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Does a Visual-Orthographic Deficit Contribute to Reading Disability? Continued from page 9.Previous|NextSome studies have compared the amount of variance contributed to reading by typical orthographic and phonological measures (e.g., Barker, Torgesen, & Wagner, 1992; Cunningham, Perry, & Stanovich, 2001), but there is minimal evidence for the contributions of letter orientation measures. In a study of 170 children, aged 6 to 10 years, recognition of letter/numeral reversals (Jordan, 1980) accounted for significant independent variance in word reading and reading comprehension after controlling for the contributions of IQ, reading experience, phonological awareness, and naming speed (Badian, 1993a). Following age, IQ, and two phonological tests entered together (phonological choice, phoneme deletion), orthographic processing (orthographic choice, homophone choice) accounted for significant independent variance in five reading measures administered to 89 third grade children (Barker, Torgesen, & Wagner, 1992). The proportion of unique variance contributed to word identification by orthographic processing was 7%. Thus, the independent contribution of typical orthographic measures to word identification was comparable to the independent contribution of the visual-orthographic measure of the current study, which also controlled for the effects of verbal short-term memory and letter naming speed . It can be concluded that visual-orthographic skills, defined as the ability to recognize the correct orientation of upper case letters and numerals, contribute independent variance to reading, even after controlling for the contributions of phonological awareness and naming speed. Although the phonological awareness measure (phoneme deletion) in the current study was short, its relatively high correlation with nonword reading suggests that it is a reasonably valid measure of phonological awareness. In a study in which the difficulty level of phonological measures was compared, phoneme elision (i.e., phoneme deletion) and blending tasks appeared to be the most discriminating tasks in the battery (Schatschneider, Francis, Foorman, Fletcher, & Mehta,1999). It is possible, however, that if a longer and more rigorous measure of phonological awareness had been used, the variance contributed by visual-orthographic skills to reading might have been less. ARE CHILDREN WITH A DEFICIT IN RECOGNITION OF LETTER/NUMERAL REVERSALS MORE IMPAIRED READERS THAN THOSE WITHOUT SUCH A DEFICIT? The second question this study investigated was whether children with a visual-orthographic deficit are more impaired readers than those without such a deficit. Sixty (29%) of the 207 children in the sample had a visual-orthographic deficit, defined as an error score one standard deviation above the mean on the letter/numeral reversal recognition test. Groups with and without a visual-orthographic deficit did not differ in IQ, verbal short-term memory, or letter naming speed, but the visual-orthographic group was significantly lower in phonological awareness, as well as on all reading measures. When phonological awareness and age were controlled, the VO group continued to be significantly lower on the reading measures. The finding that 8- to 10-year-old children who have difficulty recognizing whether upper case letters and numerals are correctly oriented are poorer readers than those without this difficulty is consistent with the results of the Terepocki, Kruk, and Willows (2002) study. That study directl y compared groups of 10-year-old average and poor readers. When asked to press a key if they saw an item (letters, numerals, letter strings, words) on the computer screen that "looked backwards," poor readers made significantly more errors. The two groups did not differ in attention or speed of motor processing. In the current study, there also did not appear to be an attention effect, as children for whom ADHD was a major concern obtained an almost identical mean score on the visual-orthographic task as children for whom ADHD was not a concern. Among good Christian peoples: Teaching Etal Adnan`s Sitt Marie Rose College Literature , Fall 2000 by Champagne, John GIn an essay entitled "Teaching Deconstructively," Barbara Johnson provides the following definition of the teaching of literature: Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take in evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it. This is the only teaching that can properly be called literary; anything else is history of ideas, biography, psychology ethics, or bad philosophy. Anything else does not measure up to the rigorous perversity and seductiveness of literary language. (Johnson 1985, 140) Johnson adds in a footnote that "this is not meant to imply that nothing should be read outside the text at hand, or that a text is unconnected to any discourse outside itself," as the "inside" and "outside" of a text are themselves not a "`given"` (148). As Johnson herself concedes, it does, however, submit that "history, philology, biography, the `spirit of the age,` and the `material conditions of production` are not less problematic-or less textual and interpretively constructed-than the literary text they would come to explain" (142).1 How is the teacher of postcolonial literature in particular to read Johnson`s advice?2 Given, for example, the history of Western imperialist expansion into, withdrawal from, and lingering influence over peripheral regions, and the way this history necessarily structures the writing and reading of the texts of postcoloniality, what are we to make of Johnson`s emphatic interest in the literary? In raising this question, I am reluctant to suggest that postcolonial novels, poetry, and drama represent some kind of "special case" of literature that needs to be read differently from other literary texts. Obviously, history is inscribed in all texts and all readers, not just the texts and readers of postcolonial literary works. It is not something we are necessarily required to import to a text; in a cultural climate that diligently attempts to erase the traces of history, however, perhaps postcolonial texts appear to confront the problem of history more directly than other literary works. It would seem, then, that any attempt to think through the possibilities of Johnson`s account as it may apply to the teaching of postcolonial literature in particular must confront a number of problems: In the case of a postcolonial novel, what counts as textual evidence? What is it evidence of?. To what end is something noticed? What particular kinds of things does a metropolitan "speed-reading culture" tend to "disregard" in a postcolonial text, and how does the reader`s inscription in history inflect what can and cannot be read?3 At least once every year for the past several, I`ve taught in translation Etel Adrian`s experimental novel Sitt Marie Rose. The novel is one of several that I currently use in an undergraduate survey course called "The Theme of Identity in World Literature."This essay will examine the teaching of Adnan`s novel. Interweaving an account of my experiences teaching the novel with a close reading of appropriate passages, the essay will implicitly argue for a pedagogy that requires students to be attentive to their own historical positionings as reading subjects. Such a pedagogy ideally implicates the Western reader in, among other things, the torture and death of Sitt Marie Pose. Clearly, my assumption here is that "history" is not necessarily something "outside" the novel that one must bring to a reading.While students do seem to benefit from having done some research on the history of Lebanon in general and the 1975 Civil War in particular, such research is not sufficient; students must also learn to address the way the transaction between subject and text we call reading is necessarily structured by a history always already inscribed in their own subjectivities, as well as in the text.This history inflects not only their interpretation of any given novel, but also any attempts to understand something of the historical context out of which that novel was written and in which it circulates today. As Antonio Gramsci might say, history has deposited within the reading subject an infinity of traces; it is up to the reader to compile an inventory of such traces. Teaching literature can provide an occasion for the compiling of such an inventory. I would thus propose rewriting Johnson`s formulation as follows: teaching postcolonial literature in the metropolitan center is teaching students how to read their own positionings as subjects: how to theorize their own practices of reading as necessarily structured by, among other things, the history of imperialism, a history in which they are woven as subjects; how to interrupt and complicate their desires to over- or dis-identify with the Other (as character, as implied author); how to recognize themselves as implicated in the text of the Other. This is the only teaching that can avoid treating postcolonial texts as either 1) simply another commodity for Western consumption (this time, under the guise of a benevolent "appreciation" of "foreign" literature), or 2) a representation verifying the savageries of "underdevelopment" and the need to reinvigorate the exportation of Western humanism to the Third World. Speed reading index
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