Home David Morgan on 30 Jul 2008 02:40 am
Learning To Read Is Harder For Visual Learners
In every class you will find children displaying this phenomenon.
There will often be several bright children in the class, who can do most things well and have a good attitude, but fall behind in reading.
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.
Eventually their confidence begins to crumble. They can feel the frustration and concern of the adults around them, but don’t know what to do.
Sometimes this leads to a diagnosis of dyslexia, which is quite wrong.
Dyslexia suggests there is some underlying problem that cannot be overcome.
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 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 all seems well.
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 make the switch without careful instruction. Their auditory perception just isn’t up to hearing the phonic structure of the words.
And these are the children that get stuck.
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 that is a tragedy, because we routinely see exactly these children learn to read in a matter of weeks. They have no underlying reason not to be able to read. They are just going about it the wrong way.
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.
