French, Danish and even English can be hard for dyslexics students while Spanish, German and Italian may be easier.
It becomes more and more evident that dyslexia, being the same to its core all over the world, also depends on how difficult the language is to learn and to read. Between languages, there are differences in the orthographic, phonological, morphemic, and inflectional structure, but what makes them harder or easier to learn is also the “opaqueness”: how possible it is to break the words up into sounds and how well those sounds match the letters and letter combinations. For example, French, Danish, and even English can be hard for dyslexic students while Spanish, German, and Italian may be easier.
Different languages, dyslexia and spelling transparency
Danish speakers are sometimes said to swallow their consonants, making it a bit of a challenge for learners to hear which words they are using. Looking at a Danish word on paper, you won’t necessarily know how to say it out loud. The same goes for French with its je peux (I can), il peut (he can), and un peu (a little), pronounced in the same way (x and t silent) but with different meanings. Dyslexic students, as well as English students, often struggle with the irregular spelling of the language. They often feel the need for an extensive repertoire of strategies to overcome the challenge.
Studies are being done on dyslexia in different languages but there is still much left to discover. Such as how dyslexia looks in languages that are written in another direction, like Arabic, or in a language that doesn’t have an alphabet, such as Mandarin. Learning Chinese, you must match the meaning and sound to a specific character, which in fact results in a perhaps more complicated and severe disorder than that of English dyslexics.
Child development isn’t an exact science, which is why it doesn’t usually make sense to compare your child to his/her peers. Some kids take to reading, writing, and math early on, and others need more time to master these skills. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong just because your child isn’t reading yet.
Let’s look at some common language milestones. If you notice issues or your child is experiencing challenges in and out of the classroom, it might be time to consider getting some additional help.
Common Reading Milestones
Kids learn to read and write one sound at a time. Here are some typical language accomplishments during early childhood:
Kindergarten (ages 4-5): Links letters to sounds and pronounces simple words. Students may be able to write some letters.
First Grade (ages 6-7): Learns about 100 common words. By mid-first grade, many students can read simple books on their own. They also learn to write the alphabet and sound out words when they’re unable to read them on sight.
Second-Fourth Grades (ages 8-10): By this age, students understand the sounds of all letters and recognize lower versus upper case letters. They begin reading short chapter books and can discuss characters, settings, and storylines. By fourth grade, students can also do basic research projects.
By: Judy Zorfass, Tracy Gray, and PowerUp WHAT WORKS
I grabbed my purse, stepped outside into the cold night air, and watched as a flake drifted to the ground. I started walking to my car, but I had to grab hold of a mailbox to keep from slipping.
Did you picture a woman standing outside on a winter’s night watching the snow fall? Or maybe you pictured her taking a step and then slipping on the icy sidewalk as she headed to her car? If so, you were visualizing — a critical reading skill that is necessary to comprehend both informational texts and literature. Within the College and Career Readiness Standards for Reading, visualizing has a role to play in helping students identify key ideas and details and understand craft and structure.
Proficient readers scan and interpret text, forming a mental image of what is happening. Visualizing while reading adds texture to a scene by adding imagined details that the text may not spell out, and it is an indication of successful text comprehension.
By incorporating differentiated models, practicing visualization, and supporting your students as they visualize (drawing on principles for Universal Design for Learning), you can help them learn to use all of their senses to engage with and imagine the world of a text, and to bring that world to life as they read. See UDL Editions Visualize Strategy for a student-friendly explanation and rubric for visualizing.
Technology Tools for Visualizing
A range of tools (both low-tech and high-tech) can support your students’ ability to visualize. For example, you could encourage students to draw, use dramatizations, and/or create music. Students could use cameras to take photos, or they could search for photos, images, and other graphics. They could create their own videos or watch those produced by others; they could listen to music or use programs to create their own. A variety of software tools and apps are available that stimulate students’ visualizations and support their efforts to draw, diagram, and create images.
If students are reading digital text, they can access a variety of embedded supports to enhance visualization (e.g., audio explanations, photos, and images), including embedded prompts that encourage students to stop and visualize. All of these tools can help you to differentiate instruction. The video below provides ideas for using supports that are built into text to differentiate instruction.
Summer reading is as much a seasonal pastime as baseball and fireworks. Many parents put together a selection of books that are meaningful, educational, and engaging—books to nourish and stimulate young minds during these few freewheeling months.
Parents should consider assembling a summer listening list, too. When we think of literacy, we tend to think first of reading and writing. That’s because for centuries, printed text has been the dominant means of recording and sharing information. Yet for most children, listening is really the first entry point into language—the cornerstone of learning and of cognitive development. In an age when kids are regular users of personal multimedia technologies, the importance of learning to listen and listening to learn is as great as ever.
The importance of learning to listen
Listening is an engaging way to learn, a primary approach to developing or strengthening reading strategies, and, in some cases, a necessary means to access information and knowledge. Listening media, such as audiobooks and text-to-speech, can be especially helpful to children with learning disabilities, such as those with dyslexia and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), who struggle with print-based learning, and central auditory processing disorder (CAPD), who may struggle to listen.
For such students, well-chosen listening experiences can open up new vistas of learning, providing access to information and ideas previously ‘hidden’ in books and supporting the reading process itself. Such opportunities provide a powerful supplement or alternative to a reading program focused around printed text.
Research has shown that combining reading and listening through the use of audiobooks or text-to-speech programs improves the literacy skills of struggling readers, including those with learning disabilities. Reading comprehension, listening comprehension, phonological awareness and blending, and naming skills have shown to be improved with a combined reading-listening program. Listening while reading helps children learn the patterns of language, the obvious ‘code’ of letters and words on the page, as well as less obvious codes, such as tone, nuance, and implied meaning. Brain imaging technologies show that when we listen, different parts of the brain are engaged than when we read—or even when we merely hear something. Listening can provide whole levels of information that are essential to determining the value and validity of a source. Teaching children to listen to tone of voice not only helps them develop reading skills but can help in the development of their social and conversational skills, too. (For more information, see Plato Revisited: Learning Through Listening in the Digital World by David Rose& Bridget Dalton, published by RFB&D.)
People with dyslexia have difficulty reading letters and words; it’s a learning disability that has nothing to do with their intelligence. Until recently, researchers assumed the challenge could be traced to language difficulties, including problems processing printed words, and they focused their attention on the language parts of the brain.
But in the latest research published in the journal Neuron, scientists led by John Gabrieli, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that dyslexia may be due to a much broader difference in brain function. After analyzing functional MRI brain scans of people with and without dyslexia, they found that those with dyslexia were less adept at something called adaptive learning. When the brain sees something new, whether it’s a word, object, voice or experience, it expends a lot of neural energy to gather as much information about the novel stimulus as possible. But if it does this every time it hears the same voice, or encounters the same dog barking, for example, that wouldn’t be efficient. It’s therefore able to adapt and quickly triage new encounters from familiar ones.
Gabrieli found that in the brains of dyslexics, this process wasn’t occurring when they heard the same person speak different words. Nor did it occur in other tests of the brain’s plasticity, or ability to adapt. That suggests that the trouble with reading has less to do with language specific problems but rather broader issues with adaptivity. In other words, the issues with adapting to new things may compromise skills like reading.
Reading is the key to success. Anyone who reads well and who understands what has been read automatically learns the rules of correct spelling.
Precise, accurate reading is a prerequisite for writing and learning. The specific design for children of the Easy Reading Card makes reading easy and fun.
Scientific studies have shown that a majority of individuals that exhibit reading problems are affected by subjective visual perception. When reading, the visual channels have to work precisely timed together so that there is no overlap of visual information.
Science has proven the positive effects of the influences of colors while reading. Especially the color blue leads to a phasic activity of the channels, which leads to an increase in reading achievement, reading comprehension and reading speed. The color thus supports the sub-processes of the visual sensors.
Teachers from around the world are already using the Easy Reading Card when working with children.
In this groundbreaking book written for both lay and professional readers, Dr. Harold Levinson, a renowned psychiatrist and clinical researcher, provides his long-awaited follow-up work about truly understanding and successfully treating children and adults with many and diverse dyslexia-related disorders such as those found on the cover.
This fascinating, life-changing title is primarily about helping children who suffer from varied combinations and severities of previously unexplained (“inner-ear/cerebellar-determined”) symptoms resulting in difficulties with:
reading, writing, spelling, math, memory, speech, sense of direction and time
grammar, concentration/activity-level, balance and coordination
headaches, nausea, dizziness, ringing ears, and motion-sickness
frustration levels and feeling dumb, ugly, klutzy, phobic, and depressed
impulsivity, cutting class, dropping out of school, and substance abuse
bullying and being bullied as well as anger and social interactions
later becoming emotionally traumatized and scarred dysfunctional adults
Feeling Smarter and Smarter is thus also about and for the millions of frustrated and failing adults who are often overwhelmed by similar and even more complicated symptoms—as well as for their dedicated healers. Having laid the initial foundations for his many current insights in an earlier bestseller, Smart But Feeling Dumb, Dr. Levinson now presents a compelling range of enlightening new cases and data as well as a large number of highly original discoveries—such as his challenging illumination that: “All the above dyslexia-related manifestations are primarily ‘inner-ear’ or cerebellar-vestibular—not cerebrally or thinking-brain— determined and so do not impair IQ and have a favorable outcome.”
And an “ingeniously clear” and explanatory theory of symptom formation, including the triggering of phobias and anxiety, has been formulated by Dr. Levinson using a simple analogy: “I can rapidly but transiently induce the entire dyslexia syndrome in perfectly normal individuals by spinning them around until their brain signals become dizzy or scrambled. And then mandating they perform varied reading, writing, conentration-demanding…tasks.” In other words, dyslexia is recognized to be a complex multi-symptomatic syndrome encompassing all of the above mentioned symptoms—and many more. Clearly, it’s not just a pure reading disorder as now also recognized by the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) diagnostic manual, DSM-V.
This syndrome results when diverse normal thinking brain and related processors fail to descramble the “dizzy” or distorted signals received from a fine-tuning signal impairment within the inner-ear and its supercomputer—the cerebellum, man’s lower “little brain.”[1]
Most important, all the dyslexia/inner-ear based impairments and their symptoms were discovered by Dr. Levinson to respond rapidly and often dramatically when treated with simple and safe inner-ear enhancing medications and nutrients—thus enabling bright but dumb-feeling children and adults to feel smarter and smarter. In addition, by clarifying and more effectively utilizing a diverse range of educational and non-medical therapies which enhance inner-ear and/or cerebral compensation, all dyslexics can be best helped.
Using the above mentioned spinning analogy in order to better explain improvements, Levinson states: “The dyslexia-like or inner-ear/cerebellar syndrome triggered by spinning normal individuals till dizzy signals arise can be minimized or prevented by pretreatment and/or treatment immediately following symptom formation, using anti-vertigo or inner-ear-enhancing meds and non-med therapies.”
Additionally, Dr. Levinson discovered and similarly treated the relatively “minor” inner-ear/cerebellar dysfunction found associated with ASD or autism as well as traumatic brain injury and other major disorders. This enabled overall improvements, albeit the primary impairments persisted.
In summary, this book’s content is highly unique. Its many patient-derived insights are fully capable of explaining and successfully treating all the known dyslexic symptoms and their determining mechanisms as well as clarifying all data and theories characterizing the dyslexia syndrome—including the frequently overlapping attention deficits and phobias. Significantly, most all of Dr Levinson’s highly original inner-ear/cerebellar concepts—considered “decades ahead of their time”— have been independently validated via hundreds of referenced neuroimaging and other studies.
To order this “life-improving” book from Amazon or its publisher, Springer, log onto Dr. Levinson’s website: dyslexiaonline.com
Feeling Smarter and Smarter: Discovering the Inner-Ear Origins and Treatment for Dyslexia/LD, ADD/ADHD, and Phobias/Anxiety by Harold N. Levinson, MD
1 This theory was considered “ingenious” because it replaced and resolved several long held mistaken concepts—previously leading to scientific dead ends and paradoxes. For example, it was mistakenly believed:1-that dyslexia was a pure reading disorder of primary cerebral origin, despite its typical “symptomatic impurity” and the absence of cerebral neurological signs as well as the presence of only inner-ear/cerebellar signs, and 2-that all the many non-reading symptoms found among dyslexics were considered “co-morbid”—meaning they were/are believed due to separate non-dyslexic cerebral-related processing impairments—rather than due to a common inner-ear/cerebellar origin akin to the way the diabetic syndrome is caused by a common underlying insulin deficiency. So the illuminated paradoxes to be resolved were: 1-How could dyslexics have normal and even genius IQ’s and improve if they had so many separate and irreparable cerebral processing impairments? They couldn’t! Indeed, their IQ’s would approach zero, 2-How could dyslexia be due to a primary and irreversible cerebral impairment akin to Alexia in the presence of only inner-ear/cerebellar neurological signs and mechanism? It can’t! , 3-How could spinning, which destabilizes only the inner-ear/cerebellar signals, create all the dyslexia-related symptoms and how might inner-ear-enhancing meds “cure” them? This would be impossible if the dyslexia syndrome was of a primary cerebral origin affecting multiple sites of primary brain functioning.
It was about three years ago when I started doing my dyslexic blogs and pod casts with comedian Mark Simmons. For me at the time it did not matter whether people read or listened to it (other than my mum of course) because I was just doing it for me. I guess it was a way of putting pen to paper or pressing record and just getting stuff off my chest and putting them out there in a notional black hole that maybe one day someone may dip into.
However, it surprised me when people started to comment on them and started to engage feeding back their stories. It soon turned out that I was not the only one that was forced to wear coloured glasses and eye patches and being placed in classes branded as special needs. It made me feel better in myself that I was not the only one who was going through this.
So from that I decided to write to my dyslexic man crush, Jamie Oliver! Why wouldn’t he be anyone’s man crush, he is driven, successful, focused, you could take him home to your mum and you would not go hungry!!!
For many dyslexic children the one-size-fits-all approach of traditional classrooms doesn’t work and can leave them feeling frustrated, singled out and upset. This experience can affect the whole family and you may be left feeling helpless with little choice.
Homeschooling is an increasingly viable option for many families. While the idea may initially seem daunting, you can tap into your child’s strengths to aid their learning and best of all, the whole process is led by them. At home they can learn at a pace to suit them and in an environment they are comfortable with. If a new concept requires several different approaches before it’s really embedded in their mind, then you have the time and space to enable that creativity. You can also explore a wide range of technology to support their learning that isn’t permitted in mainstream schools. Homeschooling is flexible and that’s key.
Kailash’s son Innes has dyslexia and homeschools with Wolsey Hall Oxford: “Homeschooling with Wolsey Hall has been fantastic for Innes. With Wolsey designing the yearly study plan, Innes has been able to tailor his schedule of work to accommodate his dyslexia. He immerses himself in a subject for days at a time, finishes an assignment and then moves on to the next topic. This pattern of working is very effective for Innes, as his short term memory is not very good – the knowledge is placed in his long term memory, giving him a very high retention rate.”
For many dyslexic students their low self-esteem is also a major issue. The nurturing approach of homeschooling builds this up, giving them the confidence to try new things without the ridicule of their peers should they fail.
Becoming your child’s home educator can feel overwhelming at the start, but many parents use a combination of approaches. From finding free resources on the internet and borrowing library books to meeting up with local homeschooling groups who often organize activities and trips. Online forums are a great resource for answering tricky questions, and the many Facebook groups offer a network of support from families in a similar boat.
While homeschooling often means one parent losing their potential income, many families run home-based businesses alongside home educating. You could also sign up for some homeschooling courses online, where your child will have their own tutor and learning support. At Wolsey Hall Oxford, we help parents to identify the best ways they can support their child in order to unlock their potential. We pride ourselves on the learning support we offer students and their families including a mentoring service and development of personal learning plans. Your Student Progress Manager is with you every step of the way to answer your queries, and your tutor will follow the pace set by your child.
Alfie, who has dyslexia, has been homeschooling for the past three years. Last year, he achieved four IGCSEs and is now studying another four IGCSEs this year. His mum, Helen explains why it works for them: “I can honestly say that Wolsey Hall was a fantastic choice for us. We really like the structure that Wolsey provides, the assignment schedule, and the online facility. Michaela, our Student Progress Manager, has been brilliant, always there to offer support and advice. I think what has been excellent for Alfie is the structure of the learning.”
Wolsey Hall Oxford offers a wide range of courses from Age 7 Primary right through to Secondary, IGCSE, and A Level. For more information about our Cambridge-accredited school and how we support children with additional needs such as dyslexia, visit: www.wolseyhalloxford.org.uk
Homeschooling a child with dyslexia works best when you understand how the learning difference actually works. Parents who want that grounding can take an online dyslexia certification for homeschooling parents and learn the AFS method at their own pace.
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