Samuel Torrey Orton Award To Jack M. Fletcher: Citation

Annals of Dyslexia, Dec 2004 by Fletcher, Jack M

In recognition of your commitment to effective reading instruction through your dedicated research into language development and other cognitive skills in children and adults with learning and attention difficulties. November 14, 2003

Acceptance of the Samuel Torrey Orton Award

November 14, 2003, San Diego, California

It is a true honor to receive the Samuel Torrey Orton Award from the oldest professional organization on reading and learning disabilities. I thank the International Dyslexia Association and its president, Nancy Hennessy, and the Board of Directors for this distinction. Many of you undoubtedly know that the award was first given in 1966 to Lauretta Bender, and I mention this because she was the first on a long list of true Hall of Famers on dyslexia research, instruction, and advocacy. I really wondered why I had been selected-I'm not that old-but then I noticed that my partner in crime, Reid Lyon-who is grayer and a little older-was selected in 2000, and that one of the other three balding North Floridians who has engaged in dyslexia research, Bruce Pennington, was selected last year. So I felt more at home and accept the award with great personal pleasure, recognizing it for the distinction that it represents. I am truly honored!

The price we all have to pay is that I have to speak for a few minutes, which makes me terribly nervous without any of my usual props: lots of data and too little time. Those of you who have attended my presentations in the past will be relieved to know that taking notes will not be difficult, that I am speaking slowly, and won't be presenting what my colleague, Maureen Dennis, describes as my terrible text only, left hemisphere slides. Of course, this means that you can't e-mail later and ask for the PowerPoints! But I was able to think of a few things to say, thanks to a dream I had.

It was an anxiety dream after I learned I had to speak without slides. I dreamed of a meeting in Heaven among Samuel Orton's first patient with dyslexia, MP, and Dr. Orton, Norman Geschwind, Alvin and Isabelle Liberman, and Reid Lyon. This assumes that the whole language types finally got to Reid and blew him up with a loaded e-mail before he could get to the colleges of education. Either that or he gave me more bad news about my last grant submission and I blew him up. At any rate, MP convenes a truly heavenly meeting of these distinguished scientists. In opening the meeting-I have a pad by my bed for really good quotes-MP said "Dr. Orton described my dyslexia when I was 16 in 1925. At the time, no one seemed to understand the problem I had, just what problems I didn't have. What is this dyslexia that everyone still talks about at the IDA meetings every year?" Dr. Orton said that he was still "convinced that dyslexia, or strephosymbolia, was a language-based disability, representing a problem with cerebral dominance; a failure of illusion of the images from the nondominant visual sensory cortex and, therefore, confusion between the visually presented stimulus and its remembered concept." Geschwind said, "I still think Orton was right, but dyslexia is best understood as a disconnection syndrome where areas of the brain that work in isolation are not connected, so that there is a disconnection between the area of the brain that can process the form of the word and the area of the brain that makes it a linguistic symbol." Alvin and Isabelle Liberman said, "We showed that dyslexia is due to phonological awareness deficits." Before MP can say, "HUH?" Lyon said, "All of this is really interesting and we've always known that the brain was an important component of the problem in dyslexia, but the real problem is that teachers aren't adequately prepared and dyslexia results from lack of adequate instruction." MP listened, a skill at which, unlike reading, he was quite accomplished, and then said "DANG, I thought I had a reading problem!"

Reading is the heart of dyslexia, and as Alvin and Isabelle Liberman pointed out over 30 years ago, a central accomplishment of humankind. Dyslexia is more than a reading disability, especially at the level of the brain. But any systematic understanding of dyslexia begins with the observation that it is a severe, unexpected difficulty with reading. And it's something that everyone experiences in their development. Reading is not natural and everyone is taught to read. Some of us require just a nudge from an adult and others require years of nudges and even that's not enough. As Alvin Liberman said, "We are all born with dyslexia and the difference among us is that some are easier to cure and others are not."

These examples of thinking from the early history of dyslexia, the middle history of dyslexia, and current thinking about dyslexia reflect how far we have come in understanding dyslexia and reading in general. We know that dyslexia is the opposite side of the reading proficiency coin and that the factors that produce reading proficiency lead to dyslexia when these factors are not present. If you attended the neuroimaging seminars on Wednesday and Thursday, you noticed a very consistent finding. Dyslexia is associated with a failure to establish a neural network-a set of connections among brain regions-in the language areas of the left hemisphere that provides support for the scaffolding of written language onto oral language. As Joe Torgesen discussed in his Orton keynote, other studies show that many people with dyslexia can develop word recognition skills if the instruction is comprehensive, explicit, and intense. Imaging studies show that when we provide this type of instruction, what we see is an establishment of cerebral dominance for reading in the left hemisphere-much like what Orton, Geschwind, and others had proposed-and because of the instruction provided by the teacher. All good instruction is brain-based! These scientists were right, but we only began to understand dyslexia when these strands were integrated by a focus on the reading problem.