THE LEARNING ENHANCEMENT ADVANCED PROGRAM

Difficulties with learning academic tasks such as reading, spelling and mathematics have been recognised for over a century, with Kussmaul in 1877 ascribed as the first person to specifically describe an inability to read, that persisted in the presence of intact sight and speech, as word blindness. I The word dyslexia was coined by Berlin in 1887.2 Within a decade a Glasgow eye surgeon James Hinschelwood (1895) and a Seaford General Practitioner Pringle Morgan (1896) observed students who were incapable of learning to read and hypothesised that this was based on a failure of development of the relevant brain areas which were believed to be absent or abnormal, This model was based on the assumption that developmental dyslexia (congenital dyslexia) was similar in form to acquired dyslexia, which is dyslexia due to brain damage after a person has already learned to read. Deficits in other types of learning, such as mathematics,’ would also result from some other underlying brain damage or abnormality.’