Reading
and Spelling Difficulties
Dyslexia
- "Poor Reading"
Dyslexia
is a common diagnosis for individuals with reading problems.
It's a Greek word meaning "poor with words,"
"poor reading," or "a disturbance of the
ability to read."
Why Dyslexia?
Parents, researchers, and educators have long wondered
why some children fail to learn to read when other children
in the same classroom with the same curriculum have learned
to read.
Is there something wrong with those that fail to read?
Do they have some sort of disorder? What factors do and
do not play a role in reading failure?
The
term is often used by those who believe that poor reading
is due to a neurological disorder. The problem, however,
is that this fails to consider normal variations of mental
skills or abilities. Remember that reading has been invented
and is not an innate, biological entity of just one part
of the brain. In fact, we actually use numerous parts
of our brain to read.
Deficiencies
in particular mental skills, most often due to normal
variation, not brain damage, are the neurological basis
for a reading problem.
Years of research on the brain have conclusively shown
that those diagnosed "dyslexic" do not have
damage to any part of the brain.
Numerous
other studies have also demonstrated a high correlation
between the ability to read and the ability to manipulate
sounds in words. Although this skill has been called many
different things (auditory processing, phonemic awareness,
phonetic awareness, phonological awareness, or phonological
processing), it can be summarized as the ability to 'unglue'
sounds in words, blend sounds to form words, and analyze
sounds within words.
In
other words, many students with reading problems struggle
to hear, analyze and separate the individual phonemes
in words.
Furthermore,
it has been shown that children don't automatically learn
to segment words into sounds simply because they are exposed
to a reading system. In summary, research consistently
shows that phonemic awareness is the major predictor of
reading ability (independent of reading scores themselves).
Other
factors that impact learning to read to lesser degrees
include speech problems, attention and visual processing.
Inheritance is also a factor. But poor reading is not
inherited. Reading cannot be coded in genes anymore than
other high skills like typing or playing a piano. What
can be inherited is the tendency to have difficultly blending,
segmenting, and analyzing sounds. But these problems can
be corrected.
To
correct these problems the student needs to develop the
ability to:
- hear
the individual sounds within words
- blend
isolated sounds into words
- analyze
and manipulate sounds within words
To
learn more about the LEARNING
MASTERY PROGRAM and dyslexia, we suggest that you...
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