Lauretta Bender - Work in Reading Disability

Work in Reading Disability

Bender became aware of the need for a specialized teaching philosophy applicable to children with language disabilities. She recognized that children with learning disorders were best understood as suffering from a biologically determined disorder. She believed that there was “a functional defect of the maturation of those areas...needed for the development of language, considered in its broadest sense” (24). She felt that, although there were many possible reasons for the maturational delays, such as those resulting from poor social experiments at critical times of language development, there was a genetic factor underlying some reading disabilities.

Bender viewed reading disabilities as evolving from a basic biological unevenness in maturation. She believed the reading disability itself to be but a manifestation of a more fundamental condition. Bender claimed that “children with various biological problems have a number of common problems", including: difficulties in patterned behavior in impulse, motor, perceptual and integrative areas; severe anxiety, also poorly patterned, with associated body image and identification problems; and a great need for human support in relation to these areas.

With the help of Paul Schilder, Bender developed the thesis that many of the language problems facing children with reading disabilities may have as their basis difficulty with the temporal ordering of sequences in a series of hierarchies of organization. Such ordering and hierarchical sequences include the organization of phonemes in words, words in a sentence, and sentences within paragraphs.