ISSUE BRIEF:
“It's Time to Be Scientific About Dyslexia”
Distilling a complex idea down to a single term, while efficient in the short run, can lead to unintended difficulties. Clarity and precision are part and parcel of academic discourse. This clarity and precision allows scholars from across disciplines to understand what is being discussed, and for those within a specific field to efficiently communicate on multi-faceted ideas or concepts. However, distilling a complex set of ideas and factors into a single term often leads to a siloing effect, wherein the tenets or expectations of a definition being used in an academic community begin to mean more to insiders than to outsiders.
 
Such is the tenor of Julian Elliott’s article “It’s Time to Be Scientific About Dyslexia,” (available free as open access) wherein he discusses the term dyslexia and its evolution into a word so drawn out that it no longer refers to any precise condition or state, but instead represents an entire industry of academic and medical thought. This issue brief offers a summary of Elliot’s key points, its implications for the study of dyslexia, and the use of academic terminology going forward. 
Defining Dyslexia, or Not
Elliot presents four definitions of dyslexia for the reader, each having certain affordances and constraints associated with them.

Dyslexia 1, simply put, refers to people who exhibit word-level reading difficulty. Identification and assessment of dyslexia under this definition is relatively straightforward, requiring basic word-reading tests. However, “reading skills are distributed normally in the population with no clear boundary between normal and disabled reading performance. Thus, the location of any cutoff point that could be employed for diagnostic purposes is largely arbitrary” (p. 2). That is, determining who might be considered dyslexic is far less stable than one might expect, and it could include anyone who has difficulty decoding words and reading fluently.

Dyslexia 2 refers to a clinically derived subgroup of poor decoders. Since dyslexia is considered by many to be diagnosable, but often hidden or unrecognizable, “a diagnosis on these lines is typically obtained on the basis of a clinician’s judgment following detailed psychological examination using a range of educational, cognitive, and neuropsychological measures” (p. 2). However, this definition is also problematic. There are currently no meaningful ways of identifying such subgroups within larger pools of those who struggle with decoding, and there are no specialized, differentially appropriate interventions available. At the same time, differential resourcing can lead to uncertain moral and ethical grounds, such as only those with financial resources being able to afford these diagnoses.

Dyslexia 3 refers to people who exhibit a persistent resistance to high-quality intervention using targeted, evidence-based instructional practices. However, with this approach comes the difficulty of knowing just how much intervention is required before a diagnosis could be made. As such, interventions that could support a reader who is experiencing difficulties may not be provided in a timely fashion.

Dyslexia 4 defines dyslexia as people with a “pervasive neuro-diverse disorder that, in its reach, goes far beyond reading difficulties.” This definition is often based on “observations that those with severe reading difficulties are more likely than normal readers to present with various cognitive difficulties.” Yet, there is no consistent evidence of genetic or neurobiological factors that separate readers who are dyslexic from other readers who exhibit reading difficulties.
Key Problems and Potential Solutions Regarding the Dyslexia Debate
The central problem Elliott identifies is the inability of researchers and educators to come to consensus about how to define dyslexia. As a result, its prevalence is reported with a wide range of figures from 4% - 21% of the population. Elliot argues that if the prevalence of dyslexia can be manipulated based solely on how one chooses to define it, then the term has become virtually useless. Still, it must be acknowledged that some readers experience serious difficulties learning to read. Whether we label these readers as dyslexic or not, these reading difficulties must be addressed with appropriate, high-quality, research-based reading instruction.

As Elliott relays to the reader, “identifying the particular literacy strengths and weaknesses of a given struggling reader appears to be the most effective means to determine forms of instruction appropriate to his or her needs” (p. 7). Through this lens, it is not the term which should determine the approach that we, as educators, take. Rather, our instructional approaches should rest on our analyses of students’ reading behaviors. Neither should an industry that has developed around the issue be the primary arbiter of how teachers address their students’ needs: “Differences in dyslexia conceptualization and operationalization, fueled by the term’s varied use both as a psychological/medical diagnosis and as a social construct (Kirby, 2018), have led to a burgeoning dyslexia assessment industry that disproportionally caters to more advantaged social, racial, and economic groups (Holmqvist, 2020) while distracting attention from the needs of high numbers of other struggling readers” (p. 11).