Overcoming Dyslexia
In her book, Overcoming Dyslexia, Sally Shaywitz has sought to identify the physical reasons for dyslexia and identify the remedies. Here we condense her findings and examine some of the other solutions that are available.
How do I know I am dyslexic?
A typical young dyslexic reader will probably exhibit some or all of the following indicators, surrounded, let it be said, by a sea of strengths:
- A family history of dyslexia
- Early language problems in articulation but not in comprehension
- Trouble learning the alphabet
- Problems associating letters and sounds
- Trouble sounding out words
- Confusion of words that sound alike
- Difficulty perceiving the detail in words
- Absolute terror of reading aloud
- Slow reading
- Disastrous spelling
- Diminished self-esteem
- Time is critical factor in performance
It's a Physical Problem
Shaywitz looked at brain activity of dyslexic and non dyslexic readers, using MRI scans. The findings indicated that non-impaired readers tend to have markedly different brain activation patterns than dyslexic readers. As they read, good readers tend to use the rear left of the brain and to some extent the front of the brain. By contrast, Dyslexic readers show a fault in the system: under activation of neural pathways in the rear of the brain. The studies show that as they get older struggling dyslexic users demonstrate over activation of the frontal region (known as Brocca’s region). This appears to be a compensatory reaction. This coincides with what is known about the reading style of many dyslexics. One means of compensating for a reading difficulty is to subvocalise as you read, a process that utilizes a region in the front of the brain, responsible for articulating spoken words. This is a much slower process than the more automatic activity of word forming that occurs at the rear of the brain.
Shaywitz believes this pattern of under activation provides a neural signature for the phonologic difficulties characterising dyslexics.
Dyslexic readers use compensatory systems to read The non impaired reader on the left, activates neural systems that are mostly in the back of the let side of side of the brain; the dyslexic reader, on the other hand, activates systems on the right side and the front of the brain on the left.
New data suggest we are on the verge of being able to tease apart different groups of poor readers. Imaging studies now suggest there may be two major groups of poor readers. One, the classic dyslexic, is born with a glitch in his posterior reading systems. This group has higher verbal abilities and is able to compensate somewhat - improving his accuracy but remaining a slow reader. The second group appears to have developed into poor readers, probably as a result of poor teaching and a disadvantaged home environment.
One of the key questions Shaywitz addresses is whether dyslexic readers can develop fast paced word form reading systems? Shaywitz and her team embarked on a one year formal study, using fMRI to study boys and girls who were struggling to read and learn and who then received a year long experimental reading programme.
The final set of images obtained one year after the intervention had ended was startling, claimed Shaywitz. Not only were the right sided auxiliary pathways much less prominent but, more importantly, there was further development of the primary neural system on the left side of the brain. These activation patterns were comparable to these obtained from children who had always been good readers. This helps to explain why children who receive effective intervention early on develop into both accurate and fluent readers.
Images obtained one year after successful intervention.
Shaywitz has identified four steps for successful intervention:
- Early intervention
Diagnosing early is the key first step. Poor readers receive the least amount of reading practice although they need the most. A dyslexic child at eight who has not been identified is already thousands of unlearned words behind. His vocabulary has suffered and he is not learning new concepts. A child needs help before he fails.
- Intense instruction
Reading instruction for the dyslexic reader must be delivered with great intensity. This reflects the dyslexic child’s requirement for more instruction; he must make a leap as he is already behind his classmates.
Optimally, a child who is struggling to read should be in a group of three and certainly no larger than four students and he should receive this specialized reading instruction at least four and preferably five times a week.
- High quality Instruction
‘Teaching reading is rocket science’! Recent studies highlight the difference that a teacher can make in the overall success or failure of a reading programme. In one study where experienced teachers were pitted against inexperienced ones using the same instructional methods, the results were overwhelmingly one sided. Shaywitz concludes: the primary job of teaching dyslexic children to read should not be left to classroom aids, peer tutors, or teachers who do not possess the necessary knowledge or experience.
- Sufficient duration
One of the most common errors in teaching a dyslexic child to read is to withdraw prematurely when the instruction appears to be working. A child who is reading accurately but not fluently still requires intensive reading instruction. A child with a reading disability may require as much as 150 to 300 hours of intensive instruction if he is going to close the gap between himself and his reading peers.
What Happens in the Absence of Intervention?
The young dyslexic adolescent is probably reading less than his peers- he is certainly expending a great deal more energy on the text as he focuses on decoding word after word. He will use his higher powers to fill in word gaps. Curiously, he will find some of the little words more difficult than the big ones – is that ‘in’ or ‘on’? If young readers can’t penetrate the words easily, comprehension becomes extremely difficult. By adolescence, good readers are reading thousands of words instantly. They are devoting their energy to thinking about what they read. By contrast, people who have not mastered the phonetic code must devote their energy to decoding and often they rely on just memory. This memory has to serve them not just for reading words, but also for writing the spellings. It can drive some people to adopt the line of least resistance and not read and not learn new subjects. Relying on just hard copy books, highly motivated, dyslexic adolescents and young adults have to work incredibly hard to persevere with the volume of material dealt with routinely by good readers.
If reading and writing are slow and laborious tasks, help is at hand in the form of electronic intervention. Tools such as Dolphin EasyTutor use a speech synthesiser to read back highlighted text and include helpful word predictors and homophone databases to help with writing assignments. If you wish to dictate your work, Dolphin Tutor, with an add-on from Dragon Dictate, can accommodate this also. For larger blocks of material, such as course notes or handouts products such as Dolphin EasyProducer can be used to convert the content into a digital talking book that can be read back using either DAISY play back software such as Dolphin EasyReader (playback software for a PC or laptop) or a mainstream MP 3 player. The multi-sensory output from the digital talking book producer has been designed to help dyslexic users, by synchronizing the highlighted text to the audio playback. The user can also navigate the material by paragraph, page or chapter and search on specific words within the content.
Conclusion
This article has not dealt with many of the wonderful talents and abilities bestowed on people who also happen to have dyslexia. We haven’t questioned whether Muhammad Ali would have been the greatest boxer ever to live or Sir Steve Redgrave the greatest rower, or if Winston Churchill would have been as uncompromising, or Richard Branson as entrepreneurial if they didn’t have dyslexia. Instead, we have simply looked at the problems it brings and looked at how these might be overcome. There is no doubt it makes life tougher, especially for people who aren’t diagnosed early. For people who enjoy a timely and effective intervention, life is smoother. For those for whom intervention is too late, hope is not lost. Slow reading does not have to lead to a less interesting role in life. Electronic tools can help dyslexic readers gain speedy access to content ensuring ongoing learning at the same pace as unaffected readers.