-"My understanding of dyslexia has always been that something in the shapes of letters is what causes confusion?"
"No. I think research has shown clearly that isn't the case..
Your visual learning is fine. It's not about vision, it's about the sounds that you should already have in place in your brain in order to do that visual learning. There's nothing wrong with their hearing, but what we're finding is that there's particular aspects of sounds that their brain is just not very efficient with."
My cousin (front row center of my profile picture) is thought to be dyslexic. I learned everything I could when I found out as he is intelligent but not getting on at school.
I highly recommend UK readers to view
last night's Horizon episode on the iPlayer. Aside the neuropsychological/scientific approach to education and development, it went in some depth into dyslexia and dyscalculia.
Here's a transcript from the program(me):
A huge reading experiment is underway which requires children to do something rather weird.
11-year-old Kazia is having her brain monitored, not as she reads, but as she listens to beeps.
Prof.
Usha Goswami explains that the experiment involves the child listening to very simple beeps. Every one in six or so beeps has a subtle variation in its abruptness relative to the other beeps. We would not be able to recognise the difference, were it not for the text that corresponds on the screen.
-"Why is the acquisition of a reading brain not mainly about seeing words and letters on a page? How come it's not mainly about sound?"
"Because the words and letters on the page are speech written down. It's a simpler answer"
"So it's not individual differences in visual learning that determine how well or how poorly a child learns to read. It's individual differences in the language system and it's to do with the sound structure of words."
Narration:
So to be able to read, you first have to recognise the individual sounds that make up our language. These are then put together to make words.
"A word can start very abruptly, like with a "Puh" sound or a "Buh" sound. Or it can start more gradually with a "Wuh" sound or a "Luh" sound, and those rates have change in the amount of energy hitting the ear. It's very important that your brain is picking up those differences in the rate of change, for you to hear "puh" versus "wuh," for example.
Narration:
Although Kazia is not even conscious of it, her brain scan shows that she is able to recognise these subtle differences, and so has entered the world of reading. Not all children will.
-"My understanding of dyslexia has always been that something in the shapes of letters is what causes confusion?"
"No. I think research has shown clearly that isn't the case..
Your visual learning is fine. It's not about vision, it's about the sounds that you should already have in place in your brain in order to do that visual learning. There's nothing wrong with their hearing, but what we're finding is that there's particular aspects of sounds that their brain is just not very efficient with."
-"Would you say there are things that you've found out here that should change the way that our children are taught to read?"
"Well I would say it impacts certain things that early-years teachers have always done, but it shows why they are important...
Playing a musical instrument in time with singing... Anything that involves rhythmic co-ordination."
Narration:
Because nursery rhymes and songs repeat and exaggerate the sound of language, they seem to help children develop this skill.
"[music, rhyme etc, things that are fun] will help their language system develop. That's the sort of counter-intuitive bit of this research. And if you've got that strong sound structure system in your brain, then you'll be able to learn to read much better."