At the most fundamental level dyslexia has been defined as a difficulty with reading despite adequate intelligence and tuition. It is now more normally taken to be a difficulty with literacy skills - reading, spelling and writing – in comparison with underlying intellectual ability. Diagnosis will also take into account visual and auditory sequencing ability, speed of processing and working memory. Literacy difficulties are common across a wide spectrum of developmental learning disorders, and the term ‘dyslexia’ is often applied to all of them. These notes are confined to a narrow definition.
Most children have difficulty with paired associate learning, which is the process by which you learn verbal labels for objects and associate a word in your native language with its counterpart in a foreign language. This will cause children to be a little slow to learn to speak, have difficulties with word finding and fail dismally in their attempts to learn foreign languages. The first signs of dyslexia may be that a child is a little late with their speech and tends to mis-label words, or refer to them as ‘thingy’ or ‘whatsit’. They may be physically very able, however, and a whiz with the Lego. Problems with balance are very common, which can come as quite a surprise with children who are very sporty. Sequencing difficulties show early as a problem with sorting out yesterday, today and tomorrow or learning the order of the days of the week. There is usually also a problem with learning to tell the time.
Starting school can be quite traumatic for dyslexic children, because they are not ready to learn to read and write, and immature balance ability can make it very hard for them to sit still. As time goes by it is found that they struggle to orientate their letters correctly and cannot recall the shape of words for reading using a ‘look and say’ approach. Some of them will cope better with multisensory phonic instruction, but if they have poor auditory short-term memory skills they will not be able to put the sounds together effectively to sound out a word, and this route to reading will be blocked also. Phonological processing problems are central to dyslexia, so they may lack an awareness of rhyme and alliteration and an ability to ‘see’ the building blocks from which language is constructed and manipulate the component parts. Often children fail in literacy skills despite an enormous amount of input from parents and teachers and a great effort on their part. This can have a devastating effect on their self-esteem.
Dyslexic children often find maths a lot easier than English, but they will tend to be held back by their short-term memory problems and inability to learn tables, which require the same sort of visualisation ability as the ‘look and say’ approach in reading. Some children, particularly the brighter ones and the girls, will get through the early part of their education without too many problems, but the stresses show when the material becomes more complex and their coping strategies are overwhelmed.
Many dyslexics are visual thinkers with strong right-brain processing, excellent spatial ability, very creative, very good at seeing the whole picture and processing intuitively. They often reject left-brained, sequential, logical processing and hate to break things up into bits, which is the favoured approach in school. They can be particularly good in careers involving art, architecture, engineering and practical skills and may have strong entrepreneurial ability.
Suggested action
Many dyslexic children suffer from poor self-esteem because they see themselves as failures. Often they do not value the things that they are good at and there is too much focus on the things they find hard. It is important to have a good understanding of their strengths and weaknesses and to make sure that they have as much support as possible at home and at school. The most important thing is to make sure that they are given experiences which will enable them to develop their own unique abilities.
Case Histories
PHILLIP
Phillip had a typically dyslexic profile. This is his mother's account.
“Phillip was not an easy baby. He was induced at 38 weeks because of concerns about an incompatibility between our blood groups. There were also concerns about one of his kidneys which meant he was on antibiotics for the first year of his life and had a number of very invasive scans. He was jaundiced and developed colic which made him and me very miserable.
He did however, settle down after four months or so and seemed to develop pretty normally. He crawled, walked and babbled away. When he was approaching his two year development check I became concerned that he was not yet talking. Phillip’s older sister had started speaking very early and was very articulate by the age of two. Friends I shared this concern with explained it away by the fact his was a boy and having an older sister to speak for him meant he didn’t have to bother. Nevertheless, when he was three we had his hearing tested and when that was found to be normal he was referred to a speech and language therapist. Her assessment was that his speech was about six months behind but that it was now developing rapidly and in time would catch up.
His speech did improve but it was still immature when he started nursery aged three. Shortly after, his younger sister was born and my time was taken up with looking after a new baby. However, we noticed that Phillip had become very sensitive to loud noises. He would cover his ears when planes went over and could not cope with the fireworks on bonfire night. His teacher called me in to school to say that he had been putting his hands over his ears when he went into lunch although she went on to say that she didn’t blame him as it was terribly noisy.
Phillip really struggled at school. He found it exhausting just getting through the day. At the end of the reception year he had made no progress but the teacher felt that this was understandable given his end of August birthday. How I wished he had not been induced.
When he started in year 2 the class teacher asked me whether there was any dyslexia in the family. She was puzzled by his lack of progress and asked the special needs teacher to informally assess him. Her view was that he could well be dyslexic and suggested that we had him formally assessed. He saw an educational psychologist shortly after his seventh birthday. Her assessment was that he had a profile that was typically dyslexic in nature. That was enough for the school. They began schedule time with the special needs teacher and at the next parents’ evening we were told he was progressing very well. Our suspicion was that the dyslexic label meant they could safely lower their expectations!
About this time, I heard about the work Jane Lloyd was doing. I had started attending an art class and found that three out of the ten women attending had dyslexic children and were seeing enormous improvements following sessions with Jane. I joined the long waiting list and got an appointment in December 2001.
I came out of the first appointment with my head spinning! Over the course of the morning Jane had taken through a number of tests to find out why Phillip had been having problems. More importantly it helped me to understand Phillip for the first time. Phillip’s hearing had been tested many times but no one had ever pointed out that it was exceptionally acute. No wonder he put his hands over his ears and I could now understand why he appeared not to hear. He was tuning out to save his sanity. Jane could see a pattern in his behaviour and made connections between his dislike of strong smells, chewing clothes, clumsiness, fidgeting and near hysteria when it came to cutting toenails! I had been concerned that I was making a fuss about nothing but Jane helped me to see the enormous hurdles Phillip was overcoming to achieve almost average results at school with an above average brain.
Four years on and the therapy provided by Jane has changed almost beyond recognition. Now children are attached to a computer that does it all. Four years on Phillip has changed enormously as well. His improvement was slow at first. A friend remarked that she had been able to keep music on in the house when Phillip came around. In fact he asked for it to be louder. When he changed school in year four he started with an individual learning plan but after six months it was felt he no longer required one. He had caught up with the rest of the class. Over the last nine months this improvement has gathered pace. He was successful in gaining a place at a selective secondary school and won the cup for the pupil showing the most improvement over the year.
More importantly he has discovered a passion and aptitude for cricket. Over the years Phillip has tried and given up on a number of sports. He found all sports very difficult which caused him real problems at school – particularly as a boy. He couldn’t play with “the football lot”. At the start of the summer he asked if he could join a local cricket club with a number of other boys from school. We agreed and expected it to be another two week wonder. This time, however, he has stuck at it and his coach recently said he was very agile and showed real promise! This is the boy who famously picked up the rugby ball and ran the wrong way up the pitch to score a try for the other team.
I believe that Phillip has not yet started to realise his potential academically and I am confident that he will now go from strength to strength. This therapy is, however, about far more than academic results. It is very difficult to explain to a parent who has a child who communicates normally how upsetting it is to have a little boy who doesn’t speak. I didn’t know what was going on in Phillip’s head for years. He said nothing and was cut off from us. His hypersensitivity also meant he wasn’t keen on cuddles. I had a very poor relationship with him. For me the biggest change is that I now know how he feels – for better and for worse.