Dyslexia

What is dyslexia?

The British Psychological Society defines dyslexia as:

‘… evident when accurate and fluent word reading and/or spelling develops incompletely or with great difficulty.’

This indicates that, although people with dyslexia can learn to read and spell, they will do so with difficulty.

What is it like to have dyslexia?

One of the most common activities for a class of children is to be asked to read a task from a white board, a class worksheet or a textbook, and then to write something in an exercise book. Every day in the classroom, in lesson after lesson, children with dyslexia see their friends completing such tasks with apparent ease, yet they find such tasks very difficult.

It is not surprising that many of them, in addition to having difficulty with reading and spelling, also lose their sense of self-esteem and may even come to believe that they must be stupid.

The following account by Emily’s mother illustrates the problem.

Case study: Emily

Emily was an easy baby. There was no difficulty with feeding and she was soon sleeping all through the night, not like her elder brother who seemed to want feeding every two hours, night and day.

Emily did all the right things at the right time, sitting up, crawling and walking but, although she had no difficulty understanding what was said to her, she sometimes seemed to have difficulty getting her words out clearly. She’d say things like ‘par-cark’ for ‘car-park’ or ‘poppotomus’ for long words like ‘hippopotamus’. It became a family joke and her older brother and sister teased her about it.

When she started infant school, all the teachers liked her. They said that in class she was ‘brighter’ than most of the other kids at answering questions but she just couldn’t seem to learn things that involved what the school called ‘rote’ learning. That’s things like learning to say the alphabet, the days of the week and the months of the year, things that were really just long series of sounds.

The real problems began when she had to learn the sounds linked with letters, things like the letter ‘b’ represents the sound /buh/ and the ‘c’ a /cuh/ sound. We spent hours at home trying to help her, but she couldn’t seem to learn.

She was brilliant at telling a story about something that had happened at school among her friends and was better at jigsaws and Lego than her older brother, but she couldn’t get the hang of even simple things to do with reading and writing.

As she moved up to juniors, she went through periods of being very unhappy because her friends were all reading and writing things at a much higher level than her. As the years went by the gap just got bigger and bigger and she slipped further and further behind.

Things like homework became very difficult. She couldn’t copy the instructions from the white-board quick enough so I often had to ring her friends’ parents to find out what she was supposed to do. She started to say there was no homework, which wasn’t true, but she found it so difficult, we had tears night after night.

There were some things she was really good at. One Christmas, a local toy manufacturer sponsored a competition. The prize was a computer for the school that produced the best homemade toy.

Emily made a joke Paddington Bear look-a-like; she dressed him like a ‘Hell’s Angel’. Instead of a navy cloth duffle coat and red hat, he had long hair in a pony tail, a fierce looking eye patch, black T-shirt and torn jeans. Just looking at it made you smile. Emily was the winner in her age range; it was even put on show in one of the local toy shops.

When she was about ten, I think it was in Year 5, the junior school asked me if I would let an educational psychologist see her for an assessment. I wasn’t happy about it because I thought ‘psychologist’, that sounds serious, but I agreed because by that time I was so worried.

After the assessment, the psychologist wrote a report that said Emily’s intelligence was above average but she had a specific difficulty with reading and writing. She said the correct term was ‘specific learning

‘There were some things she was really good at. One Christmas she made a “Hell’s Angel” teddy bear that won first prize in a competition.’

difficulties (dyslexia)’ and explained that it meant exactly what it said: Emily was bright enough to learn almost everything as well as everybody else, she just had a specific difficulty with reading and writing.

The report also said there were things that could be done about it and, wow, what a relief that was, for me and for Emily.

The school and the psychologist arranged for a specialist dyslexia teacher to see Emily for 30 minutes one-to-one teaching on a Tuesday and a Thursday. The specialist gave advice to Emily’s class teachers on how to help her cope better in the classroom and with homework.

Over the next few months, Emily’s reading and writing began to improve, her confidence came back and she stopped saying she was ‘thick’.

She had help right through junior and secondary school, always just for short periods during the week. The secondary school arranged for her to drop foreign languages, she just couldn’t get the hang of writing in French, and that freed her up for the extra lessons. The rest of the time she’d attended all the normal classes with her friends.

Instead of reading and writing, she now has coaching in how to study and how to write exam questions. She’s just done her mocks for GCSEs; her predicted grades are really good: ‘As’ in design technology and art, ‘Bs’ in maths, science and geography and ‘Cs’ in English, history and religious studies.

She wants to go on to university and study fashion design. It’s back to Paddington Bear!

What is, and what is not, dyslexia?

Although, historically, dyslexia has been thought of as difficulty with reading, it usually affects all aspects of literacy: reading, spelling and writing.

The problems of someone with dyslexia can sometimes be best illustrated by examining samples of his writing skills. Let’s look at a piece of free writing done by a girl called Rebecca, when she was asked to write what she had done that morning.

Rebecca

Rebecca is 11 years old and very bright. Her IQ score places her in the top 10 per cent for her age range. For the last six years, skilled teachers have endeavoured to teach her the basics of reading and writing. For a child of her IQ, Rebecca is clearly making far more spelling and handwriting errors than other children of her age and ability.

Let’s look at two particular errors Rebecca has made errors that are typical of pupils with dyslexia. In the first line of her handwriting, when she started to write the word ‘brushed’, she used an upper case B instead of a lower case b. On the third line, she again incorrectly used an upper case B rather than a lower case b.

After six years of teaching, and despite being very bright, Rebecca is still having difficulty knowing when and where to use a capital letter correctly and, as you see later, she has used different spellings for the same word even within the space of three lines.

Rebecca’s errors are clearly not the errors that you would expect from a pupil of her age and high ability. They are ‘age-inappropriate’ errors and the presence of such errors is one of the essential elements of a diagnosis of dyslexia.

Michael

Let’s now look at a second case study – a piece of Michael’s writing and he was asked to write about his family.

Two errors are ringed in red. On the first line, Michael has written ‘yoostu’ where he meant ‘used to’. Not only has he misspelt both words, but there is also no space between them. On the bottom line, Michael has written ‘cict’ for the word kicked.

Now, from these errors it might be easy to assume that Michael is dyslexic, but he is most definitely not! Michael is only six years old and is not dyslexic because he is making ‘age-appropriate’ errors – ones that are usual for a child of his age.

For example, most teachers would argue that the incorrect spelling ‘cict’ represents a ‘virtuous error’ in the sense that Michael clearly recognises every sound in the word and knows a letter that can justly represent that sound.

At Michael’s age, this is not incorrect, but shows that his reading and writing are developing normally.

Age-inappropriate errors

In summary, children with dyslexia make age-inappropriate errors in reading and spelling, whereas children who don’t have dyslexia may make similar errors but they are generally at a younger age and so their errors are considered to be just part of normal literacy development and therefore age appropriate.

The probable causes of dyslexia

There has been a wide variety of suggestions and hypotheses as to the causes of dyslexia but recent research suggests that a child with dyslexia has difficulties in one or other (or even both) of the following two areas:

1 Working memory or, to use its older term, short-term memory

2 Phonological awareness.

Working memory difficulties

Research indicates that pupils with dyslexia often also experience difficulties with a particular aspect of memory called working memory. This should not be confused with long-term memory, which is what we usually mean when we talk about ‘memory’.

Long-term memory is concerned with things that you remember for a long time, items that seem so ‘wired into’ your brain that they are always available and easy to access. This might include things such as recalling what you did yesterday, recalling the plot of a film you saw last week, remembering the capital of Italy, the name of the town you were born in and so on.

‘Working memory’ usually refers to your ability to recall a series of unconnected items over a much shorter period of time.

What’s it like to have working memory difficulty?

The trouble that some people have in remembering a new telephone number is a good example of how difficulties in working memory affect daily life. Few people would have difficulty remembering a telephone number if the numbers had some obvious association, say 1 2 3 4 5 6, but most numbers (or at least, most telephone numbers) are not linked, and new ones are not easy to remember, even over as short a period as a couple of seconds.

Suppose somebody suggests you telephone me and gives you my number, which is 573192, but you don’t have a pencil. To remember the numbers in sequence, you will probably find yourself repeating them over and over in your head (or even aloud) as you walk to the phone.

It is by ‘rehearsing’ this new information in working memory that you are able to remember the sequence of these six unfamiliar and unconnected numbers. If you stop repeating the numbers, even for a few seconds, not only would you forget them, but they would be gone forever – and you would need to be given the numbers again.

What affects working memory?

At least two things are important in understanding working memory:

1 The need for repetition

2 How many elements (in this case, numbers) can be held in working memory.

Clearly, everybody has a limit as to the span or number of items that will fit into their working memory: most adults can repeat six or seven unconnected numbers with little difficulty but have trouble with ten numbers. You might start repeating the numbers but, by the time you reached the ninth and tenth numbers, you will probably have forgotten the first numbers, and will not be able to restart the repetition of the series, and so it will be forgotten.

Many people are surprised to learn that working memory has little to do with what we commonly think of as ‘intelligence’: some people who are thought to be highly intelligent may have a working memory span of only four or five items, whereas others who might score lower in standard intelligence tests may have a working memory span of eight or nine items.

How does working memory affect the ability to learn?

To get into long-term memory, to become permanently and instantly available, strings of unconnected items have to be repeated frequently over a period of time. Some things, like our own or friends’ telephone numbers, are used so often and repeated so frequently that they are eventually transferred from temporary storage in working memory and appear to become ‘wired’ into long-term memory, so we have no difficulty recalling them whenever we want.

Many things that we learn are a series of unconnected elements – such as the days of the week, the months of the year, multiplication tables. To illustrate the importance of working memory in such tasks, let’s look at how children learn the alphabet, a series of 26 unconnected letters.

A young child with a working memory, which holds seven items, will progressively learn the alphabet by repeating chunks of seven letters. Another child of the same intelligence, but with a working memory that can hold only four items, will learn the alphabet at a much slower pace – in chunks of four letters.

The same happens when learning many of the essential skills necessary for reading, such as the sound that each letter represents or spellings that don’t follow the rules. As people with dyslexia often have a limited working memory span, learning to read is very difficult.

A child with a relatively poor working memory will, however, not be unable to learn to read. Its simply that learning to read will take him longer and he will inevitably be behind his peer group.

Phonological awareness

Research indicates that many children who have difficulty in acquiring literacy have difficulty with what is known as phonological awareness or the ability to attend to the individual components of sound in speech.

Two important aspects of phonological awareness are:

1 The ability to break up words into their separate sounds: for example, being able to break the word ‘cat’ into the three sounds, /cuh/ah/tuh/.

2 The ability to blend sounds to make words: knowing that the three sounds /cuh/ah/tuh/ can be blended together to make the word ‘cat’.

Many of these skills are easy for people who are not dyslexic but very difficult for people with dyslexia.

Phonological difficulties

Spoken language can be thought to have at least two levels. First, individual words represent individual concepts: for example, the words ‘cat’, ‘mat’ and ‘sat’ each represent identifiable concepts in the real world. Second, these items can be related to form a relational concept: for example, ‘the cat sat on the mat’.

All children are, as it were, pre-programmed to learn such concepts almost automatically. All human cultures have spoken language and evolution has made sure that children’s brains are specially ‘wired’ to deal with spoken language.

Written language is different. It has not been around long enough for our brains to be ‘wired’ to learn to read. How is it different?

Let’s analyse a simple question, first as it is spoken and then as it is written. The sentence is:

Would you go?

Say it aloud, two or three times very quickly, and listen to the sounds. Now imagine yourself to be a pre-reading five year old and ask yourself two questions about the way you spoke the sentence:

1 How many words were in the question?

2 What was the last sound of the first word?

If you said these words in the same way that most people speak English, then a five year old listening to you could believe there were only two words, ‘wouldyou’ and ‘go’ because, as you said the sentence, you will have merged the first two words in a way that leaves no discernible gap between them.

There is no noticeable space between many of the words in spoken English and, to be able to speak English, you don’t need to know much about the spaces between words. However, to read or write English, it is essential to have good knowledge of the spaces between words.

Recognising the individual sounds in speech, knowing that there are spaces between words and knowing where they occur are important aspects of phonological awareness.

Let’s turn to the second question. Say the sentence aloud very quickly and then ask yourself: ’What is the last sound of the first word?’ You will actually know that the last sound in the first word, ‘would’ is a /duh/ (that is, the sound represented by the letter d) because you have seen it in the printed form, and are able to read it.

However, when speaking the sentence, using the normal English dialect, as demonstrated above, you probably merged the end of the word ‘would’ into the beginning of the word ‘you’ so that they sounded like one word ‘wouldyou’.

So, the sound you made to end the first word (to the ears of the five year old) is most likely to have been /ju/, rather than a /duh/. Say it again aloud, and listen carefully: /wudju/.

Phonological awareness is the ability not only to recognise but also to separate the sounds within words of the English language – at a simple level, knowing that the word ‘cat’ can be broken down to make three sounds /cuh/ah/tuh/ and vice versa.

To speak a language, you do not have to have phonological awareness at the level of either recognising spaces between words or hearing the individual sounds within words, but it is important to have phonological awareness to read, spell and write English.

Most children develop phonological awareness easily, whereas children with dyslexia often have difficulty.

KEY POINTS

n  People with dyslexia have difficulty learning to read, spell and write with fluency

n  There are thought to be two main factors in specific learning difficulty (dyslexia): difficulties related to working memory and difficulties related to phonological awareness

n  A child who has difficulty with literacy skills is likely to have problems in either or both of these areas

n  Neither of these factors is related to intelligence

n  Almost all people with dyslexia eventually learn to read and write, although such tasks may remain hard

n  Schoolchildren with dyslexia often lose self-esteem and come to believe that they are not as clever as others.