Angela Fawcett

This text links general skills difficulties to dyslexia. It examines the research which has found that dyslexic children have problems not just with their reading but in a range of skills including several (such as balance) unrelated to reading.

A unique overview of research on dyslexia and an account of the underlying causes at cognitive, brain, and neural system levels that provides a framework for significant progress in the understanding of dyslexia and other related learning disabilities. Dyslexia research has made dramatic progress since the mid-1980s. Once discounted as a "middle-class myth," dyslexia is now the subject of a complex-and confusing-body of theoretical and empirical research. In Dyslexia, Learning, and the Brain, leading dyslexia researchers Roderick Nicolson and Angela Fawcett provide a uniquely broad and coherent analysis of dyslexia theory. Unlike most dyslexia research, which addresses the question "what is the cause of the reading disability called dyslexia?" the authors' work has addressed the deeper question of "what is the cause of the learning disability that manifests as reading problems?" This perspective allows them to place dyslexia research within the much broader disciplines of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience and has led to a rich framework, including two established leading theories, the automatization deficit account (1990) and the cerebellar deficit hypothesis (2001). Nicolson and Fawcett show that extensive evidence has accumulated to support these two theories and that they may be seen as subsuming the established phonological deficit account and sensory processing accounts. Moving to the explanatory level of neural systems, they argue that all these disorders reflect problems in some component of the procedural learning system, a multiregion system including major components of cortical and subcortical regions. The authors' answer to the fundamental question "what is dyslexia?" offers a challenge and motivation for research throughout the learning disabilities, laying the foundations for future progress.

This book highlights the most recent developments in the area of research, policy and practice. All the authors are well known in the field of dyslexia and they will offer significant contributions at the forthcoming BDA conference ' Dyslexia: the dividends from research to policy and practice' to be held at Warwick University in March 2004. In addition to the opening chapter, which provides an overview of developments in dyslexia, there are also chapters on the research associated with neurological factors, the cerebellum, genetics and the links between research and practice. The policy section provides insights into policy developments from Europe, the UK and the United States, as well as polic developments relating to both children and adults. The practice section is comprehensive with chapters on multilingualism, the range of specific learning difficulties, ICT, mathematics, the implications for the classroom from the science of learning and the features of dyslexia friendly schools.