words into phonologically coded strings. This phenomenon
is one of the central features of the type of dyslexia known as
SURFACE DYSLEXIA (Marshall and Newcombe, 1973; Coltheart, Masterson,
Byng, Prior & Riddoch, 1983; Patterson, Marshall & Coltheart,
1985).
The interesting question which arises at this stage, is whether FE is also
a surface dyslexic in Spanish. This question is not as easy to answer as it
might seem, however. Because the symptoms which are characteristic of
30 TESL CANADA JOURNAL/REVUE TESL DU CANADA
VOL. 3, NO.1, NOVEMBER 1985.
this type of dyslexia rely on a severe mismatch between a language's
orthography and its phonology, surface dyslexia is only really apparent in
languages like English, Danish or French which have irregular orthographies.
In languages with regular orthographies, homophones and irregular
words do not exist, and this means that is is theoretically possible for
someone to be a surface dyslexic without this disability ever becoming
apparent. The skills that English speakers develop to handle irregular
words and homophones are simply not needed in these languages. Spanish,
unlike English, has an orthography that is very regular, but not
entirely so. Some of the tests used to screen for surface dyslexia in English
can also be constructed for Spanish. There are a few instances of sounds
that can be spelled in two ways, for example, and this means that one can
(with some ingenuity) construct a test similar to the homophone test in
English-the irregular words test cannot be duplicated however.
FE's performance in Spanish is generally much better than it is in
English. He correctly read aloud a list of 78 Spanish words; he made only
3 errors in reading aloud a passage of 500 words; and he misread only 3
out of 74 legal nonwords in Spanish (legal nonwords are sequences of
letters which could belong to the language in question but just happen not
to exist.) However, his spelling of dictated words was poor (14 out of 24
correct), again with a preponderance of phonologically correct mispellings.
He also produced a very high proportion of errors on the Spanish
homophone test (24 out of 40). These results suggest that FE has little
difficulty in handling written words in Spanish, except where there is no
simple direct mapping of graphemes and phonemes. In other words, he
shows essentially the same symptoms in English and Spanish, but his
overall performance reflects the fact that Spanish orthography is regular
in almost all everyday situations.
To be fair, we ought to point out that there are a number of other
possible explanations of FE's behaviour which do not rely on a diagnosis
of dyslexia. One possibility is that FE is simply behaving in a way that
would be typical of a younger, non-dyslexic reader. Specifically, good
readers in the early stages of learning to read make more errors on
exceptions than on regular words, and the spelling errors made by good
spellers tend to be phonological. Another alternative is that FE is not
dyslexic, but rather an extreme case of what Baron and Strawson (1976)
have called "Phoenicians." These are individuals who rely heavily on
spelling-sound correspondence rules, and whose reading behaviour is
characterised by a tendency to read regular words well, but to misread
exceptional words. Baron and Strawson contrast these readers with "Chinese"
readers, i.e., readers who rely on word-specific associations, and
can therefore read regular and irregular words well as long as they are
familiar, but cope badly with any unfamiliar word. Some reasons for
HIDDEN READING PROBLEMS
rejecting these alternative explanations will be found in Masterson, Coltheart
and Meara (1985). Even if these arguments are wrong, however,
they should not affect the argument put forward in part 2.
PART TWO
In order to see why FE's case is an important one for teachers of
English as a second language, we first need a model which will allow us to
explain how his behaviour differs from what we would expect in normal
readers. A model of this sort is shown in Figure 1.
written
word
orthographic
representation
B»>
spoken
word
phonological
representation
1
A »>1
I :«