Join us for a live webchat with Professor Dorothy Bishop, Tuesday 16 December 1-2pm

[KateHMumsnet]

We've had a few requests for a webchat with Professor Dorothy Bishop on academic research into language disorders, dyslexia and literacy issues - so we're delighted to announce that she will be joining us for a webchat on Tuesday 16 December at 1pm.

Dorothy is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, where she heads a programme of research into children’s communication impairments. She is also a supernumerary fellow of St John’s College Oxford, as well as a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society. As well as publishing in conventional academic outlets, she writes a popular blog and tweets as @deevybee.

Please join us in welcoming Professor Bishop on Tuesday 16 December from 1-2pm, or post your questions in advance on this thread.

Excellent choice MN.

I'd like to ask what is the best way to improve on early diagnosis. I work in a University where 30% of the students registered for dyslexia only get that diagnosis after they arrive. And related to that, it is possible that they are missed because their difficulties aren't absolutely in evidence at the age of 7 or 11 or 14?

Oh wow! Thank you MN.

Have to get thinking now. As always, a million questions are forming.

And I have the WHOLE of the weekend to no doubt form a million more.

Mumsnet, you really are fantastic! How do you do it?
Thank you

Oooh.... so many questions....
Will have to limit myself

Another one very excited here too! I won't be able to join as I work day times but I'm sure I can think of a question or 6 to ask!

Totoro, I had a similar situation with my ds and he had no problems learning to read. In fact, he was reading small chapter books within 6 months of learning phonics. He did have a helpful teacher who learnt the way he said his letters so that they could understand him. We used the Nuffield speech therapy system and I'm sure that helps with the blending of phonics to create words.

What a great choice!

I am a dyslexic and work in HE - I would like to know, what's the best way to raise awareness of dyslexia in HE, and would you agree that the later someone's diagnosed, the more likely on the whole it is that they're going to present in an atypical way?

I ask because I think a lot of us miss out on support because we have developed coping strategies and/or we're not 'typical' dyslexics, and many people only seem familiar with what a typical dyslexic would do. Eg., I've had to explain that my dyslexia doesn't mean I can't spell at all, but it does mean that even putting corrections someone else has listed for me into a text can be extremely difficult.

I would like to know the best way to raise these issues with colleagues and for students, if you have thoughts?

Ooh! And, I know that you may only be able to get to one question per poster, but I also wondered:

Is there evidence to suggest dyslexics are likely not to follow a normal trajectory in terms of results? I keep seeing people saying 'well, so-and-so got Bs at GCSE so you would not expect them to do any better at A Level' or 'she only got a 2:1 so she won't make a good PhD student,' and yet it seems to me dyslexics can often have quite a 'jerky' path through education, sometimes struggling unexpectedly then making rapid progress when their coping strategies catch up.

Is there a reason for this?

Hi Dorothy,

Thank you so much for coming. I hope you don't mind but I have two urgent questions. A specific one and a general one.

Specific: I am home educating my 8 year old son who has ASD and his progress has been fantastic, even in literacy. However what he struggles with is verbally forming a sentence he wants to write, and then remembering what it was he was going to write. Does this difficulty have a name or be recognised, and if so, are there any resources or interventions you could recommend that he might benefit from?

General: Has anyone ever broken down how children acquire language in enough detail for a curriculum to be written to teach children who do not learn typically which is systematic and devoid of gaps? Like a 'learn language from scratch' tool. My daughter is typically developing in a mainstream school and it appears the usual curriculum is exposure with some elements of practise and then an expectation that she will just fill in the gaps herself through inference, observation and experience. My son will never learn this way.

Thanks again for coming.

How exciting!
Dorothy, my question is:

A few years ago I read an address you had done at a conference ( I think) about how the developmental disorders (ASD, SLI, ADHD etc) were arbitrary cutoffs on a continuum (absolutely agreed!) and that you expected in the long term that the separate 'labels' for clusters of behaviours would fall away and we would have a more general understanding of neurodiversity with descriptions of a youngster's specific issues within the neurodevelopmental spectrum rather than calling this thing 'aspergers' and that thing 'NVLD' and this other thing 'SLI' (I hope I have that essentially correct!)

Can you tell us a bit more about this as it is a subject I find very interesting but have struggled to get more information and can no longer find that conference address! Is it something you still think will happen? (I notice aspergers has dropped from DSM IV but they seem to have stuck in a load of other new 'disorders' so I am not sure if this is as much a step in that direction as it may at first appear) - and would you be happy if it did?

What an opportunity! I have a very specific question, I hope that's ok.

My son, who is almost 4, has suspected ASD. He is very verbal but largely echolalic. He does have functional language and can make his needs known - eg, ask for a drink or the loo etc.

The main concern for me is his receptive language/conceptual understanding. He can follow instructions and answer yes/no questions, but he doesn't understand ideas! So he doesn't understand how old he or anyone else is, or understand Christmas, or tomorrow/yesterday. He has never asked or answered a 'why' question.

So my question really is how can I teach him things when he doesn't understand the concepts/language? He is very concrete but visuals haven't worked because he can't seem to grasp the concept behind the visual...

Sorry, that was long! Thanks for any advice or info.

most excellent questions - both of which I'd love to know the answers too.

I have a DS (10yo) who is suspected of having aspergers. (Still on assessment waiting list).
Although he has an amazing vocabulary which can seem very advanced at times he struggles to communicate through speech and writing very simple sentences. He also tends to make statements about things rather than ask direct questions. I'm not sure if it's a confidence, language or inability to gage the reaction thing.

How can I work on helping him explain things using his language skills and understand the listener doesn't know what he's thinking?

Oh yes youare. DS drives me bonkers with 'I'm thirsty' instead of 'Please can I have a drink?'.

I used to answer with 'I'm not' or 'So am I' and he just gets louder with 'I'm thirsty'.

Now I tell him to think about what he wants and a better way to say it and try again in 2 minutes. No idea if this is the right approach. DS usually says the right thing after two minutes though so I guess he has learned the appropriate sentence somewhere.

I sometimes think my ds needs to be taught language in a similar way as you might 'teach' a computer. Not assuming any extrapolation or inference or generalisation.

It would take a lot of teaching for sure to teach him that way but he learns exceptionally fast. I wonder if there is anything close to a curriculum like that? Ideally it would have input from linguists to ensure all bases are covered. Good PhD project for someone in Uni of Sussex. I'm getting desperate.

A very general question.
Do you think we start formal teaching too early? And does this have an impact on literacy in general and in particular boys' attainment?

I have a child who is 7 i belive has high functioning autism and sensory issues,we have been under the peadatrician and salt since he was 2 and are still waiting for diagnoses. Now he has a lot of meltdowns especially after school,he seems to cope well within school but as soon as he gets home its like fireworks, now my problem is trying to get to the bottom of why he is having a meltdown without it taking hours to get there, sometimes he will tell us sometimes he wont,he can be very very violent,like last week he pulled handfuls of my hair out,kicked,punched,scratched and bitten,salt told us a few weeks ago we need to go on a socail commnication course.

Is this because of the socail communication problems?

Hi

Zzzz - are you asking if there are any large scale efficacy studies on service delivery models of speech and language therapy intervention for a diagnostic category of "language disorders" here, similar to studies in the autism field like the Early Start Denver model, or are you asking if there is any evidence of any description on any specific speech and language therapy intervention demonstrably effecting change on language disorder?

My understanding is that there are no equivalently scaled studies of language intervention for language disorder, but there are a range of interventions with moderate levels of evidence, for example shape coding, the Strathclyde intervention programme, Hanen approaches etc.

"Speech and Language Therapy" is not a discrete practice or approach so rather than looking for evidence for "Speech and Language Therapy", you can investigate evidence for different service delivery models and/or the the efficacy of a particular approach or technique in dealing with a particular problem with a specifically defined group. "Language Disorder" is itself hotly debated as a diagnostic category, which impacts hugely on the reliability of efficacy studies.

My question is as follows:

What is your perspective on Relational Frame Theory as a psychological theory of human language development and do you think more speech and language therapists should be aware of it?

I find a lot of RFT more elegant and parsimonious and relevant to the work I actually do as a speech and language therapist than traditional Chomskyan language models, particularly in relation to vocabulary teaching (semantics). I haven't heard many of my colleagues mention it and most I've discussed it with have never heard of it.

MostHighlyFlavouredLady - your second question. I can't help with forming the sentence but we used to record sentences into speaky boxes (will find link) until the child was happy with it. Then count our each word using cubes. As they wrote each word they listened to their sentence and took a cube away when they had written it. It helped break down a sentence into words for them to follow.