High Visual Intelligence Can Make Learning To read Difficult | Education

By DavidMorgan
Total views: 1
Word Count: 440

Most teachers of 5 and 6-year-old children will tell you how baffled they can be by 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.

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.

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.

These children will often be labelled dyslexic. But that is quite wrong.

Dyslexia suggests a 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 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 everyone thinks it is going fine.

But problems develop as the text starts to use a broader range of words. Some children will naturally switch to scanning the words phonetically.

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 children that get stuck.

You will see them guessing wildly, just using the context and the first letter of the word.

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.

Of the one in five children who reach the age of 11 unable to read properly, around 80% are in this group. It virtually destroys their chances of a good academic career and severely limits their working options.

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.

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.

About the Author

For more information on helping every child learn to read visit our site. There is a range of information on ways to fix most causes of dyslexia. There is usually a solution!

You are here Articles > Culture and Society > Education