Unusually high dyslexia incidence in the UK

[HeathRobinson]

A little bit of drift in the "6 year old and table saw accident thread" got me thinking about what seems to be excused all too regularly as dyslexia here in the UK. It will be difficult for me not to come across as arrogant to some readers of this thread but what better thing than arrogance to needle someone with to elicit a response!

I am now 28. I realise I am fortunate in that, despite being British, I grew up in South Africa. For the most part I grew up in relative privilege thanks to SA's infamous empowerment of the few at the cost of many, and that probably gave me advantage in the quality of the schooling I received and by extension on my ability to write more clearly than many of my similarly aged UK peers.

If you watched the recent TV show on disciplinarian parents, in particular the South African episode you'd have some idea what I'm talking about in terms of the schooling there. The education was distinctly 1950's style. Corporal punishment only recently being outlawed. For quite some time after I started at school it seemed that PT was more about preparing us for the military than about having fun and playing sports. I'm not advocating any of that though, just curious as to the falling writing standards in the UK.

It may be rude to ask but I've wanted to know for a long time now what went wrong over here. There can be no denying that there are definite problems and it is fairly easy to generalise and compare the incidence of bad spelling to age bands.

The people I know and work with who are aged 40+ tend to be able to write fairly clearly. It may just be that they've had more practice but there seems to be genuine effort and thought behind their communications. Then, between ages 30 and 40, I could say maybe a maximum of 5% of people I've met are terrible spellers. These people often claim that they suffer from dyslexia but to be honest that is a rather high incidence of dyslexia compared to the rest of the world! Then we come to my direct peers, the under 30's. It is a rare occasion when I meet someone in this age group who can write and spell proficiently. If you think that my experience in this regard has just been one big unlucky coincidence then please let me know. I often find myself pining for peers with whom I can communicate without puzzling over their messages!

For what it's worth I do get annoyed sometimes about the spelling tuition I have received, and that is because I was taught mixed American and English spellings and hence my writing is sometimes neither American nor English, it may be Amglish. More generally let me not say anything of the rather biased and politically poisoned South African history education I received!

Wot finks yoo? Wood a letta ritten laik this pass muster? Also, before I let you rip my writing to shreds let me just say that I knew before posting this topic that I'd be inviting criticism of my own writing! So nee nee ne nah nah :lol:

 

[lurker]

My opinion is that the UK has a normal rate, but we are now reached a state where people with any sort of disability are relaxed about "coming out". And are accepted for what they are warts n all.

Maybe all the dyslexics in SA are in low paid jobs (and below the radar) because the bigots running the companies refused to see their positives & concentrated on the negatives.

 

[HeathRobinson]

My opinion is that the UK has a normal rate, but we are now reached a state where people with any sort of disability are relaxed about "coming out". And are accepted for what they are warts n all.

You might be right lurker. I've just done a quick bit of searching around for statistics on the internet and it seems that the incidence is genuinely higher than I thought it should be. Ranging from 3 to 10% of the population with higher incidence among males apparently. Still, I'm not so sure this excuses the under 30 age group's apparent rather higher incidence. Are some of these people just using dyslexia as a lazy excuse?

 

[Steve Maskery]

Well I regularly moan about the standard of the written word and I'm well aware that I am setting myself up a fall, given that that is what I do regularly, and in the public domain, too.

I get particularly annoyed by people who deliberately choose to write, how can I put this politely, "non-standard" English. It seems that some people don't have a keyboard with a Shift key or Full Stop on it. If they want me to read what they are writing, I really don't think it should be made as hard as possible for me to understand what they are trying to say.

As for Dylexia, that is even more reason for those who do know how to spell properly should make the effort to do so. Dyslexics have enough trouble reading as it is, without their job being made even more difficult by other people's laziness. Same goes for people who contribute here and for whom English is not their first language. We should have more respect for them than to inflict literary garbage on them.

There is a very real difference between people who are not terribly good at spelling but who do their best and those who just can't be bothered to use the keys in front of them.

 

[Smudger]

There are possibly two reasons for the apparently higher rates of dyslexia in the UK.

The first is that the identification and teaching of dyslexics was simply advanced here by the 1970s, with the work of Bev Hornsby and others. This was partly due to the Warnock Report and child-centred educational ideas.

The second, which comes from that, is that dyslexics are entitled to support in lessons and to extra time or amanuenses in exams. It is therefore in the interests of parents to get a diagnosis of dyslexia for their kids, especially as there is now very little stigma attached.

I remember a very good friend of mine being beaten for being 'too lazy to spell properly' in the early 60s, nowadays after a long and successful career which includes several well-received books he can be relaxed about it, but it eventually took computers with spell checks and a very supportive partner to allow him to release his knowledge and insights.

I vividly remember sitting with a profoundly dyslexic young man many years ago, and him describing to me how the words on the page were crawling like ants as he tried to read them. It was made worse with school textbooks because of the current vogue for printing text on blocks of coloured background. He was eventually helped a great deal by the prescription of Irlen lenses.

 

[Jenx]

It 'could' be relevant ..... I'm just about to turn 44, and as a little lad, I was taught to read in what was the conventional way, I think the term for it being "Phoenetically", or in other words, by learning the sound of each letter, and how it would be pronounced and indeed how it would be pronounced in relation to its placement in a word in relation to the other letters around about it.
This method of teaching kids to read had been used successfully for many many years.

Not long after I'd gone through that stage of learning as a child - the method of teaching kids to read was changed, and they learnt by the use of Flash-Cards. I.E. - the child is shown a card with the word on it, and learns by recognition of that whole word, thus recognising it by having it repeatedly imprinted on their memory.
It is successful up to a point, but does not teach someone the mechanics of how to deduce how a word 'should' be spelled .......
and a direct result of this, is the phenomena that the original post describes.

The 'accuracy' of the reference to 40+ being less prone to this, is absolutely spot-on. and its a direct result of the change in the method of learning, implemented right about the time that would reflect in those under approximately 40 showing a disproportionate level of so-called dyslexia, by comparison.

It'd be interesting to see if the level of in-numeracy had risen by the same levels, as the teaching methods of basic arithmetic have not changed. I'd take a guess at the answer to that being a resounding NO.

Of course, we can tag onto the back of the rise in dyslexia, the 'new' phenomena or 'illness' of "ADD" or Attention Deficit Disorder, which seems to be highly prevalent among kids now. Thats got to be the 'wooly-est fob-disease excuse' for an "unruly little scrote" going.

However, there are areas of child health which have massively increased in their incidence... and the one that springs immediately to mind is Asthma. When I was in primary education, one kid from a total of maybe 700 had asthma.
When my son ( now 18 ) was going through primary school.. 7 kids from a class of 26 had inhalers for Asthma . And Its not just a case of 'better diagnosis'. Something has changed - I suspect the problem may have multiple causes, but there is definately a huge rise in the incidences of Asthma in the young.

My closest pal in School had quite severe levels of dyslexia - it wasn't picked up till much later in life, when he returned to college at the age of 26, having given up work to pursue a change in career direction. After which he was assigned a 'Scribe' for all his written work.
I also came across a really unfortunate lad when I was at technical college during my apprenticeship.... he was quite open about his dyslexia, but as a young child going through his early schooling, he told us he had been ridiculed and basically ostricised as a 'buffoon', where in reality he was as intelligent a young man as the next guy. His written words, were like heiroglyphs, making no sense to a conventional reader at all, and even he himself struggled to read them back to himself.
Poor fella, this must have had severe impact on his own evolution.

So for sure, the 'condition' is very real and tangible, but whether it's become all too easy to diagnose someone as "mildly dyslexic", when they just havent really learned to read and write properly is a bit more open to debate than it once was.

 

[cant-weld-wood]

i am dyslexic a bit reading is not tghe problem for me its putting the pen to paper side of things that gave me the problem at school and spelling was not brilliant.
my consertration span lacked at school in most lesson apart from
maths / wood working and metal work.
people suffer from differnt things and differnetly to each illness
i have 5 kids 2 of them are autistic and both of them suffer differently.
one hateing loud noises and the other not but the pair of them have no fear of danger and will walk out into the road without any thought at all.

 

[devonwoody]

Can I come in.

Steve, some people can only accept 100%

Others are happy to plod along at lesser standards.

Sometimes I miss off the apostrophe and if I am in the mood I correct, sometimes I wont. Am I a bad person?

 

[MikeG.]

Firstly, what a great series of well thought out and intelligent postings. A real pleasure to read such an interesting discussion.

The inference from the question is that spelling and dislexia are associated directly, and even that spelling is the only symptom of dislexia. The logical extension of this suggestion is that good teaching of spelling will eliminate dislexia.

I contend that this is a mis-understanding of dislexia.

I have a daughter in a grammar school who is right at the top end of all the indicators for intellectual and academic ability, and who spells really very well generally (don't start me on texting!!!). However, she has dislexia.

I was amazed when the school suggested this straight after she achieved 9 A's or A stars at GCSE.........and yet the tests confirmed it. The manifestations of dislexia in her case are a slower reading speed than her contemporaries, and a difficulty in retaining the meaning of the sentence or paragraph she is reading. The mental battle to de-code the spelling is overwriting the short-term memory. Whereas you and I generally read a page of script and aren't conscious of the reading process........we merely absorb the contents and do some analysis...........my daughter is looking at the words and spelling (not the meaning).

My wife is a teacher. I regularly see her marking kid's work, and can tell pretty quickly these days which of her kids have problems. A good number have dislexia. All the class are taught spelling rigorously (like most schools do these days, despite what you hear). A good number of these dislexic kids are otherwise high achievers, and are motivated and attentive. Dislexia is quite clearly not being used as an excuse by kids parents or teachers in my wife's school to allow sub-standard spelling.

In its worst form, the letters apparently seem to jump off the page at the kids in a random sort of way, and even if the child can focus on just one word, unless they recognise it the effort of the process of decoding it sound-by-sound can mean that by the time they get to the end of the word they have forgotten what the first sound/ letter was. Some of these are very able children, but without a diagnosis of dislexia, they would have been considered "thick" by their class-mates...........and a generation or two ago would have been sitting in the corner with a dunce's hat on.

So why have we an unusually high incidence of dislexia?........Well, we haven't. It is just that other countries don't have the knowledge or expertise in this area that we do. They are missing countless numbers of children who are somewhere on the dislexic spectrum...........to the detriment of the children, and to the detriment of their country.

Mike

 

[agbagb]

There could be more diagnosed dyslexics about now but less total illiterates.
Because of the difficulty with written language that many of us have, we can be put off writting as no-one likes ridicule and stigma. With identification of the problem, schooling is now adjusted to help, content is valued highly and help is given to improve legibility. In the past many left school without the skills or confidence to put anything down on paper.

I'm glad things have changed, I was lucky, my mum was a remedial english teacher. Now my son has a chance to shine at what he's naturally good at and gets the support with his areas of difficulty.

We're just wired up differently - sometimes benficially

Alexander Graham- Bell
Albert Einstein
Henry Ford
John Lennon
Leonardo DaVinci
Nigel Kennedy
Richard Branson
Walt Disney
Agatha Christie
Winston Churchill
Thomas Jefferson
John F. Kennedy
Pablo Picasso
Steven Spielberg
George Washington

Who really cares if they couldn't spell?

 

[davebray]

I agree with your sentiments.
From experience, sloppy English in engineering reports, specifications and the like provides me with the opportunity to discount what is written and interpret the same in such a way as to favour my employer. I know it sounds hard hearted but that's life.

But I am now going to be a pedantic curmudgeon, the word 'illicit' in your phrase "to needle someone with to illicit a response" should really read 'elicit'.
The former means illegal and the latter means to 'draw out' or 'to extract' which I think is more in keeping with the context of the discourse.

I shall now slunk off.
Cheers
Dave

 

[woodbloke]

Firstly, what a great series of well thought out and intelligent postings. A real pleasure to read such an interesting discussion.


Mike

I can't add anything of note to this thread but would echo Mike's sentiment - Rob

 

[HeathRobinson]

But I am now going to be a pedantic curmudgeon, the word 'illicit' in your phrase "to needle someone with to illicit a response" should really read 'elicit'.

Duly noted and corrected. Thanks. :lol: It was tempting to concoct some unlikely excuse about clever puns involving illicit needles, but perhaps I should just go and get tested for dyslexia instead :idea:

 

[Steve Maskery]

Have you noticed how many of us have gone back and corrected mistakes in our original post in this thread?

 

[SketchUp Guru]

Mike, I didn't take away from Heath's post the same thing you did. I think his point was that there seems to be more poor spelling, grammar and punctuation in the under 30 age group than can be accounted for by the incidence of dyslexia.

I won't claim to be any sort of expert in using language but I do notice a great many errors made by others. I don't know the situation of the writers in those cases so I am hesitant to be critical. I have heard some say that spelling and punctuation is overrated and that it isn't taught to nearly the same level as it was when I was in school.

Steve's point is an excellent one which I'd not thought of before. Seems like good incentive for those of use who don't have dyslexia.

 

[HeathRobinson]

Dave R, you are quite correct. That was my original point, though the danger with it was that it would come across as antagonistic to some. I was therefore happy that the thread had found it's own good spirited tone. It's been darned interesting to me so far. So many real life accounts. It has certainly caused me to dismount my spelling and grammar high horse. I am now riding a somewhat shorter horse.

That said, I believe you might be the first person located in America on this thread and as John Cleese informed you in his notice of revocation of independence, there is no such thing as US English and all Americans are thus dyslexic by UK standards! :wink: :lol:

Coming back to topic though, Steve's point was a good one indeed (seriously). Less seriously it has helped me to recognise that not all of the badly formatted email coming to me from Nigerian princes is fake. Some may be for real and they're just struggling with the language barrier!

 

[filsgreen]

Mike, I didn't take away from Heath's post the same thing you did. I think his point was that there seems to be more poor spelling, grammar and punctuation in the under 30 age group than can be accounted for by the incidence of dyslexia.

I won't claim to be any sort of expert in using language but I do notice a great many errors made by others. I don't know the situation of the writers in those cases so I am hesitant to be critical. I have heard some say that spelling and punctuation is overrated and that it isn't taught to nearly the same level as it was when I was in school.

Steve's point is an excellent one which I'd not thought of before. Seems like good incentive for those of use who don't have dyslexia.

I cannot believe that some would say that spelling and punctuation were overrated :shock: . The whole meaning of a sentence can be changed with the miss spelling of a word, or a comma in the wrong place.

 

[Steve Maskery]

As Lynne Truss said, there is the world of difference between Extra Marital *** and Extra-Marital ***!

 

[agbagb]

I wonder if the under 30's in the UK could have been let down by the education situation at the time. It would be interesting to see if the same is true of the under 20's. I don't often come across examples of 20 - 30 year olds writing. My daughters' 18, 14, 7 writing skills are excellent. A small sample but the only experience I have.

Andy

 

[Racers]

Hi,

agbagb

I think you will fine that the 40-50 age group are the ones most let down by the system, they are the ones thet where branded as thick and some (like me) wern't even entered in the english exam.

filsgreen

You just don't get it do you.


Pete