Dyslexia pioneer still making gains

Contribution: At 77, a clinical psychologist who was an early champion of those with the reading disorder continues to tutor and diagnose children.

Mike Bowler | Education Beat

July 22, 2001

ROGER E. SAUNDERS is a very modest man.

He didn't want to be photographed for this article, and he didn't want me to discuss his monumental contribution to our understanding of the reading disorder dyslexia.

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The latter is hard to do. The 77-year-old clinical psychologist is behind almost every leaf of the dyslexia-awareness tree. Twenty-eight years ago, he helped establish the Jemicy School for dyslexic children, now in Owings Mills. He was instrumental in building what is now the International Dyslexia Association, based in Towson. He helped organize the Dyslexia Tutoring Program in Baltimore, a free service to low-income children and adults. He taught hundreds of Loyola College graduate students how to recognize and address reading disorders.

And he's still practicing - diagnosing and tutoring, in some cases, a third generation of children with the neurological condition that causes difficulty in processing words. Dyslexics might have trouble processing what they hear, expressing their ideas in words and spelling correctly.

When Saunders arrived in Baltimore in 1957 to study at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, it helped that he already was grounded in what then was called "specific language disability." He had studied at the Wake Forest medical school in North Carolina with June Orton, widow of Samuel T. Orton, known as the "father of dyslexia."

Maryland was a wasteland for reading disorders 44 years ago, Saunders said in a long interview last week. Children with dyslexia often have behavior problems, and educators slotted them as emotionally disturbed or retarded, often blaming outside influences such as poor child-rearing.

Those educators, Saunders said, "saw the behavior, not its cause. ... Dyslexia is neurologically based, not emotionally based."

Saunders said that when he entered the field nearly a half-century ago, 10 percent to 15 percent of children had some degree of dyslexia. "It remains pretty much the same," he said. "Some schools are doing a better job at reinforcing phonetic approaches to the skills of reading. There's more interest in dyslexia, and some of the school districts are doing better than others in addressing it, but things haven't changed nearly enough."

It's not lost on Saunders that some parents have to spend $18,000 or more a year to get an appropriate private education for a dyslexic child. That's an education based on the Orton-Gillingham approach, named for Samuel Orton, a neurologist and pathologist, and his colleague Anna Gillingham, a psychologist and educator.

Orton-Gillingham employs all of a child's senses, especially sight, hearing and touch. It's structured and sequential. It teaches phonics, the relationship of sounds and letters in the 87 percent of English words that are phonetically regular. Few teachers are trained in Orton-Gillingham.

I asked Saunders whether the 85 percent to 90 percent of children who are normal learners would benefit from an Orton-Gillingham approach. There's disagreement on that, he said. Many believe that Orton-Gillingham wouldn't harm nondyslexic children while helping those who need the more structured method.

If he had his way, Saunders said, dyslexic learners would be identified and helped as early as possible. But a Peter Principle is at work in education. A classroom teacher gets promoted to assistant principal, principal and then supervisor. "If she doesn't have the training to work with handicapped children, she uses the skills that she used as a teacher and says, 'They worked for me then; they'll work for me now.'

"And then maybe she goes on to teach in college, and she teaches teachers the way she taught, not having anything to do with children with special learning needs."

Saunders regards dyslexia not as an illness from which people "suffer" but as a condition with many positives. "People with dyslexia have strengths in art and often music, and they're sometimes mechanically gifted. I say jokingly that when I see an architect at a cocktail party, I assume he's dyslexic until proven otherwise. They have such great right hemispheres."

Saunders said he's encouraged that brain research that was technologically impossible when he entered the field - magnetic imaging of brains in the process of reading, for example - "is confirming what was hypothesized all along. It's the brain that reads, and when the brain has some problems or developmental differences, it affects language learning."

Another more recent development that Saunders finds comforting: Dyslexia is a worldwide phenomenon not restricted to speakers of English. Researchers in Czechoslovakia, Denmark and South Africa have reached similar conclusions about its causes and nature.