Learning To Read Is Harder For Visual Learners
July 16, 2008 Category: Home School No Comments »
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.
In the end their reading will go into reverse as their confidence implodes. They can feel the worry of their teacher and parents, but don’t know what to do.
These children will often be labelled dyslexic. But that is quite wrong.
Dyslexia suggests there is some underlying problem that cannot be overcome.
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 child will always approach a problem in what seems the easiest way. To a visual child, memorising the alphabet and simple words seems easy. People praise their achievement. So they think that they are reading. And early reader books encourage this with a very limited vocabulary.
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 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 ones that have major problems.
You will see them guessing wildly, just using the context and the first letter of the word.
They are frustrated and puzzled by their situation and don’t know the way out of it. They can sense the frustration of their teacher and parents, but have actually been doing their best.
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 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.