Identifying Students at Risk for Dyslexia in the Indian Context

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Six
  In Roundtable Session: English Language Education and Students From Low-Income Backgrounds in the Indian Context: Service or Disservice? (Table 15)

Abstract

Purpose
This study was aimed at measuring reading acquisition and identifying students who were at-risk for dyslexia within a complex linguistic, economic and socio-political context.
Theoretical Framework
English and Hindi are the two official languages of India, but English is used as the link language for most people who speak different state languages (National Council of Educational Research and Training, 2011). It is the primary language of business, and is viewed as the language for economic and social mobility (Ramanathan & Bruning, 2003). “It is estimated that 90 million children in India are currently being formally schooled in English” (Kalia, 2007, p. 149). “In urban centers, more than 50% of children (27 million) attend private schools” (Annual Status of Education Report, 2016, p. 122). These private schools follow a state, national or international standardized curriculum, and the language of instruction is English (Kurrien, 2005). The predominant method used to teach reading in India is the “Alphabet-Spelling Method” (Gupta, 2014, p. 3911). Students are taught letter names and how to spell out words; they therefore bypass the sound structure of the language and are taught new words by sight word recognition instead. We will discuss how these socio-cultural issues impede our understanding of whether a child has limited language proficiency, inadequate instruction in reading or might be at-risk for dyslexia.
Method
The sample consisted of 1003 students from Grades 1, 3 and 5, recruited from six school sites, located in an urban city center, Bangalore. Two of these schools were low-cost schools, two were middle-cost schools and two were high-cost schools, and all the schools followed an English-immersion program. It was a longitudinal study and we measured students’ reading abilities across three time periods in a school year. Our reading measures included DIBELSNext, easyCBM and TOSREC. Our data analyses included hierarchical linear modeling to capture growth trajectories in reading; linear regression to determine the role of predictor variables and cut-off scores to identify students at-risk for dyslexia.
Results
The two main findings of the study were the following: (a) Curriculum accounted for the most variance in reading scores in Grade 1 and SES did not play a significant role, but as students progressed to Grades 3 and 5, both curriculum and SES played significant roles in reading acquisition; (b) The prevalence of dyslexia reduced as SES increased; students in low-cost schools were more likely to be identified because of their limited proficiency in English compared to students in high-cost schools who were more proficient in English and had a continuity of access to English both at home and school.
Scholarly Significance
The push towards English-medium instruction might be working for students from middle-high income backgrounds, but is a disservice for students from low-income backgrounds who are not only losing out on language proficiency and content area skills, but are also more likely to be identified as being at-risk for dyslexia. The disconcerting reality is that the prevalence of dyslexia is closely intertwined with social and economic immobility in the Indian context.

Author

• Sunaina Shenoy, University of New Mexico
  Presenting Author