The controversy surrounding the issue of specific learning difficulties/dyslexia may be attributed partly to the inappropriate application of the medical model of diagnosis and treatment to an educational context and partly to a politico-economic climate which encourages individual competition for scarce resources. The individual-centred focus of specific learning difficulties detracts from the wider problem of reading failure and what can be done to prevent it in all children. It is suggested that an ecological approach to reading difficulties would be a more appropriate orientation, leading to interventions of a preventive rather than a reactive nature.
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