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By Suzanne Day
Dyslexia is believed to be the most common of all learning difficulties, often going undetected until age nine or ten. It remains profoundly misunderstood and undiagnosed. Too often dyslexic people will be labelled lazy, unmotivated, slow, and even stupid, destroying a person's view of their worth and God's given abilities.
Contrary to what people think, dyslexia is more than the reversal of letters. In fact, only ten percent of dyslexics present this characteristic. Dyslexia is not related to a person's intelligence and it is estimated that one in six Canadians has dyslexia. The Ontario education system prefers to use the term "learning disability." However, the term "dyslexia" is coming back into the reading research arena because it better describes the problems with reading.
Thomas G. West summarizes dyslexia in that it "signifies a problem with words: written or spoken words, words of speech, words that are recalled on command, the organization and memorization of words, and words that conform to complex rules which originate from foreign languages."
The symptoms of dyslexia vary greatly from one individual to another. The dyslexic person can experience difficulties in many areas, including: forming and/or naming letters, appropriate sequence in individual letters which make up a word such as was/saw, finding the right word when talking, distinguishing left from right, telling time, days of the week, memorizing multiplication tables, difficulty memorizing non-phonetic words, and more.
Dyslexia is genetically inherited and its cause is biological. Dyslexia is not a disease but a difference in the brain functions. Computerized images of the reading brain allows us to see differences in the brain of dyslexics where the effort is concentrated in the frontal lobe devoted to visual understanding and memory.
A dyslexic can boast of membership in a club of famous people like Albert Einstein, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell. This club has a large number of scientists, engineers, lawyers, and computer programmers. Like other dyslexics, Ronald Davis was gifted with an unusual talent for creativity and imagination, yet he grew up with a "retarded" label. He wrote a book, called "The Gift of Dyslexia," where he explains procedures which allowed him to overcome the difficulties of dyslexia. He explains this gift as a perceptual talent. For Davis, dyslexia is a product of thought and a special way of reacting to the feeling of confusion. A dyslexic person would think mostly in pictures rather than in words. They have to transfer their "pictures" in words and vise versa which takes them more time to process verbal information. When engage in the reading process they are confronted with symbols or words that cannot be put into pictures, like the word "the," "was," "and" and the dyslexic person gets confused and frustrated, which interfere with the ability to concentrate. Davis' techniques use the tactile and visual modalities in comparison to most remedial approaches which mainly stimulate the auditory-language channel with phonics. The difficulties encountered by a dyslexic person are real in our world where the written language needs to be mastered for survival. Dyslexics are poor readers, writers, and spellers, and often have poor numerical skills in math because of their problems with symbols. There are three fundamental types of dyslexia shared by most dyslexics to some extent. Testing allows us to better understand the person's characteristics and to determine the appropriate techniques where we use the strengths while we remediate the weaknesses to address the problems. To help you understand these three categories I will attempt to briefly describe them as different components. The first type of dyslexia has to do with a difficulty in developing memory for direction of the lines in the written symbols. The student will have difficulty writing "b" instead of "d" and writing in general will be painful. Tactile techniques will be necessary to work with this problem. The second type of dyslexia is a deficit with the memory of the sound and symbols and has to do with the ability to develop skills to analyse what is needed for syllabication and working with morphemes (root words, prefixes and suffixes). The student will read "house" instead of "home" and write "posaih" instead of "position." This child will have a difficult time learning from a phonetic approach and will need support with flash cards, although effort needs to be extended to provide as much support as possible to analyse the sounds and the structure of words. The third type is a deficit in remembering the configuration of whole words. The student will read "ball" instead of "bell" and writes "enuf" instead of "enough." This student will usually respond well to phonics but will always have a slow reading pace. I let you imagine how complex it is when in reality a dyslexic person has a combination of these three.
Yale brain researcher Sally Shaywitz warns that something has to be done. "You need really intensive and directed intervention . . . it is not going to change by putting a Band-Aid on it." If identified at a young age dyslexic children will learn with confidence to overcome their difficulties. One of the major problems for a child with reading difficulties is his difficulty with the perception of symbols. The standard universal method of reading instruction is not effective for dyslexic children. There is no magic "bullet" to quickly fix or cure dyslexia. To learn to read, these children require a systematic, explicit, and sequential teaching method. The International Dyslexia Association, formally known as the Orton Dyslexia Society, recommends that programs for dyslexics teach different principles with specific methodology. The content goals should include: phonological-phoneme awareness, sound-symbol association, syllable instruction, morphology (affixes,) syntax (rules that govern the meaning of sentences), and semantics (meaning of words). These recommendations are applied in multisensory approaches inspired by the Orton-Gillingham method. Among the best recognized of these approaches is the Lindamood Instruction in Phonemic Segmentation, but requires a complexe training to administer. Louise Ward, from the Canadian Dyslexia Association in Ottawa, has developed an efficient simultaneous multi-sensory method which is practical and includes detailed lesson plans that outline the pedagogical objectives and expected outcomes for each step. Louise Ward's son, identified at the primary level with severe dyslexic symptoms and now in high school, is now mastering a third language. Mrs. Ward summarizes her experience with wise advices: dyslexics do not react well to time pressure and should not be rushed when we teach them; we should not underline their mistakes but we should erase them and replace them by the correct answers; they need to be discouraged from guessing, and they benefit from tactile procedures to enhance their learning.
In my research and professional experience I have found it very helpful to evaluate the child's neurological disorganization against a developmental profile. This allows me to assist parents with techniques to address inefficiencies of the central nervous system responsible for attention deficit problems and aggression. This profile of development includes sensory integration and analyses of such components as visual and auditory processing, language, manual function, mobility, and tactility. For example, these children will often have hypersensitivity to touch, sounds, or sight, which interferes with their ability to pay attention. These inefficiencies are not the cause of dyslexia but they use up energy at a lower level of organization which needs to be available to exert mental energy at a higher level of neurological functioning.
Levine (1994) gives us a profound statement to remember when we deal with these children, "All of the intervention strategies should come with a protective shield so that these youngsters do not have to endure humiliation." It has been reported that Einstein's mother encouraged him to play his violon when his teacher told her that her son was not able to learn at school. Einstein had an unusual talent for visualizing concepts. I am thankful that his mother did not let his difficulty hide his talent.
School is no haven for a dyslexic person because of the constant confrontation with demands to perfom in these precise areas of weaknesses. One dyslexic adult wrote about her chilhood: " I always felt like an allien. From the time I was five, I can recall feeling like an outsider. Constant rejection created feelings of isolation, isolation created anger, and anger created self-defeat." Many will find themself in prison or in a psychiatric center few years later. A research shows that after teaching first time offenders to read, the recidivist rate drop from 80% to 20%.
If your child is experiencing difficulty reading, writing, spelling and reading comprehension, he or she may ahve dyslexia. The best procedure is to have him/her tested for dyslexia. If this turns out positive, don't let the diagnosis of dyslexia intimidate you. The problem is fifty percent resolved with your recognition and acceptance of the difficulty.
I hope that this article has given you enough food for thought to pursue your own research at better understanding the difficulty and gift of dyslexic people around you . . . or yourself. I would be glad to further assist you.
© Suzanne Day
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