Bannatyne Reading Program -- LEARNING DISABILITIES and DYSLEXIA

There are many RESEARCH STUDIES on Learning Disability students, including ADD and ADHD students, in the Section on TESTIMONIALS AND STUDIES.

The Palm Beach County Study, which is presented below, was selected for inclusion here because the class included a wide variety of students with a mixture of characteristics. It is representative of the heterogeneous varieties of students who are often all grouped together not only in Learning Disability classrooms and resource rooms, but (very unfortunately) in so-called research studies designed to "diagnostically" differentiate SLD students from the general school population, usually on the basis of one or two test scores! Read more about these kinds of research problems in the section RECATEGORIZATION OF THE WISC.

Specific Learning Disability* (SLD) Students (Includes: LD, ADD, ADHD, Dyslexics)

Class: 12 miscellaneous LD students, 6 of whom were also emotionally disturbed. Groups of 3 to 5 students. LD Resource Room.

Amount of Instruction: One hour of instruction daily using Bannatyne Program with one LD teacher

Full Scale WISC-R IQ: 81-131, average IQ 91, average verbal IQ 83, average performance IQ 97 (i.e. normal spatial ability)

Results: Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) group--average pre and post test scores as grade achievement levels in Reading (Word Recognition), Comprehension and Spelling

Pre and post test results over a 5.25 months period of teaching instruction using the Bannatyne Program
	Group Grade Gains	Prorated School-Year Gain (improvement)
Average Word Recognition Grade	1.72	2.94 grade achievement levels
Average Reading Comprehension Grade	1.08	1.88 grade achievement levels
Average Spelling Grade	1.60	2.78 grade achievement levels
Average Grade for all three PIAT Tests (in 5.25 months)	1.47	2.54 grade achievement levels

Comments: This average prorated gain by LD students of 2.54 grade achievement levels in Reading Word Recognition, Reading Comprehension and Spelling is over two and a half times faster than the rate of one school-year achievement of regular students in regular classes with average IQs using regular reading programs. The Bannatyne Program teaches word recognition, reading comprehension, spelling and many other facets of language very thoroughly.

From the above group of TWELVE Palm Beach County SLD students, I sorted out the SIX students who had WISC Performance Scores that were between 10 and 21 points HIGHER than their WISC Verbal IQ scores. None of them have Full Scale IQs below 80, and the one girl in this group has a Full Scale IQ of 131 with a Performance IQ of 138! In other words these SIX students had good Spatial Ability which is one essential characteristic of True Dyslexia. Here is the equivalent TABLE to the one above.

Results: Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) group--average prorated pre and post test scores as grade achievement levels in Reading (Word Recognition), Comprehension and Spelling.

Pre and post test results over a 5.25 months period of teaching instruction using the Bannatyne Program
	Prorated School-Year Gain (improvement)
Average Word Recognition Grade	3.1 grade achievement levels
Average Reading Comprehension Grade	2.3 grade achievement levels
Average Spelling Grade	3.1 grade achievement levels
Average Grade for all three PIAT Tests (in 5.25 months)	2.83 grade achievement levels

Comments: This average prorated gain by DYSLEXIC students of 2.83 grade achievement levels in Reading Word Recognition, Reading Comprehension and Spelling is well over two and a half times faster than the rate of one school-year achievement of regular students in regular classes with average IQs using regular reading programs. The Bannatyne Program teaches word recognition, reading comprehension, spelling and many other facets of language very thoroughly to DYSLEXIC students who are Spatially Competent.

DYSLEXIC STUDENTS have much more difficulty than other students in remembering the correct phoneme-to-grapheme (sound-to-symbol) associations when reading, writing and spelling. All dyslexic students are, by definition, of average or above average intelligence.

The reason is that dyslexic people have both a mediocre short-term and long-term memory for retaining arbitrary (non-logical, irregular) associations such as are found in the orthography (sound-to-symbol association system) of any phonetic language. This mediocre short and long term memory difficulty is further compounded when a series of these arbitrary (non-logical) associations are sequenced in sequencing memory, as they are when learning to read, hand-write and spell words. These sequential associations are equally arbitrary, especially when the coded symbols and their arbitrary associations with phonemes (sounds) are used and reused in thousands of words without any "rhyme or reason." Consider the arbitrary jumbled confusion of graphemes (letter-shapes), phonemes (sounds) and sequential associations in the following words:

I could go on and on with endless examples, but suffice it to say here that the Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program regularizes all the irregular arbitrary, orthography of English, thus making it much easier for dyslexic (and all other) students to learn (in a logical manner) the orthographical and sequencing associations of our disorganized language. (See below.)

Note that the short term and long term memory of dyslexics for logical, regular associations and combinations, especially within a single sensory system (vision, or auditory, or touch, or taste, or smell) is usually not only normal but often very good, especially in terms of recognition memory. However, this does not include "left" and "right" which are verbal labels for the two mirror-imaged sides of the body and the way it is facing. If you turn around, the external objects that were on your left are now on your right! This is very confusing and arbitrary to spatially competent dyslexics.

Dyslexics often tend to mirror-image letter shapes because their right hemispheres are spatially dominant and a letter-shape (grapheme) in their verbal left hemisphere can be switched to its mirror-image in their right hemisphere where it is NOT suppressed. Dyslexic students are, in a way, self-diagnosing, inasmuch as teachers see or hear the results of mirror-imaging or poor phoneme-to-grapheme associations in their presented work. Most dyslexic students are less competent in verbal skills and more competent in spatial ability. The Bannatyne Program is intentionally designed to assist dyslexic students permanently learn phoneme-to-grapheme associations through a variety of devices and techniques, and to minimize mirror-imaging. For example, the grapheme d has a little upstroke added which makes it distinguishable from the b grapheme. Also the multi-sensory approach to learning allows the other sensory and motor functions to counteract any residual tendency to mirror-image. By regularizing the phoneme-to-grapheme orthography of English and by overlearning these associations, we enable dyslexic students to overcome the above deficits. Dyslexic students in the Bannatyne Program also learn to read, write and spell successfully because each word along with its syllabic components is overlearned during the same lesson in a wide variety of ways using all the sensory-motor channels used in verbal activities. Numerous spatially competent dyslexic students in several countries have learned to read, write, spell and cope with language very successfully using the Bannatyne Program.

It needs to be made clear that the vast majority of spatially competent, DYSLEXIC students are perfectly normal human beings in that they are neurologically, physically and psychologically normal. My reason for making this factual statement is because reading, writing and spelling have to be formally learned -- much like driving a car has to be learned. It is true that whereas our native auditory-vocal conversational language is naturally absorbed from birth, the coding and decoding of that language is not naturally absorbed. Reading, writing and spelling are genetically NOT natural to human beings; if they were everyone who could talk would automatically learn to read, write and spell from birth. If the skills of coding and decoding our native language were naturally wired into the brain from birth, we would all know the Morse code and shorthand as well. Remember that just 300 years ago only a very few human beings could read and write -- and so reading, writing and spelling cannot be naturally inbuilt into the brains of the human race. In order to make the people of our society literate and functional in today's world of information and technology, we pass education laws which necessarily demand that we all learn to read, write and spell our native language competently to a high level, and this is something dyslexics find hard to do without an assist from sophisticated programs like mine. If the government passed a law tomorrow that everyone had to become a highly skilled artist, how many "artistic dyslexics" would we find in the general (normal) population? If the government passed a law that everyone must become a highly competent musician who could not only play a musical instrument well but also quickly code and decode symbolic musical notation, how many "musical dyslexics" would we find in the normal population? We do not call normal people who find it difficult to learn to draw well, or who cannot learn music easily, "handicapped" or "disabled," nor do we search for abnormalities in their brains! All that spatially competent, dyslexic students need, if they are to become literate, is a fully integrated, interlaced multi-sensory, task-analyzed, reading, writing, spelling and language method just like the Bannatyne Program.

Please read the Sections on STUDENT CHARACTERISTICS and the RECATEGORIZATION OF THE WISC for more information on Spatially Competent DYSLEXIC students.

The Bannatyne Reading Program is a comprehensive, fully integrated reading program, writing program, spelling program, language program, and reading comprehension training program. The Bannatyne Reading Program is unlike any other reading programs currently available. This means you will find many features which are only in the Bannatyne Reading Program. The Bannatyne Program is especially valuable for teaching DYSLEXIC students and other learning disabled students how to read, write, spell and master language quickly and efficiently. In some Commonwealth countries the program may be referred to as: Bannatyne Programme, or Bannatyne Reading Programme.

Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program -- Copyright � 2003 Alexander Bannatyne, PhD