A Comparative Study of Special Education Contrasting Denmark,Sweden, and the United States of America

Many background factors, such as demography, size of the country and the history development, have created different atmospheres and have influenced philosophies, laws, and procedures for dealing with handicapped students in educational settings in Denmark, Sweden, and the United States of America. Yet, despite the differences, these three countries have developed educational systems that are more similar than different. This report examines both similarities and differences and aims to spread information that could be useful in developing the special education systems of different countries. The authors represent special educational research in the United States of America and Sweden.     

Profiles of reading related skills in dyslexic families

The aim of the present study was to investigate patterns of similarity in reading related tasks among dyslexic members of the same family. From a sample of 19 well defined dyslexic students in grade 8, three cases were randomly selected for closer examination with a battery of tasks assumed to be causally related to reading. In all selected cases the fathers reported reading disability and in one case the mother was affected as well. The profiles of performance on the various tasks showed a striking similarity within families suggesting similar mechanisms underlying the reading disability. All cases showed remarkable problems in phonological processing, although functional reading skills were almost intact in some cases. Thus, the phonological tasks might be regarded as marker tasks for identifying genetic dyslexia.Requests for reprints should be sent to Torleiv Høien, Center for Reading Research, Stavanger Teacher College, P.B. 2521, Ullandhaug, N-4004 Stavanger, Norway.     

Second language learning and reading with the additional load of dyslexia

Students speaking a language at home, which is different from the instructional at home, often face serious literacy problems in their additional language. This article examines the various factors involved in these difficulties and proposes some procedures for determining whether the reading problems are primarily due to linguistic factors, sociocultural factors, or specific learning problems such as dyslexia. The discussion of linguistic factors includes a closer examination of the concept of language proficiency. Dimensions of individual differences in the ability of second language (L2) acquisition are specified. Particular emphasis is given to the role of verbal working memory in L2 acquisition and to neuropsychological aspects. A popular target for recent research has been the orthographic structure of the language, and a general assumption has been that transparent orthographies, such as Italian or Finnish, are easier for a learner to deal with than deep orthographies. The methodological problems involved in the study of this issue are discussed. Some recent large-scale comparative surveys of reading literacy have not been able to demonstrate the impact of orthographic structures, as other, more powerful explanations of achievement variations have masked the possibly small orthographic effects. These explanatory factors are to a large extent related to social and cultural conditions in homes, communities, and schools. A tentative model is proposed where the various factors involved in L2 reading are specified, providing guidelines for assessment strategies.     

Bilingual-bicultural education of immigrant children in Sweden

Current research emphasizes the importance of the mother tongue in second language teaching. This paper describes a longitudinal project which studies 4 groups of Finnish children in Malmö, Sweden, who are receiving a bilingual education starting from the pre-school.

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Zusammenfassung Die zeitgenössische Forschung betont die Rolle der Muttersprache beim Zweitsprachenerwerb. Dieser Artikel beschreibt eine Längsschnittstudie an vier Gruppen von finnischen Kindern in Malmö, Schweden, die eine zweisprachige Erziehung von der Vorschule an erhalten.

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Résumé Les recherches courantes soulignent l'importance de la langue maternelle dans l'enseignement de la langue seconde. Cet article décrit un projet longitudinal examinant quatre groupes d'enfants finlandais recevant à Malmö, Suède, un einseignement bilingue qui commence dans l'école maternelle.

     

Development of phonological awareness during the preschool year: the influence of gender and socio-economic status

Phonological awareness is a critical enabling skill in learning to read, often developed outside the context of formal reading instruction. More than 2,000 6-year-old children were tested on phonological awareness at two occasions during the preschool year in two cohorts. Between the assessments, a training program was implemented. A two-level path model was applied. More frequent training sessions were connected to higher gains of test scores especially for children with low initial scores in the first cohort. A clear gender effect was also observed. There were more boys with very low initial scores and more girls among the top scorers. A clear SES-effect indicated the influence of early language stimulation. Children who already at the beginning of the preschool year had grasped the alphabetic code had the highest initial scores on the test.     

How immediate is language understanding? Investigating reading in real time

Oral and silent reading was studied for moving-window text displayed on a computer screen. Experiment 1 investigated whether local linguistic properties of text being read aloud affect speed in performing a dual task or the distance which a reader's voice lags behind the text seen. Regression analyses showed that choice reaction time during reading is not predicted by any linguistic properties of the immediate text considered, and that these properties instead predict a measure of eye-voice span. Experiment 2 investigated whether, in silent reading, reference is assigned to expressions in text while, or after, they are being viewed. In nearly all contexts, readers were observed to confirm that a given character in a story was being referred to only after the source expression in text had passed out of view. In general, the results tend to speak against an hypothesis about reading which holds that a reader completes processing of an expression in text while still looking at it.     

The nature of reading difficulties among inmates in juvenile institutions

Dyslexia is assumed to be frequent amonginmates in prisons and in juvenileinstitutions. However, it remains unclearwhether the literacy difficulties observed arereally dyslexic in nature. Seventy inmates injuvenile institutions were studied. In additionto literacy skills, the assessment includedphonological skills, school attendance,cultural background, and self-esteem. Dyslexiain the sense of decoding problems related tophonological deficiencies was observed in 11%of the cases. Most of the inmates withliteracy difficulties had a background, frominfancy and onwards, characterized by severesocial and emotional problems, interfering withpositive experience of literacy and theliterate culture. However, these sub-optimalexperiences of the literate culture do notimply dyslexia. From this perspective, it isunlikely that dyslexia is a determining factorof delinquent behavior.     

Components of phonological awareness

The factorial structure underlying different types of tasks within the domain of phonological awareness was examined in two studies. Large sample sizes allowed for sensitive differentiation of constructs. In the first study, 128 preschool children without any experience of formal reading instruction were tested with a battery of tasks intended to tap various aspects of phonological awareness: rhyme recognition, syllable counting, initial-phoneme matching, initial-phoneme deletion, phoneme blending, and phoneme counting. Three basic components were extracted in a principal component analysis: a phoneme factor, a syllable factor and a rhyme factor. Cross-tabulations indicated considerable dissociation between performance on phoneme, syllable, and rhyme tasks. The structural relationships were replicated on a much larger sample (n=1509) in the second study. Subjects in this study were one year older and were attending grade 1 thus providing an opportunity to test their reading achievement. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that the phonemic factor was by far the most potent predictor. However, the rhyming factor made an independent (although small) contribution to explaining the reading variance. Among the phonemic tasks, phoneme identification proved to be the most powerful predictor.