How High Visual Intelligence Can Cause Apparent Dyslexia

In every class you will find children displaying this phenomenon.

There are many children who struggle with reading, while being evidently bright and hard working.

Initially everything can seem OK. But, while other children's reading progresses steadily, these children will hit a plateau at around 6. As the text they are expected to read gets more complicated, they will get more and more confused, often guessing wildly.

And then their confidence collapses under the pressure. They can feel everyone's concern and don't know what to do to fix the problem.

These children will often be labelled dyslexic. But that is quite wrong.

Dyslexia suggests a fundamental problem with reading, despite normal intelligence.

But these children have no real reason not to be able to read. They are just approaching it in the wrong way.

Let me explain the process.

A very visual child will learn most of the alphabet quite easily. Then they are usually shown some simple high frequency words, which they can sight-memorise. Their first early reader books are usually made up of a very simple vocabulary of these common words and they can apparently read them, using this sight-memorisation and a bit of intelligent guessing.

So everyone thinks it is going fine.

But this approach implodes on them as the text gets more complicated. Some children will be able to switch to decoding words phonetically, because they also have a strong natural auditory ability. They can see how the sounds within the speech relate to the text.

Others cannot naturally distinguish the sounds within the words (phonemes) and so cannot relate them to the letter patterns that represent them in text (graphemes). At least not without quite a bit of careful instruction.

And these are the children that get stuck.

They will use the context to guess wildly, taking the first letter of the word as a guide.

They are baffled by their predicament and have no idea why it has gone wrong. They can feel people's frustration, but have actually been working hard.

One in five children reach the age of 11 unable to read properly and these children make up a large proportion of that group. It is a disaster for their academic career and working life.

And that is a tragedy for each of them because they are just trying to read the wrong way. We routinely see them successfully crack it in just a matter of weeks.

I hate children being labelled dyslexic because it reduces the sense of urgency to actually finding the solution. Acceptance creeps in, consigning the child to a much harder track through life.

Article Source: http://www.search4allinfo.com

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