JISCMail - ESOL-RESEARCH Archives

This is a great question Laura-- one I wasn't going to get to , the way things were going on the discussion.

I am acutely aware of the interference of vision and hearing issues in adult ESO-- it is one of my six factors. As those of you who read the article a couple of years ago may remember, I describe one case in that article where a learner had severe hearing loss but never told anyone --and her teachers never had a personal conversation with her to find out what might be holding things up.

As for the vision function and vision stress, I have no idea if the incidence is as high as it is in the struggling adult English speaking population, but I do know that when these problems interfere, it is a terrible problem. Here are some examples:
A young lady from Liberia ( refugee) who had no education was being given instruction in the Wilson System ( an Orton-Gillingham-based reading system for English speaking adults who have struggled to learn to read-- none of which described her, but Wilson is sometimes used for teaching reading to non-literate ESOL adults-a practice I do not agree with). The reading teacher noted that this lady--who was in reality about 20 though the school thought she was much younger--had "stopped" reading at words longer than three or four letters--the teacher decided she had dyslexia (again, the misinformation about how dyslexia impacts reading is great). When the young lady came in to meet with me, she brought the Cat in the Hat to read. She LOVED this book-- she could read the first 6-8 pages pretty accurately, but then she would misread the same word she had "read" several times in the pages just before--and then the reading waned to guessing words here and there( which meant she had memorized the opening pages through tremendous amounts of repetition). Without asking her any questions, I just began slipping colored overlays over the page--when I put a grey-blue one on, she sat up, grinned and began reading accurately. I tried her out on Wilson 2-syllable words (phonologically predictable) and she read them effortlessly. Then I asked her how things were different-- she said without the overlay, words were "all over the page"-- Her foster father, who was watching this process gasped! He said " THAT explains why she says the oddest things when we ask her to look at something on a page!!"

Another experience was with an Ethiopian man whose tutor asked me to meet with him because he was making no progress in tutoring after 5 years and about a dozen tutors and teachers all over his city.   Because I thought I was evaluating him for oral English, not reading, I did not come with my overlays. To my surprise he had terrific oral English, but the tutor explained he was having trouble READING.   He could not remember his letters from lesson to lesson she said, and never read words.     I had him read a line of letters-- big dark black letters on white paper--and it was as if he was reading GREEK letters -- I had to check to see if his eyes were on the paper. Then I sat back and asked him what he SAW when he looked at the page. He put both hands out in front of him with fingers spread out and wiggled his hands back and forth--things were moving all over the page. I raced home, got the overlays and worked with him to find a color. When we got to goldenrod, he got a huge grin and pointed at the paper-- THAT, THAT he said-- It's GOOD!!    Then I had him read in a Laubach beginning reading book-- and he was reading words and lines of letters with no errors. He had literally NEVER seen then not moving!! No wonder he could not remember them from lesson to lesson. It wasn't the same letters!

A Haitian lady I worked with in Boston told me, when I asked her that crucial question--"What do you see when you look at the page?" --that there were flashes all over the paper when she looked at it. That was before I used overlays, so I sent her to a developmental optometrist, who was able to help her some, but not eliminate the flashing.

Overlays are not always the answer-- I worked with a severely dyslexic Jamaican lady and had some hope that overlays would make reading less difficult--but there was no difference for her.   There is some rumor going around that overlays "cure" dyslexia-- of course, they do not. Dyslexia is a phonological processing problem-seeing better doesn't make it easier for your brain to process sound. What overlays DO do is eliminate visual stress as a cause of poor reading--if that is the issue, then overlays will help. I have worked with dyslexics who have visual stress TOO--with overlays, the stress is less, but they still labor over becoming automatic in decoding. As the above examples indicate, though, if it is visual stress and NOT dyslexia, readers will be helped a great deal and be able to read perfectly normally.

Vision function problems exist, too. In a class I observed a couple of years ago, there were at least two much older learners who appeared to have difficulty looking at close-up work-- one lady's eyes streamed when she read and she said, when asked, that yes, her eyes hurt a lot when she tried to read.   The other man said he could not see the board. I screened those two and their classmates and found at least 4 in that class with significant vision problems needing attention.

Here in the town where I live, I encouraged the local organization that serves the Hmong to figure out how to do vision screening of ALL persons who come into the program-- the director told me just a couple of weeks ago that they had had a local clinic come in and do vision screenings and in just one week had identified 5 people with significant vision problems-- two with eye damage or disease.

I started doing vision screenings with my ESL students at the university-- I did informal screenings--looking for a telltale discrepancy between reading text badly and reading individual words accurately-- and then referred students to a developmental optometrist.   One year I sent 35 students to this optometrist-- of those, 33 had significant problems-- 2 had eye undiagnosed eye disease and one had permanent eye damage-- he was accommodated by the school with use of a very large computer screen and other devices that enlarged print for him.

The school that wrote the article for the FOB issue where my latest article is has begun screening ALL incoming students routinely for vision problems. I don't have figures for how many have been referred for more testing, but I do know they show up regularly in the screenings.

So yes-- Vision problems are definitely an issue among adult ELLS-- It is SO easy to institute vision screening at intake-- and so easy to have overlays available in EVERY classroom that it is inexcusable if these issues go unaddressed.   And note that my university students, who had lots of money and education, were unaware of their vision problems. Imagine those who are not so educated and have had little health care-- and who are older-- like the lady in that class I observed.    They are not aware how much their vision problems interfere with reading and learning.   Unfortunately, the teacher in that class had not noticed a thing.

I encourage ALL of you to think about this and figure out how to do this screening-- contact Laura for more information, too.

Robin Lovrien Schwarz

Robin -

In addressing impediments to learning, I was hoping that you might address what you have seen as some of the potentially underlying issues related to culturally and linguistically different (CLD) learners that struggle with learning to speak, read and write English.

I know that you've seen the incidence studies of:

• vision and auditory function weaknesses in the adult basic and literacy population
(about 48% have visual function weaknesses -- including participants that were screened with their glasses on -- and 38% have auditory function weaknesses that appear to be mostly due to lack of access to health care), and

• the high incidence of visual stress syndrome - a neurological-based hypersensitivity to some of the colors in white light that is exacerbated with bright fluorescent overhead lighting, white paper with black text causing too glare, words moving, only being able to read only one word at a time, headaches, mental confusion, lack of comprehension, difficulties focusing on printed materials, etc. (effecting nearly 90% of adult basic and literacy education participants).

How might these three key issues to accurately processing information be impacting CLD learners as they learn to speak, read, and write English? The adult basic and literacy population is alarmingly high. Do you think the incidence of these underlying issues might as high in CLD learners?

Have you had any personal experiences with CLD learners with visual or auditory function and/or visual stress syndrome issues that you might previously have thought were LD or cultural issues?

Laura Weisel

Laura Weisel, Ph.D.,
Clinical Services
The TLP Group*
PO Box 21510
Columbus, OH 43221
614.850.8677

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