The development of reading skills in young partially sighted readers

The development of reading skills in youngpartially sighted readersbjsp_540 80..86

Michael Tobin and Eileen W. Hill

Young learners with severe visual impairments arerestricted in many ways, and psychologists andspecial needs teachers require information aboutthe nature and extent of the possible educationallyhandicapping effects. This article, written byMichael Tobin, Emeritus Professor of Special Edu-cation within the School of Education at the Univer-sity of Birmingham, and Eileen Hill, a teacher atQueen Alexandra College, Birmingham, reports theuse of a longitudinal approach to measure howreading development is affected in these childrenand to uncover the relationships with and amongother cognitive factors. The 60 participants werepart of a larger cohort of children registered as blindor partially sighted, their reading progress beingmonitored from seven to 12 years of age. Whileimproving in all three skill areas as measured by theNeale Analysis of Reading Ability, there were sig-nificant deficits/lags in development as comparedwith the norms for their fully-sighted age peers,especially in speed of reading. Even more disturbingwas the finding that the deficits increased with age.Significant correlates of reading, changing in impor-tance over time, were intelligence, visual efficiency,phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledgeand short-term memory. It is proposed that, if theeducationally handicapping effects of the impair-ment are to be overcome, a formal, regular cycle oftesting to monitor progress be instituted by spe-cialist teachers and educational psychologists.together with the design, development and stan-dardisation of a new reading assessment procedure;and that the professionals collaborate in the con-struction of programmes of continuing structuredteaching to improve speed of reading throughoutprimary and early secondary schooling.

Key words: visual impairment, reading develop-ment, influential factors/correlates, comparisonswith fully sighted peers.

Introduction and backgroundReadingThe importance of the development of reading skills inchildren is an issue of nationwide importance, as is evidentfrom the interest expressed in the media by commentatorsfrom all sectors of society. It is certainly not only of interestto the teachers, the ‘professionals’, since parents, journalistsand politicians are regular contributors to what is an almost

perennial debate in the public arena. Among the profession-als, many of the arguments circle around the technicalities ofthe teaching and learning of the letters of the alphabet,around the value of various kinds of phonics approaches inconjunction with or in opposition to whole-word reading,and among researchers around the finer detail of the possiblechanging significance of these alternative or complementarymethods as the child matures cognitively and socially. Oneof the more recent, twenty-first-century reappraisals andreinterpretations is that of Paris (2005) in which the focus isupon the proposition that theories about reading develop-ment have neglected ‘basic differences in the developmenttrajectories of skills related to reading’. Paris’s argument isthat emphasis has hitherto tended to be unduly centred upon‘small sets of knowledge’, such as learning and naming theletters of the alphabet, which he considers are skills oftransient relevance and that are ‘mastered in relatively briefperiods’ of the child’s maturation and at the expense of morefundamental and longer-lasting skills such as vocabularyand general conceptual development.

There is no compelling evidence indicating that learning toread is conceived by specialist teachers and psychologistsas fundamentally different for partially sighted children.Perhaps, to be more scientific, no one has shown that theselearners perceive printed text differently, or that their teach-ers have reason to eschew the conventional letter-naming,the practice of ‘sounding out’ of letters, their synthesisinginto whole words, or ‘look and say’ methods. In other words,it is assumed that, for the purposes of the teaching method-ology, these children and their fully-sighted age peers are ahomogeneous group.

Partial sight: definitions and possible impact uponinformation-gathering and readingWhatever the precise and possibly changing significanceover time of associated cognitive and perceptual skills and ofalternative teaching methods, for most children the processof learning to read is not obstructed by severe visual impair-ment, but there is good ‘clinical’ evidence from teachers ofchildren registered as partially sighted (PS), that is, thosehaving a visual acuity of 6/18 or worse after the optimalcorrection by lenses, that these learners are experiencingreal difficulties when trying to access print and other picto-rial materials in school environments. However, the evi-dence from the ophthalmics/ophthalmological field is notunequivocal about the question of whether reduced acuity ofitself is sufficient to impair the ability to decode text. Indeed,surprisingly in some early research Grosvenor (1977)

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READING DEVELOPMENT

© 2012 The Authors. British Journal of Special Education © 2012 NASEN. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8578.2012.00540.x

pointed to findings suggesting that myopia, severe shortsight, was in fact consistently associated with good readingperformance. Hall (1991), however, reported no significantcorrelations among 11 ocular functions and reading ability.Given the diversity of the causations, the nature, and the ageof onset of impairments to the visual system, it is perhapsnot surprising that we do not have a clear, overarchingdescription of how reading development in young children islikely to be affected by severe malfunctioning of one or moreof the various components of such a complex system.

Nevertheless, specialist teachers and educational psycholo-gists do notice lags, delays and deficiencies in the readingdevelopment of most children registered as partially sighted.(Of interest here is the finding that this observation holdsgood across different languages. For example, Mohammedand Omar (2011) also report reading deficits amongMalaysian-speaking visually impaired readers.) One of theparticular concerns of professionals when noting an appar-ent detrimental effect upon a partially sighted child’sreading progress is whether it seems to be an overall, gen-eralised impact over all aspects of the reading process orwhether it is possible to isolate a particular sub-skill, forexample, reading comprehension, or reading accuracy, orreading speed, that is affected. Indirect pointers to the pos-sible significance of this third factor are to be found inpreliminary work by Mason and Tobin (1986) and then laterin a larger investigation by Tobin (1998) who examinedspeed of information processing in 257 PS children, aged sixto 17 years, by means of the British Ability Scales’ Speed ofInformation Processing sub-scale. This sub-scale requiresthe child to identify and mark the highest value number ineach row of a matrix of numerical digits, the digit spansincreasing in length from page to page. While both thesestudies revealed well below average performance by the PSchildren, it was noteworthy that some of them achievedscores at the 80th and 90th centiles, indicating their ability toscan backwards and forwards along each line and to locateeach new line accurately despite having the text no morethan a few inches from their eyes. Some of those who scoredbelow the 10th centile made no errors at all but were unableto meet the strict time criteria.

‘Optimising the visual environment’ for visually impairedreaders and the role of information (IT) and assistivetechnology (AT)An expression now in common use is ‘optimising the visualenvironment’ to enhance access to print materials for thosewith low vision. The ophthalmic professionals have tradi-tionally prescribed individualised lenses/spectacles for thispurpose, and there are, of course, various kinds of simplehandheld devices for magnifying text. A drawback of veryhigh levels of magnification is that they effectively reducethe size of the visual field, thus obscuring some of the otherinformation normally available on the page to the reader(giving advance awareness of forthcoming changes in thetext that can be signalled through indentations in lines, bysize modifications to the text, and by changes to the overallpage layout). Modern technological developments have ledto more and more frequent use in the classroom of closed

circuit television (CCTV) that permit the enlarging of printsize and the reversing of foreground and background coloursto meet the user’s specific needs. Computer-based systemsnow also allow users to change letter and word size andinter-letter/inter-word/inter-line spacing, and to select pre-ferred foreground and background colours and contrastlevels. Colour and contrast changes are especially useful tolearners with some degree of colour deficiency, and notmerely those designated as totally colour blind. Othercurrent advances in information technology (IT) and assis-tive technology (AT) make it possible for text to be con-verted immediately into audio form, thus dispensing withprint altogether. (Indeed, anecdotal evidence, from discus-sions with visually impaired teenagers, suggests that someof them are of the opinion that print and Braille will gradu-ally become redundant altogether.)

The legibility of text and typefaces for normally sightedreaders has been a focus of attention for many years bypsychologists and typographers, exemplified by research onstroke-width and spacing by Berger (1944a, 1944b). Forpeople with low vision, Arditi (2004) has described anapproach to enhancing text accessibility with adjustabletypography, and more recently Russell-Minda, Jutai, Strong,Campbell, Gold, Pretty and Wilmot (2007) have published areview of research specifically directed to the needs ofpeople with low vision. One of the group’s conclusions wasthat ‘technological advances in the manipulation of type-faces’ should facilitate improvements in legibility, leadingeventually to the institution of ‘standardised concepts on thelegibility of text for people with low vision . . . on both thelocal and global scales’. Standardised concepts may well beuseful; what they must not imply is that a single set ofregulations will meet the needs of every individual reader.This point is exemplified by Keefe’s research (2001) whereit is reported that merely enlarging letter-size did not entirelyovercome the difficulties for all readers. Related to this arethe findings from McLeish’s (2007) small-scale study ofletter-spacing, where it was found that increased letter-spacing not only improved reading speed but served also toreduce the need for enlargement.

While IT and AT developments do undoubtedly widenaccess to original print materials, nevertheless conventionalwhole-page, book presentations of text have several advan-tages even to people with very severe degrees of visualimpairment. The size, the depth and width, of the humanvisual field, can facilitate an overall ‘view’ of the page,providing advanced information of what is to come throughmarkers such as paragraphing, and by the highlighting ofimportant pieces of information by changing the colour, sizeand spacing of text; and of course whole-page formats facili-tate searching by means of backward and forward scanning.

Measuring reading skills among partially sighted childrenOutside this area of highly focused evaluations of particulardevices and print modifications, one of the first broaderpieces of research into assessing reading development witha reasonably-sized sample of PS children reading continu-ous passages of prose was that by Douglas, Grimley, Hill,

© 2012 The Authors. British Journal of Special Education © 2012 NASEN British Journal of Special Education · Volume 39 · Number 2 · 2012 81

Long and Tobin (2002). Theirs was a cross-sectional inves-tigation with 476 low-vision students aged five to 17 years.Their findings indicated ‘that the average reading ages foraccuracy, comprehension, and speed are generally belowtheir chronological age when the comparison is made withfully-sighted peers’. This was a study that used children ofdifferent ages, allowing the mean scores of each sub-groupto be estimated and compared, and so revealing the increasesin scores that would be expected with increasing maturityand practice.

The present investigationWhat had hitherto not been done was to conduct a longitu-dinal investigation in which the same group of PS learnerswas assessed and monitored on a regular basis. In the reportnow to be presented, data are presented from assessmentsmade on three separate occasions with a group of PS chil-dren as they progressed through their primary and earlysecondary school education.

Two issues are taken up. The first is to do with providing anobjective description of the changing competence – theimprovements in accuracy, comprehension and speed ofreading – of the cohort over time and comparing thesechanges with the normative population data for their sightedpeers. The second is concerned with discovering whether ornot such major determinants of fluent reading in fully-sighted readers (for example, cognitive ability, phonologicalawareness, vocabulary knowledge, memory and perceptualabilities) are also characteristics of fluent reading in PSlearners.

ParticipantsThe 60 children were part of a group of 120 blind andpartially sighted learners whose school progress was beingfollowed by the first author, starting when they were agedfive on entry to school. They had all been registered, accord-ing to school medical records, as either blind or partiallysighted. However, this original medically-based ‘registra-tion’ classification was replaced for the cohort at age sevenwith a new ‘categorisation as Braille or print reader’ as thiswas clearly more closely related to the child’s actual level ofvisual functioning as evidenced in the classroom situation.This resulted in two groups, each numbering 60, but withvariations as some moved from print to Braille if their sightdeteriorated. The reading development of the braillists is tobe described in another report.

Assessment proceduresFor the purposes of this account, the tests to be describedare those considered to be directly pertinent to a study ofreading as described above. Therefore many of the otherassessment procedures used with the whole cohort of blindand PS children are not included; among these are those todo with tactual perception, number skills, and conservationof substance and weight and volume. In the context ofalready known correlates of reading, the tests predicted onthat basis and used in these analyses were the WilliamsIntelligence Test for Children with Defective Vision (Will-iams, 1956), the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (Neale,1989), the Barraga Visual Efficiency Scale (Barraga, 1964,1970), an in-house short-term memory test (orally pre-sented strings of digits), an in-house, orally-presentedvocabulary test requiring the child to replace a nonsenseword in a sentence with an appropriate real word, and arhyming test for measuring phonological awareness andwhich comprised Item 46 of the Williams Test whichrequires the child to produce words that rhyme with thestimulus word.

The testing was carried out in the children’s schools by theauthors and by other colleagues trained by the principalresearcher. The intelligence tests were administered on threeoccasions between the ages of five and 12; the reading reststhree times between seven and 12 years. Other testing wasdone on one or two occasions as time permitted. Numbers ofchildren varied over time, due to absence through sickness,movement to another school, or other causes.

ResultsReading progress and comparisonsThe first issue examined is concerned with presenting anobjective description of the cohort’s changing competencesin reading. Table 1 presents the mean scores on each of thethree testing occasions, revealing upward trajectories inaccuracy, comprehension and speed of reading, as is to beexpected with the increase in maturity from age seven to age12, and also how these trajectories differ from those of theirfully-sighted age-peers. In accuracy and comprehension, theincreases from testing one to testing two are of the order24% to 28%, but no more than 18% in speed of reading.From testing two to testing three the increases for accuracyand comprehension are not so great, about 12%; for speed,the increase is no more than about 8%.

Table 1: Mean reading ages and standard deviations in months, and lags in months against sighted norms

Actual age Accuracy age Comprehension age Speed age

1st testing 92.27 (8.06) 81.49 (11.31) 83.69 (10.64) 79.42 (12.58)Lags -10.78 -8.58 -12.852nd testing 126.85 (7.49) 100.90 (16.36) 106.97 (23.22) 93.42 (15.78)Lags -25.95 -19.88 -33.433rd testing 141.62 (7.79) 113.88 (19.27) 119.53 (23.01) 101.30 (19.33)Lags -27.74 -22.09 -40.32

82 British Journal of Special Education · Volume 39 · Number 2 · 2012 © 2012 The Authors. British Journal of Special Education © 2012 NASEN

For some children, improvement is difficult to achieve. Theminimum recorded accuracy score on the first test was 69and that was closely paralleled with minima of 70 and 71on the next two testings. For comprehension, the minimumscores were 67, 73 and 81. For speed of reading, theminimum score remained throughout the period at 70. Weare observing here the widening gaps among these younglearners, with the standard deviations growing larger,showing a widening spread on all three measures overtime.

These averages of course tell us little about the individualchild. For example, a boy of average intelligence (IQs 96,100, 99) with a score of 70 on the first comprehension testhad made an improvement of 24% by the second testing, andon the third occasion the new improvement was of the orderof 20%. While it is not feasible to present the individualtrajectory lines for each child, we infer that the trend is forthem to grow farther apart; the group is becoming ever moredisparate.

Although this will be taken up at greater length in the dis-cussion section below, it should be borne in mind that testingceases when the reader exceeds a specific number of errorson the accuracy sub-scale. In other words, the obtainedcomprehension and speed scores are partly dependent uponthe arbitrary criteria set for the termination of the whole ofthe testing procedure.

What Table 1 also reveals quite starkly is that the NealeReading Ability scores of this group of PS children lagsubstantially behind those found in the published norms fortheir fully-sighted age-peers. The trajectories are on a lowerupward slope. That is, worryingly, these gaps increase withincrease in maturity. What we infer is that these youngreaders are being progressively more disadvantaged as theymove through the primary school stage of their educationand into the early secondary school stage.

Comprehension is the least affected, but even here the lag atnearly 12 years of age was 23 months on average. The mostseverely affected area was in speed of reading, where thedeficit grew from nearly 13 months between the ages ofseven and eight, to 40 months as they approached theirtwelfth birthdays.

The standard deviations are fairly close together in size foraccuracy and speed at all ages. For comprehension, however,it is worth noting that on the second and third occasions thestandard deviations are greater than for the other two mea-sures, and this wider dispersion around the comprehensionmeans is perhaps linked to comprehension’s predictablycloser association with intelligence as measured by the IQscores as shown in Table 2.

Although the mean scores for the girls seemed, as would bepredicted, to be numerically superior on all three measures,these observed differences did not in fact reach statisticalsignificance and are therefore not set out here.

Correlates of readingThe second theme or issue is the relationship to reading ofother cognitive and perceptual determinants known to besignificant in the progress of reading skills in fully-sightedreaders. For ease of presentation, these variables, althoughoverlapping, are split into three groups encompassing cog-nition, language and perception.

Table 2 sets out the correlations between the cohort’s readingscores and what are primarily cognitive factors, namely,intelligence and short-term memory. As can be seen, a con-stant over the three assessments is the significance of theintelligence factor as measured by the Williams Test. Itaccounts for most of the variance in the accuracy and com-prehension scores, rising to 63% for the latter on the thirdoccasion. In other words, the upward trajectories for accuracyand comprehension are significantly associated with higherIQ scores. It is also significant in relation to speed of reading,but never accounting for more than 35% of the variance.

The correlation between the scores for reading accuracy andthe other cognitive variable, short-term memory (STM),measured just before the second and third reading tests,reaches statistical significance and accounts for more than24% of the variance in accuracy on the third occasion,reflecting no doubt the child’s reliance upon temporarilyholding information ‘in store’ as he/she has to scan back toprevious letters/sounds in the word in order to synthesisethem into whole words. One might also have predicted thehigh correlation between the STM scores and comprehen-sion, since the comprehension questions are posed after thecompletion of each narrative, thus requiring recall of thedetails of the narrative. However, the reader is permitted toglance back at the story, and for those with better vision andbetter scanning techniques these factors can help to make upfor poorer memory. Working or short-term memory is acomponent of many conventional intelligence tests; its cor-relations with scores on the Williams Test in this investiga-tion ranged from +0.5 to +0.7.

Language variables, such as vocabulary and phonologicalawareness (see Table 3 and Table 3a), remain consistentfactors over time, but with phonology, as measured with therhyming test, seemingly more influential in relation to accu-racy than to speed. (The cases for phonics and whole-word

Table 2: Correlations among Neale Ability Readingscores and cognitive factors (Williams IQ andshort-term memory (STM))

Accuracy 1 Comprehension 1 Speed 1IQ 1 0.519** 0.516** 0.444**

Accuracy 2 Comprehension 2 Speed 2IQ 2 0.683** 0.772** 0.442**STM 0.469** 0.462** 0.288*

Accuracy 3 Comprehension 3 Speed 3IQ 3 0.674** 0.793** 0.589**STM 0.493** 0.418** 0.392**

Notes: ** Significant at 1% level. * Significant at 5% level.


recognition approaches will be discussed later) As would bepredicted, word knowledge, as measured by the vocabularytest, continued to be significant throughout. In accord withthe hypothesis of Paris (2005) set out above, it might havebeen predicted that there would be a positive feedback loopamong the word knowledge and the accuracy and compre-hension variables, with the vocabulary store increasing as aresult of the additional reading done and then becoming moretightly correlated to accuracy and comprehension skills.

Although it may not be possible to claim unequivocally thatthe correlational analyses fully substantiate the notion of thisdynamic interplay across time, Table 3a does show that anincrease in vocabulary scores between the first and secondoccasions (29.22%) is also matched with an increase in thereading accuracy (23.81%), and of course the even largerincreases between the first and third testings (vocabularyincrease 86.75%, reading accuracy 39.74%). These findingsmay indeed be lending further support to the argument putforward by Paris about the longer-lasting significance ofvocabulary development.

In more precise and individualised support of Paris’s con-tention, it may be worth drawing attention in passing to therecording of a couple of specific changes for individualchildren with very low vocabulary scores in the first two

years of primary school (of the order of 5 and 6 out of amaximum of 60) who then scored at higher levels (33 and 43out of 60) and whose later reading accuracy scores werenearer the average for the group. The inference we draw isthat we are seeing here how a poor language background onentry to school has its effects on the initial stages of theprocess of learning to read. Further, we see the early andthen the continuing influence of teacher input and of regularattendance at school. If we do interpret the findings in thisway and see them as indicative of the greater significance ofgeneral cognitive maturation as against what Paris describesas such transient factors as letter-naming, can we make anyinferences about our teaching practices and priorities? Thisissue will be taken up later.

Visual perceptionAs shown in Table 4, scores on the Barraga Visual Effi-ciency Scale are significantly correlated with performanceon all three sub-scales of the Neale on all three occasions.Although this instrument was specifically designed for visu-ally impaired children, it resembles other conventional per-ception tests in that the tasks include matching anddiscriminating on the basis of shape, size, object contour,sequencing, and so on. The significant correlations betweenthe Barraga and Neale scores point to the importance ofvisual perception skills. The high correlations with the Nealecomprehension scores, particularly on the second and thirdoccasions, may suggest that there is a large cognitive com-ponent embedded in the Barraga. This is confirmed by thecorrelations between Barraga scores and the three scores onthe Williams (IQ 1 and Barraga, +0.629; IQ 2 and Barraga,+0.629; IQ 3 and Barraga, +0.667).

Conclusions, discussion and recommendationsThe evidence from this longitudinal investigation substanti-ates the claims made in earlier cross-sectional reports to theeffect that severe visual impairment has deleterious effectson the development of reading skills, especially speed ofreading. A major cause for concern is that the gaps/lags/deficits grow larger over time. This is especially so for thespeed factor, with all that slowness in decoding text means,both absolutely in terms of the time taken to deal with the

Table 3: Correlations among Neale Ability Readingscores and phonological (rhyming) and vocabularyscores

Accuracy 1 Comprehension 1 Speed 1Rhyming +0.328** +0.273* +0.165Vocabulary +0.524** +0.470** +0.487**

Accuracy 2 Comprehension 2 Speed 2Rhyming +0.526** +0.498** +0.328*Vocabulary +0.501** +0.656** +0.343**

Accuracy 3 Comprehension 3 Speed 3Rhyming +0.486** +0.472** +0.331*Vocabulary +0.530** +0.570** +0.419**

Notes: ** Significant at 1% level. * Significant at 5% level.

Table 3a: Percentage increases in reading accuracy and vocabulary over three testings

Acc. 1–Acc. 2, 23.81% Acc. 2–Acc. 3, 12.86% Acc. 1–Acc. 3, 39.74%Voc. 1–Voc. 2, 29.22% Voc. 2–Voc. 3, 18.14% Voc. 1–Voc. 3, 86.75%

Notes: Acc. = accuracy. Voc. = vocabulary.

Table 4: Correlations among Neale Reading Ability scores and visual perception (Barraga Visual Efficiency Scalescores)

Test

Neale 1st test Neale 2nd test Neale 3rd test

Acc. Comp. Speed Acc. Comp. Speed Acc. Comp. Speed

Barraga +0.629 +0.485 +0.560 +0.507 +0.668 +0.400 +0.476 +0.709 +0.435

Notes: Acc. = accuracy. Comp. = comprehension. All correlations significant at 1% level.


heavier curriculum demands made at secondary schoollevel, and relatively in terms of the motivation to spend moretime on the activity of reading than their fully-sighted peers.

Given the uncertainty about the precise effects of the manydifferent visual defects, the authors suggest that slowreading may be caused in part by ‘visual crowding’. Thisphenomenon is characterised by confusion for the readerarising from the closeness of inter-letter and inter-wordspacing, from increase in word length, and from increase inline and sentence length in the print texts encountered aschildren mature. The rapid left-to-right and up-and-downscanning strategies available to normally sighted childrenare less easily attainable by those who have to work at nomore than a couple of centimetres from the text. This close-ness to the text, this effective reduction in field of vision,also hinders alertness to whole-page layout markers such asindentations, paragraphing, italicising, and so on. We inferthat a combination of crowding, reduction in informationand visual fatigue are what we are observing among ouryoung learners as they tackle texts of ever-increasing length.It is also possible that these are the reasons for the below-average scores on the BAS Speed of Information Processingsub-scale referred to above (Mason & Tobin, 1986; Tobin,1998). It was pointed out in the latter paper that some chil-dren made no or only very few ‘accuracy’ errors but couldnot complete these perceptual scanning and cognitive pro-cessing tasks within the scheduled time limits.

Although all three sub-scales of the Neale Test have pro-duced depressed scores in this investigation, it must beborne in mind that testing is terminated when the accuracyscoring reaches a pre-defined level. The child’s verbal com-prehension may not, however, have reached its peak. Theprincipal author has discovered evidence in support of thisinference when he has continued with testing beyond thisaccuracy-criterion level and then asking the comprehensionquestions. In these circumstances, the inaccurately pro-nounced words are supplied by the tester and the ‘reading’proceeds. The child’s comprehension score is then oftenfound to be more in line with that predicted from the intel-ligence testing and the child’s vocabulary. This may wellhold good for other children with other learning difficul-ties; that is, their basic comprehension of language is beingconcealed by the Neale Test’s requirement to cease testingafter the specified number of accuracy errors has beenreached.

The second issue examined was to do with whether knowncognitive, language and perceptual factors associated posi-tively with reading ability in fully-sighted learners were alsoobserved as significant in the reading development of PSchildren. The statistically significant correlations found herelend support to the notion that the same set of associationsholds good for both groups. They are essentially one homo-geneous group with their full-sighted peers. While a moresophisticated statistical analysis might reveal the extent towhich the independent variables are themselves closelyinter-related, the setting out of these first-level associationsmay help educational psychologists and special needs teach-

ers to focus attention on the kinds of assessment tools to useand thus pinpoint appropriate teaching methods.

It has been argued (Tobin, 2008) that lack of ‘information’and the depressed speed of accessing and processing infor-mation constitute the main handicapping consequence ofblindness. It is now being postulated here that this explainsmany of the learning difficulties of PS children also. Notonly do the poor reading speeds of our cohort impede theireasy access to information, the slowness in reading canaffect, too, their self-esteem, their motivation and their inter-est in reading. We then see the possibility of a negativefeedback loop, with the consequence that reading is not ahabitual means of acquiring information and the absence ofinformation interferes with or impedes further learning.

The recommendation is that specialist teachers and educa-tional psychologists should seek for regular, preferably atleast yearly, assessment of reading skills as an essentialcomponent of the monitoring of these children’s specialeducational needs at the secondary school stage. With this asa basis, there can then be a platform for collaboration amongthese professionals (a) to determine whether current popular‘speed-reading’ methods for normally sighted readers can beadapted for use for the partially sighted and then be imple-mented throughout the secondary school education of thesechildren, and (b) to assess the extent to which the various‘phonics’ approaches are sufficient in themselves for theseyoung learners. The number of saccades (jumps from onefixation point, one letter, one word, to the next) may entail agreater exercise of the still-developing short-term memoryskills in the phonics methods of ‘sounding out’ of the lettersand then the synthesising of these sounds into the wholeword.

It is suggested that a thorough-going, exclusive commitmentto phonics approaches may be counter-productive for theseyoung learners. The old-fashioned ‘flash cards’ may stillhave a role in increasing syllable and word familiarity andthus enhancing the ability to process text more quickly. Thisis an area where further IT and AT advances may be valu-able; they could present syllables and words at sizes, coloursand foreground/background contrast levels optimal for eachchild. The speed of presentation and the duration of theexposure could be varied for each child and increased ascompetence improves. While the value of phonics methodsis not being disputed, especially in the very early stages oflearning to read, the inference we draw is that they areneither efficient nor sufficient when we are faced with theperceptual difficulties of many of the severely visuallyimpaired children we now have in ‘integrated’ settings. Thetasks faced by non-specialist teachers and classroom assis-tants with responsibilities for visually impaired learners canbe made easier by a more eclectic approach to teachingmethodologies and the systematic involvement of IT and ATprofessionals.

The growing use of screen-based, computer-controlled pre-sentations of text implies that more research should beundertaken to determine whether it would be feasible to


‘diagnose’ an individual learner’s needs for optimal letter-size, letter-spacing, word-spacing, inter-line spacing andcolour and contrast levels, since all these features of presen-tation are available as a matter of routine with even the leastexpensive commercial software packages. Such a diagnosis,repeated regularly for those with changing/deterioratingconditions, would at long last permit individualised teachingprogrammes to be devised and used in all school settings,even those where specialist teacher input is not available ona daily basis.

There is a limited range of well-standardised assessmentprocedures for use with blind and PS children, and theauthors of this article consider it is now the time for thedesign of a new reading test for this particular group oflearners. The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability has themerit of recognising that reading is best not conceptualisedas a single, a unitary process. A single number can notencapsulate all aspects of a child’s competence in reading.Neale tried to deal with this problem by assigning separate

numbers to accuracy, comprehension and speed of reading.However, the Neale Test does not produce scores that areentirely independent of one another since all testing ceaseswhen the accuracy criterion has been reached. To that extent,therefore, the true ‘ceilings’ for comprehension and speedages may not have been hit. For teachers and psychologists,the authors’ recommendation is that while the recording ofthe accuracy score be completed as the test Manual requires,it can be informative to continue with testing beyond the‘accuracy’ criterion level since a deeper understanding of thechild’s verbal comprehension may be achieved.

The authors are also of the opinion that what is now neededis for funding to be provided to educational psychologistsfor research into the development and standardisation of anew test in which these three aspects of reading can bemeasured on the same occasion and their inter-relationshipsevaluated to generate a fuller understanding of the young PSlearner’s current level of development and what his/herteaching/learning needs are.

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Address for correspondence:Prof. Michael TobinBirmingham University School of EducationEdgbastonBirmingham B15 2TTUKEmail: [email protected]

Article submitted: September 2011Accepted for publication: March 2012


Documents

The development of reading skills in young partially sighted readers