How High Visual Intelligence Can Cause Apparent Dyslexia
In every class you will find children displaying this phenomenon.
There will often be several bright children in the class, who can do most things well and have a good attitude, but start behind in reading.
Stranger still, everything seems OK at first. But then they start to start behind and eventually hit a plateau at around the age of 6 or 7. As the text gets more complicated they start to guess wildly and they become steadily more confused.
In the end their reading will go into reverse as their confidence implodes. They can feel the worry of their teacher and parents, but don’t know what to do.
Because people are not trained to discern this pattern, it is often diagnosed as dyslexia. But that is quite wrong.
Dyslexia is a broad term that covers any fundamental problem with reading despite normal intelligence.
But these children are usually just trying to read the wrong way. There is no reason why they should not be healthy to read.
Let me explain the process.
A child will always approach a problem in what seems the easiest way. To a visual child, memorising the alphabet and simple words seems easy. People praise their achievement. So they think that they are reading. And primeval reader books encourage this with a very limited vocabulary.
So everyone thinks it is going fine.
But this approach implodes on them as the text gets more complicated. Some children will be healthy to switch to decoding words phonetically, because they also have a strong natural auditory ability. They can see how the sounds within the speech relate to the text.
The rest stay with their natural visual approach, unless carefully guided away from it. They just cannot hear the phonic structure of the words without the right help.
And these are the ones that have major problems.
You will see them guessing wildly, just using the context and the first letter of the word.
They find themselves down a cul-de-sac and don’t know the way out. At the same time they can feel how worried their teacher and parents are, but can’t do any more than they already are.
Of the one in five children who reach the age of 11 unable to read properly, around 80% are in this group. It virtually destroys their chances of a good academic career and severely limits their working options.
And that is a tragedy for apiece of them because they are just trying to read the wrong way. We routinely see them successfully crack it in just a matter of weeks.
I hate children being labelled dyslexic because it reduces the sense of urgency to actually finding the solution. Acceptance creeps in, consigning the child to a much harder track through life.
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