A new classic text from a young dyslexic
Here’s a new text that I collected from a dyslexic youngster recently – She is almost approaching nine years old with a reading age about the same, but comprehension well above this. She is in P4. She is trailing in spelling by about a year and two months
‘I put my foot dawn in froow the door. I was cold but my foot was lickr it was sumer. it was so I stept in. I sore buterflis in the garden I did not under stand it was winter at home bet it was sumer at the garden.
I notest it was time for school. So I ran awte. So that I wood not be late wen I got to school I told my frends abwte the garden. At the end fo school I went and shode them it thaye were ameramasd at it so evry day we plade there. We went fishing, we plad tennis and bamigton.’
This pupil, clearly, has a fair amount of phonic awareness. However she seems to have poor visual memory. Just read the text out as she wrote it, especially – ‘I notest’. Yet this is a word that a standard spellchecker could not help her with.
Interestingly, the new Ghotit spellchecker scored well with this text – Microsoft Word fared less well! Here are the scores;
- Ghotit; 18 corrections suggested out of 21errors in the text.
- MS Word; 10 corrections suggested out of 21errors in the text
Remember that there are three real word errors in the text; ‘dawn’ for down; ’sore’ for saw; ‘bet’ for but. Only a spellchecker with context spellchecking can spot real word errors, which can be as common as 20% of some dyslexics’ spellimg errors.
Take a look at the trial version of Ghotit; www.ghotit.com
I expect that the release version of Ghotit will score 20 or 21 out of 21. It should do!
March 19th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Dear Mr Whittaker
I have no doubt that you will remove my comment from your blog, bloggers do not like criticism.
However, even biased publicity for a software product needs to be based on facts, otherwise, your credibility is dwindling fast.
First, you write that Ghotit suggested 18 out of 21 errors in the text. If you ask any dyslexic child, he will tell you that suggestions are not good enough, what you need is to make the choices for the child, not overload him with options.
Second, you did not verify the validity of the corrections offered by Ghotit. If you look at the first choice of each detected error, you will see that at least 5 are wrong suggestions. True, some of the corrections do show the appropriate word, somewhere along the list, but as I mentioned before, this does not help many dyslexic children.
Third, you expect that the release version of Ghotit to score 20 out of 21. How do you know that and what is the release version, I looked at their web site and they have already released their version.
I will not speculate here who you are and what are your motives but it does not sound creditable.
Regards
Eddie Cohen N.Y