Understanding what was said and what was read are two different mental processes. If some children experience difficulties in reading, is it any wonder that they will have a hard time understanding written text? The same children may have little difficulty understanding what is read or said to them. These children, who have significant problems in reading comprehension but little or no difficulty in listening comprehension, may truly be dyslexic when compared to other children of their class.
In fact, the difference between these two abilities is a good measure of reading disability and a more reliable indicator of dyslexia. Compare this method of identifying dyslexia with the IQ-Reading Difference method that shows that a dyslexic child may be poor in reading, in proportion to his/her low IQ. We may be faced with the absurd result of an intelligent (high IQ) child who reads at the same level as his/her classmates being labeled a poor reader.
Previously we discussed why IQ cannot help us to understand reading disability; now we understand how unhelpful it is in the identification of truly dyslexic children as opposed to the garden-variety poor readers.
The garden-variety poor reader, who is also poor in listening and reading comprehension, may have an inadequate vocabulary, insufficient understanding of the syntax of the sentences, as well as difficulties in more than one cognitive process—simultaneous processing may be particularly poor, but successive and planning processes may not be as good as of a classmate who reads normally.
According to one estimate, 5.1 percent of children are found to have difficulty in both reading and listening comprehension, whereas only 2.7 percent have difficulty only in reading comprehension. Perhaps these are the true dyslexics. Does good listening comprehension ability indicate that the child has a high IQ, and does poor ability predict a low IQ? Generally, this is true to a certain extent. (The correlation between IQ and comprehension can be up to 0.47.)
Is it easier for many of us to understand what is said rather than what is read? Such a comparison can only be made if the learner both listens to and reads the same text. Will the text be easier to understand when it is read aloud to the learner than if the learner reads it to him/herself? This in itself is quite a complex exercise, bearing in mind that reading the text aloud must take the same time as reading it silently. Furthermore, the person who reads it to the learner must use a monotone to avoid adding emphasis and exclamations, because these would bring the text alive and may make it easier to understand.
Text written by creative writers becomes interesting by incorporating the accents and many nuances of the language. By playing on the sense of the words beyond their meaning, writing can compete well with speech. Spelling and writing is the topic of the next chapter that discusses how we should mean what we write and write what we mean, to paraphrase a statement from Alice in Wonderland.