Dystinct Magazine

THE MIND, ONCE STRETCHED BY A NEW IDEA, NEVER RETURNS TO ITS ORIGINAL DIMENSIONS.Ralph Waldo Emerson This issue was five months in the making, and it’s been a huge learning process for me. So, rather than my usual one-page editor’s note, I’m going to write my honest reflection of what I’ve learned over the past 5 months during the making of this issue. As a parent trained in MSL, an approach to literacy instruction developed by the Australian Dyslexia Association based on the Science of Reading research, I, too, like most aware parents and educators, follow all the SOR pages and groups on social media to keep myself up-to-date, so I can advocate for my children at school. Recently, I was surprised to learn from Donna Hejtmanek’s Facebook group -…

Illustrator Abby de los Santos Age 10 Dyslexia San Antonio, Texas, USA Abby is in the fifth grade. She enjoys spending time with her friends and being creative. She loves taking her dog on walks and wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up. Illustrator Ava Eldridge Age 9 Dyslexia NSW, Australia Ava loves art, animals, cooking, her family, playing the piano and she really enjoys reading! Her newfound love of aerial acrobatics keeps her busy. Reporter Flynn Eldridge Age 10 Dyslexia & Dysgraphia NSW, Australia Flynn finds reporting fun, sometimes scary, and ultra exciting. Flynn likes to dress up as an old-time reporter and ask a range of questions, as that is his style. Flynn builds loads of different lego creations such as the rainbow, spinning-top microphone he…

To change student outcomes, we must first change adult practices.Kari Yates For the past fifty years, reading achievement among young students has remained flat. Despite years of focused efforts on reading research and curriculum, the needle on achievement levels has hardly moved. The latest PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test results show the United States and Australia scored only slightly above average in reading worldwide, essentially unchanged from previous years. Scores for American 4th-grade students also reflect disappointing progress, with a majority scoring at basic or below for their grade level. With such a poor return on our educational investment, what holds educators back from changing classroom practices to improve student outcomes? And what change should we make? First, consider some history. Back in the 1980s, classrooms moved toward the whole language…

Dystinct reporter Flynn Eldridge had a chat with Donna Hejtmanek about her Facebook group, The Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College, and her viewpoints on the Structured Linguistic Literacy approach. Excerpts from the interview: When did you start helping people who didn't know how to read and write? I became a teacher back in 1976 and started working with students in 1977. That was my first job. How many people with learning differences would you have helped in the past? I've put in about 41 years of working with students. I was a teacher in a public school, and I also worked as a private tutor. I would say several hundred students, maybe more like five or six hundred students. But something happened to me in 2019…

A revolution in our understanding of how we learn to read began in the 1960s and 70s, gained steam in the 80s, and was agreed upon theory by the 90s for cognitive scientists and others studying reading. Reading researchers from diverse fields propose that our visual reading system (spelling or orthography) is built on the back of our oral language system (especially meaning and phonology). Phonological processing–or the skill with the sounds (i.e., phonemes) of one's oral or written language–has been particularly singled out as a causal ability that supports or limits a child's ability to learn to decode words. Based on the primacy of the language and phonological system, other synthetic phonics approaches have emerged, mostly since the 90s, that do not teach children many phonics rules or syllable…

After thirty years of practicing as a Speech-Language Pathologist and the past fourteen working as a Reading Specialist, it felt like my proverbial "toolbox" was exploding. I had a Bachelor's Degree in Linguistics, a Master's Degree in Communication Disorders, and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Reading. I had worked with children and adults in clinics, schools, and private practice. I had collected what amounted to a veritable alphabet soup of trainings and approaches to teaching reading and writing: OG, RAVE-O, ECRI, PALS, SRSD, and LETRS, to name a few. I had kept up to date with the current reading and writing research, attending more conferences and webinars than I could keep track of. So why, with this deep knowledge base to draw upon, was I feeling exhausted and disillusioned…