MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE ASSESSMENT AND DIAGNOSIS OF READING DISABILITY

Even though reading instruction had been historically the most important academic responsibility of schools, recently, it has drawn much greater attention because language processing has become the backbone of the unprecedented advancement in information technology. In light of this background, specific reading disability (RD, hereafter) has become the focus of intense research efforts. As the most commonly encountered variety of Learning Disability, RD is almost always identified on the basis of a discrepancy seen between the IQ score of the at-risk reader and his or her reading achievement score. In general, poor readers who have a “significant” discrepancy between IQ and achievement are classified as having learning disability (LD, hereafter); poor readers whose reading score and IQ are on par with each other are identified as not having a learning disability. This procedure, in essence, classifies children who experience difficulty in learning to read into two categories: poor readers with reading disability and poor readers without reading disability. This approach is based on the assumption that poor readers identified as having reading disability are qualitatively different from poor readers who are not so identified. This paper examines the validity of this form of classification and offers a new approach for dealing with children with reading problems. The proposed approach utilizes a method of diagnosis which is based on the Componential Model of reading which, instead of categorizing poor readers into the two categories, focuses on the cause of the reading difficulty and targets remedial instruction at the source of the reading problem.