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STUFF TO DO, TO BUY, TO TALK ABOUTGot a minute for your Maker? William Proctor, a longtime author and editor of the new "Light Speed Bible" (Broadman & Holman, $29.99), thinks you should have at least that much. But if a minute or so is all you can spare, consider his speed-reading system that brings you the word of the Lord right quick. Proctor, who has worked as a rewrite man at the New York Daily News, says he saw a need for the book because most Americans, even those who read the Bible, hadn`t read all of it. By one estimate, 93% of Americans own at least one Bible, he says, and yet it`s clear very few have read it all. A Gallup poll showed that just 40% of American adults could name the Holy Trinity. Using his Bible built for speed, he says, you can get through it in 24 hours. The techniques include headings and subheadings, underlining of text and the use of four "speed zones." "I`ve just seen a real need for a broader contextual grasp of the Scripture. People just don`t have a grasp of the facts. They`re not into whole Bible reading," he says. But he adds that his approach "can`t take the place of in-depth study." Bishop Richard Sklba of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, a biblical scholar who has taught scripture at St. Francis Seminary and is active in the Catholic Biblical Association, likes the idea to a point. "Anything that would help people to understand the story is fine with me," he says. But he doubts that people will get the "full message" in this way. "You don`t speed-read good poetry," he says. "If you get a letter from somebody you love, you read it through real carefully. And you read it a second time. And you get the message between the lines. "It`s the difference between gobbling a meal," he adds, "and savoring it." Jan Uebelherr Does a Visual-Orthographic Deficit Contribute to Reading Disability? Annals of Dyslexia , Jun 2005 by Badian, Nathlie AIn this study, visual-orthographic skills were defined as the ability to recognize whether letters and numerals are correctly oriented. Aims were to investigate whether visual-orthographic skills would contribute independent variance to reading, and whether children with a visual-orthographic deficit would be more impaired readers than similar children without this deficit. Participants were 207 children, aged 8 to 10 years, who attended school in a small suburban community. Because of the evidence that phonological awareness and naming speed are strongly related to reading, visual-orthographic skills were entered into hierarchical regression analyses following these variables. With age, verbal IQ, and verbal short-term memory also controlled, visual-orthographic skills accounted for significant independent variance in all reading measures. When children with a visualorthographic deficit (29% of the sample) were compared with those without this deficit, they were significantly lower on all reading variable s. At 8 to 10 years of age, reading progress of some children continues to be hampered by a problem in orthographic memory for the orientation of letters and numerals. Such children will require special attention, but their problems may be overlooked. As recommended by Willows and Terepocki (1993), there is need for further research on the phenomenon of letter reversals when they occur among children beyond first grade. Key Words: Letter orientation, low level visual processing, naming speed, phonological awareness, reading disability, visual-orthographic skills For the past 20 years or more, the impetus in dyslexia research has been to prove that the underlying cause of reading difficulties is poor phonological awareness (Brady & Shankweiler, 1991; Rack & Olson, 1993; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987). Serial naming speed was included under the rubric of phonological awareness by Wagner and Torgesen (1987). Evidence has been mounting, however, that naming speed contributes variance to reading independently of phonological awareness (Badian, 1993a; Barker, Torgesen, & Wagner, 1992; Manis, Doi, & Bhadha, 2000; Olson, Forsberg, & Wise, 1994). Numerous studies have shown that naming speed is significantly correlated with reading and differentiates between normal and disabled readers (Cornwall, 1992; McBrideChang & Manis, 1996; Meyer, Wood, Hart, & Felton, 1998; Wolf, 1991, 1997). The conviction that, in addition to phonological awareness, naming speed is an important facilitator of reading skills, led to the double-deficit hypothesis (Wolf & Bowers, 1999, 2000). According to this hypothesis, some poor readers have a single phonological or naming speed deficit, and some have both deficits (the "double deficit " group). The double deficit group is the most impaired in reading skills. THE ROLE OF THE VISUAL SYSTEM IN DYSLEXIA The visual system, as well as the auditory, is involved in learning to read (Chase, 1996; Ehri & Wilce, 1985), and it is difficult to determine which system is more critical for reading development (Chase, 1996). In spite of the venerable history of visual deficits in dyslexia that goes back to Hinshelwood (1895) and Pringle Morgan (1896), interest in this aspect of dyslexia research has been minimal in recent years. Neglect of the contributions of the visual system to reading intensified following the publication of Vellutino`s (1979) authoritative book on dyslexia, which made a strong case for linguistic deficits as the cause of dyslexia and stressed the lack of evidence for visual deficits. These conclusions have been criticized (Fletcher & Satz, 1979; Willows, Kruk, & Corcos, 1993). Stanovich (1992) cites several studies that found differences between disabled and nondisabled readers in visual experiments using nonverbal stimuli, brief presentations, and psychophysical procedures. He points out that mu ch of the evidence contradicting the idea of visual deficits in reading disability comes from studies employing arrays exposed for several seconds or more. Visual deficits potentially associated with reading disability range from poor performance on low level visual processing tasks to difficulties with complex visual-orthographic measures. In their causal model for visually based reading impairments, low level visual processing leads either to the visual (object) processor or to the visual (orthographic) processor (Seymour & Evans, 1993). The route from the visual (orthographic) processor then leads to central reading processes. The following brief review will examine studies of the relationship of low level visual tasks to reading, visual-orthographic (surface) subtypes of dyslexia, and letter recognition and orientation problems in dyslexia. LOW LEVEL VISUAL PROCESSING AND READING In a number of recent experiments, low level visual tasks such as visual motion, contrast sensitivity, visual tracking, and temporal processing have been shown to correlate with reading, and, at least in some studies, to differentiate between groups of good and poor readers (Boden & Brodeur, 1999; Booth, Perfetti, MacWhinney, & Hunt, 2000; Cornelissen & Hansen, 1998; Eden, Stein, Wood, & Wood, 1995; Iles, Walsh, & Richardson, 2000; Olson & Datta, 2002; Stein, Talcott, & Witton, 2001; Talcott et al., 2002). Speed reading index
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