Understand Dyslexia to Make Helping a Child Learn to Read Easy

Very few people really understand dyslexia. There is so much conflicting information and advice that it can be very hard to know what to do. That is a great pity because learning to read well is important for all of us.

This situation is caused by the complexity of underlying causes and patterns of dyslexia. When researching dyslexia you will often come across long lists of indicators of dyslexia, many of which seem to conflict. Most of us have at least one indicator of being dyslexic!

Our focus is to look at the underlying neural processes involved in reading. Once you understand those, it becomes far easier to understand the difficulties you see a dyslexic having. The puzzle of dyslexia begins to fall into place.

Let me give you an example. A very common pattern in dyslexia is lots of guessing of words and atrocious spelling. This type of dyslexic will often read a long word more easily than a short one. They can sometimes seem to be able to read rather fast, always rushing along with lots of little omissions and errors. Their comprehension of the text tends to be low.

This can all seem quite strange, until you know why it is happening. A child with a strong visual memory will often learn to sight-memorise words as the easiest way of reading simple books with a repetitive vocabulary. Then they guess the words that they don’t recognise from the context.

This is why the long words sometimes seem easier than short ones to this type of dyslexic; there is almost always more contextual clues to a long word. Spelling is hard for them because they are trying to recreate a picture of a word, not reconstruct it. They often do well in spelling tests however, because they have memorised the ten words overnight. A few days later those same words have gone again.