Part V: Reading disabilities in other languages

In 1997, when The Orton Dyslexia Society took on its new name, the organization made a commitment to promote and facilitate crosscultural understanding of the nature, diagnosis, and remediation of dyslexia. The two articles presented here reflect current research and thinking about reading disabilities in other parts of the world.

The first article by Haynes and his colleagues represents a collaborative effort between American and Japanese educators on teacher perceptions of learning disabilities in the United States and Japan. The article is the first crosscultural research on teachers' perceptions of academic skills (reading, computation, listening, spelling, math) in children with learning disabilities. Among the results was the finding that American teachers identified 4 percent of children with LD, whereas Japanese teachers identified only 1.5 percent. The authors provide several plausible explanations for this finding, and discuss similarities and differences between teacher perceptions in light of distinctive features of the writing systems and cultural aspects in the two countries.

Most Annals readers are likely to be familiar with the research of C. K. Leong who is an authority on dyslexia research in both English and Chinese. Attention to similarities and differences across orthographies becomes important as researchers attempt to characterize dyslexia across alphabetic, syllabic, and morphosyllabic language systems. Professor Leong and his colleagues introduce readers to aspects of the linguistic structure of Chinese, a morphosyllabic language based on meaning-plusspeech sound. They describe the nature of the phonetic and semantic radicals involved in learning to read and spell Chinese, and explain how children in China acquire initial reading and spelling skills. The authors make a case for the reading-spelling connection as the main source of difficulties in Chinese. They suggest that spelling difficulties are particularly prominent among Chinese children with dyslexia, and their reading includes difficulties with automaticity and reading accuracy. The authors argue for systematic teaching of Chinese spelling patterns and their linkages to speech sounds and meaning. Their review of research on good and poor reader-spellers should be of particular interest to researchers who study dyslexia across different language systems.

As we continue to look toward what researchers are doing across the world, we will necessarily have to expand our view of what dyslexia is and what it means. Toward this end, we welcome articles from across the world that will increase our scientific understanding of reading disabilities.

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