Learning To Read Is Harder For Visual Learners
It is something that every teacher will have seen.
There are many children who struggle with reading, while being evidently bright and hard working.
Stranger still, everything seems OK at first. But then they start to fall behind and eventually hit a plateau at around the age of 6 or 7. As the text gets more complicated they start to guess wildly and they become steadily more confused.
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.
Because people are not trained to recognise this pattern, it is often diagnosed as dyslexia. 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.
Here is what’s really happening.
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 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.
They become more and more addicted to wild guessing, using the context and the first letter of the word as cues.
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.
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.
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