Feature
Lost for words
by Sally Blundell
While other countries argue over how best to meet the learning needs of children with dyslexia, our Ministry of Education refuses to acknowledge the problem.
The sentence you’re reading suddenly begm to fall abrt. The word that you think you should know – something like “this” – doesn’t look like anything you’ve seen before. And the letters you are trying to write just won’t stay on the thin blue line.
For an eight-year-old boy in a primary-school classroom such small mysteries may take some figuring out. If most of his classmates are already on to the next page, he’ll begin to think he’s not as clever as everyone else. And if the teachers tell him to stop dreaming and get a move on – for the third time that day – he’ll feel angry. With himself, with the teacher, with the whole stupid school.
“Dyslexia presents in so many ways, but the overall experience is very predictable,” says Guy Pope-Mayell, father of two children with dyslexia and trustee of the Cookie Munchers Charitable Trust, which supports children through the Davis Dyslexia Correction programme.
“Children start to recognise the negative associations with dyslexia at about five. By seven or eight, it’s created a number of difficulties for them and their parents. They begin to doubt themselves, they start to internalise a belief that they are stupid and inadequate. And that leads to a reasonably predictable set of behaviours. If you’re feeling stupid or ‘less than’, you’re not in a good place for learning to occur.”
Statistics vary on how many people have a dyslexic mind. On a spectrum from severe to subtle dyslexia, there seems to be agreement that somewhere between four and 10 percent of the population has a way of perceiving and processing information that differs from the rest of the population (see panel opposite). With a national school roll of 748,000, we’re talking about between 29,900 and 74,800 pupils.
The Ministry of Education, however, refuses to acknowledge dyslexia. Assessment is not part of standard teacher training and there is no specific support or funding for the particular needs of dyslexic children. As Education Minister Steve Maharey told a TV1 Close Up interview last month, the ministry recognises learning difficulties associated with dyslexia, but considers the range too broad to be defined by one word.
The problem with this, says Pope-Mayell, is that teachers are able to observe and document the symptoms and the resulting behaviour, “but they don’t know what label to use, so often those children are labelled lazy, disruptive or attention deficit – they’re picking up the behaviour, but not what’s behind the behaviour”.
When parents pick up the common expectations of society and schools, their child starts to fail in their eyes. And that, says Pope-Mayell, leads to more frustration.
“Everyone has good intentions, but because there’s no agreement on what dyslexia is and how it can be helped, those intentions can have devastating outcomes.”
Dyslexia can be regarded as a specific reading disability among a catalogue of “dys’s” (dysgraphia – difficulty with writing; dyscalculia – difficulty with numbers; dyspraxia – difficulty with co-ordination). Or it can be used as an umbrella term for all of these conditions. Either way, there are common indications: a child of average or above-average intelligence is dramatically below in two components of their learning (maybe sequencing, reading or writing); and there is a tendency to think visually.
Thinking in pictures is common among preschoolers, but at about the age of seven, when the “neurotypical” child starts to specialise in words and sounds, those with dyslexia tend to specialise in visual images, seeing in their mind’s eye the flip side of a “p”, for example, which can look very much like a “b” or a “d”; or reading “house” in terms of a 3D mental picture of the place they call home. Coming across a letter they no longer recognise or word that cannot be visualised – such as “the” or “from” – the child gets confused.
It is this confusion that leads to the behaviour that can drive teachers up the wall – the daydreaming, the fidgeting, asking classmates what they should be doing, clowning around, or sitting in the middle of the classroom trying not to be noticed.
“My son was the one always at the bench sharpening his pencil,” says Lorna Timms, a facilitator with the Davis Dyslexia Correction programme.
“He’s bright, articulate, but he just wasn’t reading. He’d read to me every night but he was just memorising the words from school. He couldn’t even read the word ‘and’.”
At his first school Matthew was told he was naughty and that he wasn’t trying. The next school noted his extreme marks – a 98 percent grade in listening, 30 percent in writing – but his behaviour wasn’t so bad as to warrant intervention by the school system.
Like so many other children, says Timms, “he just didn’t get it”.
Yet there is nothing in place to assess or respond to the dyslexic mind. Why not?
“It’s whether you look at the difficulty as inherent in the child or at what we can do with teaching,” says the ministry’s operational policy manager, Sally Jackson. “Our approach is that all children are learners, so what do we have to do differently to enable this child to learn? Classroom teachers use their range of assessment tools to look at the areas where a child is having difficulty. They can assess individual needs, put in individual programmes and get special support where needed.”
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