How High Visual Intelligence Can Cause Apparent Dyslexia
July 16, 2008 Category: Home School 1 Comment »
Most teachers of 5 and 6-year-old children will tell you how baffled they can be by this phenomenon.
There will be bright children in the class, who work hard but struggle to read.
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.
Sometimes this leads to a diagnosis of dyslexia, which is quite wrong.
Dyslexia is a broad term that covers any fundamental problem with reading despite normal intelligence.
But these children are usually just trying to read the wrong way. There is no reason why they should not be able to read.
Let me explain what’s happening.
A very visual child will find the alphabet easy to memorise. Then the first words they are show they will memorise as well. Everyone praises their progress and as far as they know, they are reading. The early reader books feed into this by using a very limited vocabulary that repeats a lot.
So all seems well.
But this technique gets more and more difficult as the text gets more complex. Children with a good natural ear for the phonic structure in words will now switch to decoding the words instead.
Others cannot make the switch without careful instruction. Their auditory perception just isn’t up to hearing the phonic structure of the words.
And these children are heading for failure
They become more and more addicted to wild guessing, using the context and the first letter of the word as cues.
They find themselves down a cul-de-sac and don’t know the way out. At the same time they can feel how worried their teacher and parents are, but can’t do any more than they already are.
Without expert guidance, these children will become part of the 20% who still cannot read properly by the age of 11. Their academic career and earning potential for the rest of their lives hangs in the balance at this moment.
And what a tragedy. We routinely watch them become confident readers in just a few weeks. They only need to be guided back onto the right path.
The label dyslexic carries a great risk that everyone will just relax into acceptance of the situation as inevitable. That leaves the child to deal with a much harder path through life.
April 7th, 2010 at 5:08 am
Every time I come to mysuccessfulchild.com there is another interesting article up to read. A friend of mine was talking to me about this topic several weeks ago. I think I’ll send my friend the url here and see what they say.