Dyslexia: The Great Paradox

Understanding the Great Struggle

There is a paradox that lies at the very heart of a condition called dyslexia.

While dyslexia clearly is not a myth; much of what the public knows about it today is.

This confusion lies at the heart of much heartache for parents. Even worse, it has exacerbated the learning outcomes of children who were already struggling in school.

The roots of this confusion lie in the counter-intuitive nature of dyslexia itself.

It is widely thought that up to 1 in 10 people have dyslexia; making it the most common disability affecting children and young people.

However, for most of its history, researchers and educators thought that dyslexia was a vision-based problem.

They thought that dyslexic children saw words jumping about the page, and misread words because of a problem with their visual perception.

We now know, that although visual eye strain can occur in dyslexic children, it is not the primary cause of dyslexia.

Instead, dyslexia is caused by a difficulty identifying and manipulating the smallest units of speech.

We call these sounds phonemes. Children with dyslexia can hear them alright, they just struggle to manipulate them.

Take for example the word ‘bat’. If you replace the ‘b’ sound in ‘bat’ with an ‘s’ sound you get ‘sat’. Most four-year-olds can do this instantly in their heads. Dyslexic children cannot.

Thus, interventions for children with dyslexia require explicit and structured teaching of the letter sound pairings in a language. That is how children ‘crack the code’ and develop reading skills.

For Arabic learners, this letter-sound correspondence is more complex since text often does not contain the vowel sounds required to correctly read a word.

Instead, speakers predict from context the correct ‘harakat’ to use. For Arabic speakers who have difficulty recalling or detecting the sound of a ‘fatha’, ‘damma’, or ‘kasra’ – this is a difficult task.

For English speakers the challenge is different. While English always writes its vowels, English speakers need to distinguish what is the correct sound that a vowel or a group of vowels make.

Take the word ‘bread’. It is a common word, but you need to remember when reading and writing the word, that the two vowels in the middle make the short /ě/ sound, like in ‘bed’.

However, in the word ‘cream’, those same two ‘ea’ letters make the long /ē/ sound, like in ‘tree’.

Thus, ‘cracking the code’ in English can take up to 18 months of schooling as children wrestle with the 44 sounds of English and the approximately 150 ways these sounds combine to form words.

By providing all children, regardless of their ability, with early, systematic and structured reading support, we can help break the cycle of under-achievement and ultimately raise a generation even more literate than our own.