Show 20 -- Learning Disabilities and Reading

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Hello and welcome to Disabilities 411, the podcast for disability professionals. I'm your host, Beth Case, and this is the podcast for the week of May 8th, 2006. I don't really have any announcements this week, but I do have a favor to ask. I'm collecting some information on how colleges and universities are using podcasting, so if you work in a college or university that is currently doing some podcasts, I would really appreciate it if you could drop me an email at disability411@jinkle.com so that I can talk to use some more about how your college is using them, how you address accessibility issues and so forth. I look forward to hearing from any of you all who are using podcasts.

Beth Case: Since I don't have any other announcements this week, we'll just jump right into our interview. As promised, we are back to our interview format and today we are talking to Ellen Engstrom, from Landmark College. She's a specialist in learning disabilities and working with teaching reading to students with learning disabilities. She's going to talk to us today about some of the barriers that students with learning disabilities face when it comes to reading and some of the techniques and tools that can be used to help them compensate for those difficulties. So, let's get to our interview.

[Music]

Beth Case: Today we have with us Ellen Engstrom, from Landmark College. Ellen, thanks for joining us today.

Ellen Engstrom: Thank you, thank you for having me.

Beth Case: Why don't you start out by telling our audience who you are and a little bit about what you do?

Ellen Engstrom: All right. I work at Landmark College, in Putney, Vermont. Landmark College, for those you who don't know, is a college that is specifically for students that have learning disabilities and/or attention deficits. All of our students come to Landmark College with some kind of a diagnosis. The college grants an Associates Degree and we also have a very robust developmental skills program for students who have the potential to go college, but need to develop the skills or the strategies to be able to be successful in college.

Ellen Engstrom: What I do here at Landmark is a couple of things, I'm an associate professor here and I've been here for a little more than seven years. I have taught students with dyslexia, primarily I've taught reading and study skills classes and I've also taught courses in cognition and learning to help students understand their learning profiles. In so doing, I've done all lot of work with assistive technology along the way. I have also worked in the Landmark Institute for Research and Training, or LCIRT, as we lovingly call it. In LCIRT, what I do, as an education specialist, I do a lot of teacher training, I've written some online courses and run those, in fact, I've just finished doing a two day overview for the Wilson Reading System, which is another part of what I do. I have a rich and varied life for which I am grateful.

Beth Case: In the interest of full disclosure, I will let you know that I am currently taking one of Ellen's classes online and am learning a wealth of very useful information. We will be providing information and links to Landmark College and her courses in our show notes, which as always, you can find at disability411.jinkle.com.

Beth Case: Ellen is here with us today specifically to talk about students who have learning disabilities and some of barriers they face with reading and some the techniques and tools that they can use to help compensate and overcome some those barriers. So Ellen, I'll just turn it over to you.

Ellen Engstrom: Thank you, Beth. Reading difficulties are a plague for students to be successful in the academic world. They have a number of causes, primarily, those who can't decode text. By that I mean those who can't really break the code, associate a sound with a symbol, a sound with a letter or a group of letters in order to read words. That causes multiple issues. If they can't do that automatically, then they have a difficult time actually reading the words. People with this issue may very well have the ability to comprehend well, even sometimes brilliantly, but they're not efficient or accurate in the way that they actually read the words themselves, so reading then becomes an incredibly frustrating activity. The other thing that happens is readers, for various reasons, may be able to read accurately, but they do not read quickly, so therefore they are not fluent, which means accurate, efficient and speedy. They are not automatic.

Ellen Engstrom: Fluent reading is essential for good comprehension. Fluent readers are so automatic that they don't have to think about, let alone concentrate on decoding words or breaking that code. They can completely focus their attention on what the meaning of the text is. They can make connections between the concepts in the text and what they know about a subject and so they are able to build upon their background knowledge, add to their vocabulary and things of this nature.

Ellen Engstrom: Poor readers have to focus their attention on decoding words, so they don't have any attention left for the comprehension part. Basically, when you have somebody who is not a fluent reader, for a variety of reasons, they don't had access to text in the same way. It takes them a very long time to read, they often don't get all of the meaning out of the text and reading becomes an arduous and really frustrating process.

Ellen Engstrom: What technology has done for readers is to provide them with a wonderful way of actually reading the text so that people can hear it, follow it and read it on the screen. What a text reader will do is, at its very most basic, will read electronic text to the user, who then can follow along with it on the screen and receive the auditory meaning of what he or she is reading. It provides a multi-modal approach to reading, but most importantly, it completely takes away that decoding barrier, the need to focus on the mechanics of actually breaking down a word and pronouncing it so that much more attention and active working memory - actually which is, sort of, the desk top in your brain - which allows you to do a number of things at the same time and just focus on the meaning of the text.

Beth Case: So, with the screen readers, they can still read, but at the same time listen to what they're reading and so, getting that input through multiple senses.

Ellen Engstrom: Exactly. That's exactly the point. Screen readers come in all shapes, sizes, costs and so on. You can download a screen reader from places on the Internet, through shareware and other sites. Microsoft XP has a screen reader that you can access through the operating system and Macintosh computers have always had to read back what was written as well. My preference, if you need a screen reader, is to get a really good one and the best ones that are available are the Kurzweil 3000, which is a multifaceted program, it does so much more than just read; the other program that is commonly used in academic settings is WYNN. At Landmark College, we have an agreement with Kurzweil 3000, so that's what we use, and that is what I'm using in the course, as you know, Beth.

Beth Case: I will provide links and information on these products. As I've said in previous shows, I don't endorse one product over another. I let the listeners do the research and compare for themselves, but I'm happy to provide the websites, so that they can get more information.

Ellen Engstrom: Absolutely. I don't endorse products either. It looks like I do sometimes because I discuss what I typically use, but in fact, that's really not the case.

Ellen Engstrom: It's all well and good to have a text reader that will read text, but when you are doing academic reading, textbook reading, lots of content reading and things like that for secondary and post secondary education, you also need some other strategies to be able to understand and break down the text so that it is meaningful to you. What I like to do in the way that I teach this to students, is to combine an active reading strategy with the use of the text reader, so that students are using the text reader, but are also being active with it. For example, what I mean, a good reading strategies start with pre-reading, which involves just simply familiarizing yourself with the text; looking at the pictures, looking at the title, looking at any headings there might be or questions, things like that in order to get your attention and focus set on the topic. Sometimes, it activates background knowledge or other things that you know about the topic. Everybody knows, but research also shows that comprehension is greatly enriched if you can connect what you're reading about to something that is familiar, so consequently that is an important step.

Ellen Engstrom: What's great about a program like Kurzweil 3000, is that you can program it so it will just read headings. As an instructor, I can embed questions in the text that helps students to focus, think about the text and so on. Then of course, you are going to read the text, but here when you are reading, you want to read thinking about what's important. What are the main ideas, the supporting details? What are the key concepts that I want to get out of this? On Kurzweil, what's really nice is they have highlighters for skills, so that you can actually highlight main ideas in yellow or supporting details in green or headings in magenta. You can have this wildly colorful text there, but the great thing is that you can extract those highlights, which you can't do in a regular book. You can extract your highlights from the text and use them as a help in studying or reviewing, to reinforce the concepts. The other big advantage of that is, in general, you want to be able to add an extra level of engagement on the part of a student with text because if they're holding a highlighter marker, that's great but if they're holding a mouse and highlighting on a computer screen, that works just as well.

Ellen Engstrom: The other thing that I think is great is, we always want to encourage students and really, any good learning strategy just follows the memory process, and so it it is with active reading. You want to be able to paraphrase or retell what the meaning of the text is and with Kurzweil, you can make margin notes, electronic margin notes in the margins of your text, write them in and then the screen reader can go back and read them back to you. You can also dictate notes or even use another level of technology, which is voice recognition, such as Dragon Naturally Speaking. You can dictate the notes into the computer and it will write the words out, which of course, is like magic, it's really wonderful.

Ellen Engstrom: What's great about doing that is that you've got paraphrased notes and if you have to write a summary, and summary writing is a constant in academic settings, you can then extract your paraphrased notes, which can then help you fashion a summary. It's really a very complete program.

Beth Case: I have to say, and I mentioned this in the class, I know that Kurzwell is intended for students that have learning disabilities, but I think it's a fantastic tool for students even without any disabilities whatsoever. I really wish that I had access to something like this when I was in graduate school, to be honest. The amount of reading, notes and citations that were required in graduate school, to be able to do the highlighting, the extracting of my summaries, if you highlight the topic sentence in one color and highlight the supporting facts in another color, you can extract that into the outline. I would have had all of these great summaries and outlines of all the readings that I had, and so it is a really useful tool, even for students who don't have reading difficulties.

Ellen Engstrom: I agree with you. One of things that it does is cut down on all the writing and rewriting, it makes the process much more efficient. I think what assistive technology does in its best form, is to turn activities like reading textbooks, active reading, including writing and helps students be able to focus more on the cognitive task of reading, understanding, comprehending, summary writing and pull away from some of the really annoying, what we sometimes call, the lower orders skills, having to type and retype or write and rewrite, which certainly are important. But, if you're not automatic, if you are a slow reader, if you are not a particularly good speller, if you have trouble sometimes expressing concepts in words, this makes a big difference. You do it once and morph it into a number of things, a study guide, a summary, et cetera.

Beth Case: If they go through the process of creating the outline and the summary notes as they are reading it, they may not have to face the daunting task of rereading it all again because they will have those summaries that they can study from and then only have to go back to the original source if they need clarification or expansion. For students that are struggling with reading it for the first time, they don't want to look at it again!

Ellen Engstrom: No. Of course, I beat my students over the head about how important it is to have some kind of a text marking system because you read so much stuff in college or graduate school and if you don't have some way to notate or mark somewhere in the text where important stuff is, then you really have to go back and reread it and that is horribly inefficient. Use of good text marking system means that you are working smarter, not harder, and again, I think the electronic format is really terrific. I have even seen students use it without the voices reading it. They can actually read, but they like the tracking, the marking, the notes taking and the extraction features of it, which is an interesting thing. I think it also improves attention and focus, because you know what it's like when you're reading long passages, you get to the end of a page and you think, "What did I just read?"

Beth Case: "What was that at the beginning of the page?"

Ellen Engstrom: Yes, exactly. Consequently, we've done some studies and research on this and found that the use the program does actually help people with attention issues. We used to think it was just for students who were really, really severely dyslexic, couldn't break the code. But, more and more we are finding, especially as we learn more about reading, fluency and attentional stuff, there are really a number of student profiles that benefit a lot from this kind of program.

Beth Case: I would like to point out too, for any of you who have tried using a screen reader in the past, or have heard computerized voices in the past that sounds like the computer voice from War Games, the quality of the voices have really improved. The one that I am using with the class is almost human, it's really amazing. If you've listened to it in the past and thought there was no way you could understand or listen to a whole book in that voice, you need to see what some of the new voices are like because I am very impressed.

Ellen Engstrom: Yes, version nine has great voices. It's funny because I started teaching with this program back in 1999 and that first voice that Kurzwell had, I think his name was Keith, they all had names, Keith sounded a lot like the computer, HAL, in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was just dreadful and students complained and complained. Then they came out with some better voices, but they were still pretty robotic. More and more students found it useful, but still there were complaints. Now that we have version nine, I'm not really hearing that from my students, who are great critics of anything they can be critics about, so I think that is a testimony to the quality of the voices that have come along.

Ellen Engstrom: The other thing about using a program like Kurzwell or using a screen reader, is that you can use it to read the web, which means that some on my students that have difficulty with seeing or reading can use it to read their email and can use it to do website research. One thing I would say about using it with the web is it's still kind of awkward. It's not as good as it could be, but we've also found that it depends on your browser, if you are using Mozilla Firefox as your browser, Kurzwell works really well with that and you can put the cursor where you need to read and things. Internet Explorer is much clunkier, so anybody out there who is interested in web reading with test reader, those are some tips.

Beth Case: Of course, it also requires the website to be accessible. We have talked previously in the show about this and we to are going to have some more shows coming up real soon that will talk about web accessibility and if you have a website, some of things you can do to make it a little more friendly for a screen reader, so stay tuned guys.

Ellen Engstrom: That's a big area. A lot of work needs to be done on that because unfortunately that's not nearly as accessible and usable as it should be. But, I will say that the Kurzwell program for text reading is really useful. We, at Landmark, have a digital text library, which means that all of our course texts are scanned and saved as a Kurzwell file, so that when students have to buy the text book, people wonder about copyright and things like that, but of course there is the Chafee amendment to the copyright law provides that any student needs an accommodation for electronic text, and of course all of our students have diagnoses that make them eligible for that, can have their textbooks scanned and can read them electronically. Anybody at Landmark in a course, they have to buy the text book, but then they take it over to our information technology service and then they get access to a password to the electronic text on a server. That turns out to be a wonderful service for students.

Beth Case: There may be some of you out there thinking, "How do I get those textbooks in electronic format? How do I scan them?" and other questions relating to getting them into that etext. That is a bigger topic than we have time for in this interview.

Ellen Engstrom: Absolutely, that's a topic all of it's own, that's safe to say.

Beth Case: I am working on setting that up and we will touch on that topic specifically, so don't worry, it's coming. I'm doing my best to provide you with everything you need to know.

Beth Case: There are some other tools within Kurzwell as well, such as a dictionary and thesaurus.

Ellen Engstrom: Yes, thank you for reminding me about that. One of the great features is that there is reference features in Kurzwell. There is a built-in dictionary and thesaurus within the program, so that if you simply put your cursor in front of a word that you want to know the meaning for, you can either click on the dictionary icon in the toolbar, at which point a dictionary definition will come up and you can have Kurzwell read it to you were you can go on what is my favorite tool, which is the thesaurus, which gives you synonyms, or words that mean the same thing as the word you are wanting to know, which is very helpful for paraphrasing too. That's great. Ellen Engstrom: Kurzwell actually has a whole writing tool thing, we are not talking specifically about writing, but suffice it to say that when you are writing these margin notes, you have access to things like word prediction as well as spell check. You can also have the program speak the words after you write them, so you can be sure that which you wrote is what you meant to, which is a nice feature, very useful.

Ellen Engstrom: Another thing that is great about it is many students with learning disabilities need to have their tests read to them, test taking becomes a really difficult procedure. Kurzwell actually has a whole test taking capability. For example, in a disability services office, if a student needs to come in and have a test read, it actually can be scanned into Kurzwell. You can lock certain features, so if an instructor does not want a student to have access to spell check, word prediction, the dictionary, the thesaurus or something like that, you can lock those features out. The student can then take the test independently, not needing to have somebody sitting there reading the test to them. It really fosters independence, I think, as opposed to having a reader.

Beth Case: There is also that students are sometimes self-conscious about having another person sit next to them while they are taking a test. Anything that can help students be more independent, I am definitely a supporter of.

Ellen Engstrom: Absolutely. You can sit at a computer screen with headphones, just like everybody else, and do your work and look totally like everyone else is looking, which is nice. It doesn't single you out. I think there's more acceptance of text readers and other assistive technology features all the time. We are getting more and more talking books, talking websites and synthesized voices being embedded in technological stuff, I think that all helps.

Beth Case: As it happens so many times, things that are developed for people with disabilities turn out to be a benefit to everyone. I see students without disabilities wanting to use some of our technology because they find it useful. Like I said, I would have found Kurzwell very useful when i was in school.

Ellen Engstrom: Absolutely. That's the point, really what we are talking about here are good tools just for a robust, rich educational environment that follows solid universal design principles.

Beth Case: The active reading techniques are something that everyone should be doing, not just students with learning disabilities.

Ellen Engstrom: Absolutely. One reason we started to work so much with assistive technology, here Landmark, was the active reading strategy, we have been teaching for years, it's part of our culture. But, our students with low reading abilities really couldn't access it because they couldn't read the more advanced text. Now with Kurzweil 3000 or any screen reader, you can actually participate in that wonderful comprehension support that active reading provides.

Beth Case: You are getting their attention towards comprehension of the information and analyzing the information instead of "What word does those letters make up?"

Ellen Engstrom: Exactly.

Beth Case: This is fantastic information. This has been great information, I am so glad that we had you on. I suspect that our listeners may have lots of questions and want further information, so as promised, I will provide links to further information on our website, disability411.jinkle.com. Please email me if you have any questions, I can pass them on to Ellen. We are actually going to have her back in a few weeks, she will be talking about learning disabilities and difficulties students face in writing and some of the tools and techniques they can use to help them with their writing. Ellen, thanks again for coming.

Ellen Engstrom: Thank you, this has been a pleasure, Beth. I have enjoyed it.

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Kurzweil 3000 Voice: Hi, this is the VW Paul Voice from Kurzweil 3000. I hope you enjoyed today's interview with Ellen Engstrom. Please visit the Disability 411 website at disability411.jinkle.com for a transcript of today's show, to listen to past shows and read their transcripts and to find of links to the resources mentioned on this show. You can email Beth at disability411@jinkle.com with questions, comments, or feedback. Thanks for listening to Disability 411, the podcast for disability professionals.

Beth Case: The Disability 411 podcast is licensed under a under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives License and is brought to you by jinkle.com with the cooperation of AHEAD in Texas, ATHEN; DLRP, a project of ILRU, a program of TIRR and the PEC Texas SOTAC. To learn what any of this means, please visit our web site at disability411.jinkle.com. Music by the Brobdingnagian Bards is used with permission.

(Transcribed by www.castingwords.com)