Bernice Wong - The ABCs of Learning Disabilities

I wish to thank Nikki Levy for her persistence and persuasion in getting me to attempt a revised edition of The ABCs of Learning Disabilities. If not for Nikki, I would not have had the marvelous opportunity to gather three friends to contribute chapters to the revised edition of the book or the great enjoyment of thinking and writing.

It is with deep gratitude and appreciation that I list my contributors: Lorraine Graham, Maureen Hoskyn, and Jeanette Berman. Without them, this book would not have been completed. Each of them brought her individual expertise and perspective to the book. Words cannot express my appreciation of their concerted efforts to meet the deadline, especially Lorraine, who wrote while battling an ear infection that made her feel as if the room was spinning around.

The four of us enjoyed a division of labor. Maureen wrote Chapters 2, 3, and 8 on language and learning disabilities, memory and learning disabilities, and mathematics, respectively. Lorraine and Jeanette collaborated on Chapters 5, 6, and 7: self-regulation and learning disabilities, assessment, and reading. I wrote Chapters 1, 4, and 9: the history of learning disabilities, social dimensions of learning disabilities, and writing. Our writing has been facilitated by the fact that we wrote on areas that we enjoyed or in which we conducted research.

In writing the chapter on language and learning disabilities, Maureen had benefited from Tomasellos literature. In her chapter on working memory and learning disabilities, Maureen profited much from Lee Swansons noted research on working memory. Similarly, Lorraine wishes to acknowledge the usefulness of Swanson, Harris, and Grahams book Handbook ofLearning Disabilities. In writing the chapter on the history of learning disabilities, I benefited much from three books: Mercer and Pullen; Hallahan, Lloyd, Kauffman, Weiss, and Martinez; and Hallahan and Mock. Jeanette thanks Carol Lidz for her ongoing inspiration, and Lorraine thanks Anne Bellert for their previous collaborative research on reading comprehension.

We also greatly appreciate the help of Nikki Levy of Elsevier, who has always been helpful, informative, and positive. Barbara Makinster (senior developmental editor with Elsevier) has always been understanding, patient, and helpful. And we thank Julie Ochs in the production department at Elsevier Academic Press and the copyeditor, Deborah Prato, for doing such a wonderful job with our book. Last but not least, we thank the following individuals for their help: Paul Yeung, a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University, and Devi Pabla, secretary to the associate dean in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University.

To the student

In this revised edition of The ABCs of Learning Disabilities, you see the combined efforts of four authors, each writing on areas of her expertise. More important, we bring to our writing tasks much experience in teaching undergraduate students. The breadth of our teaching experience gives us a shrewd sensitivity to your instructional needs, and this sensitivity guides our writing.

In the chapters on reading, mathematics, and writing, you will notice the absence of the words and learning disabilities. This omission is deliberate. We wanted to emphasize that the instructional materials given in those chapters are designed for use in inclusive classrooms, with clear and specific pointers on adaptations for use with students with learning disabilities.

We have tried to smooth out differences in our individual writing styles, while maintaining a sense of humor and efforts to stimulate you to think about what you are reading. We hope you find this revised edition reader-friendly and useful.

Cheers and best wishes,

Bernice Wong

F ROM P AST TO P RESENT

This chapter traces the history of the learning disabilities field and presents the standard gamut of topics subsumed in the history of the field. These include, but are not limited to, the origins of the learning disabilities field, the influential definitions of learning disabilities, the characteristics of individualswith learning disabilities, the condition of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and the etiology of learning disabilities. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the current hot topic of the response to instruction model as an alternative to the IQ-achievement discrepancy model of diagnosing learning disabilities and boldly raises the question of the contributions of the research of response to instruction (RTI standard-protocol approach) to the learning disabilities field.