Suggested Reading
Different people (dyslexics, friends and family, etc.) have different perspectives on dyslexia. From my perspective (that of an Orton-Gillingham trained academic therapist), these are some of the most interesting and useful publications on the subject.
For an overview of the reading process, and the process of learning to read, I recommend Beginning to Read by Marilyn Jager Adams (The MIT Press, Cambridge Mass., 1990). Adams reviews a lot of recent and not-so-recent research on reading and learning to read. It's a long book (over 400 pages) and not light reading, but by the time you finish it you'll know more about how people learn to read, the kinds of things that may go wrong with the learning process, and the kinds of instructional approaches that are likely to help.
There is also a shorter (and cheaper) summary of the book: Beginning to Read by Steven Stahl, Jean Osborn and Fran Lehr, published by the Center for the Study of Reading at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The summary itself is over 100 pages. Essentially, the summary states the conclusions without the detailed description of the backup research provided in the full-length book. If you have time, I recommend the full-length book. I didn't find it any harder to read than the summary, and the research descriptions are fascinating. (It's a bit confusing: as far as I can tell, the summary and the full-length book have the same title. You have to differentiate them by the publisher.)
If you're going to read just one book about reading fundamentals and reading problems, it should be one of those two.
For an overview of remedial approaches, I think the best book is Dyslexia: Theory and Practice of Remedial Instruction (Second edition) by Diana Brewster Clark and Joanna Kellog Uhry (York Press, Baltimore, Md. 1996). For each of about a dozen different methods, Clark describes: the method; the training required to apply the method; and research studies on the method's effectiveness. You'll also find in there a good, concise (20 to 40 pages, as I recall) discussion of the nature and diagnosis of dyslexia. If you have time for only one book and you need to make some sense of the different methods, this is the one to choose.
If you're interested in the underlying neurological and cognitive problems, here are two books that I have found interesting and reasonably accessible: Dyslexia and Development, edited by Albert M. Galaburda and published in 1993 by the Harvard University Press; and Developmental Dyslexia, edited by Chase, Rosen, and Sherman. They're both collections of research papers.
I believe it's generally accepted that dyslexia has a neurological basis, but I don't think there's any general agreement on how the neurological differences observed in dyslexics cause their cognitive problems. So those last two books are more -- well, speculative, I guess I'd say, than the first two. I mention them because I am able to understand the papers in them (mostly, anyway, I think), which was not true for all of the neurophysiology I tried to read. And I'm fascinated by the topic.
For a historical perspective, I don't think you can do better than Reading, Writing, and Speech Problems in Children by Samuel Torrey Orton (original copyright 1937, reprinted by Pro-Ed, Austin Texas, 1989). Orton was the first to observe and record systematically the close similarities in symptoms between accident victims who, because of brain injuries, had lost some language abilities, and children who had difficulty learning to read, write, and speak. Not all of Orton's hypotheses are supported by recent research, but I think it's reasonable to say that it is he who discovered that dyslexia is a physical problem.
The International Dyslexia Association (based in Baltimore, MD; formerly the Orton Dyslexia Society) sponsors meetings and publishes material on dyslexia. Their web site has an active bulletin board. If you have a long-term interest in dyslexia, you should join the IDA. As part of the membership package you will get their quarterly newsletter Perspectives and the yearly journal Annals of Dyslexia.
Perspectives is mainly directed toward dyslexics and their families. It has columns on such things as the laws regarding support and accommodation that public schools should provide for dyslexics, and what families should look for when they seek a tutor or academic therapist. Perspectives also contains administrative news about the IDA: new appointments, conference dates, and the like.
Annals of Dyslexia
is an interdisciplinary research journal. Most of the articles are
written at a good level for academic therapists to understand, and they
usually contain explicit conclusions discussing the instructional
implications of the research.
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Everything on this web site is the personal opinion of S. W. Davison. Any of it might be incorrect or out-of-date.