Many parents have difficulty understanding why their children cannot speak or read, especially since these are skills we take for granted and do without thinking.
Here’s another way to help parents understand why a child may have dyslexia or reading difficulty: a child with dyslexia is like a person who does not ‘read’ a music score.
The music notes are symbols that tell you how high or how low to sing, how long or how short each note should be etc.
If you don’t read a music score and find yourself singing in a group with others who do, you would be just listening and ‘singing along’, you would not pay attention to the music score since it makes no sense to you, you would be trying to just ‘memorize’ the song, and you would not be able to sing new songs from music scores that you have not ‘memorized’.
Sounds familiar? For a better understanding of why a child may have dyslexia or reading difficulty, please read on:
Some Reasons Why Your Child Has Dyslexia or Reading Difficulty
1. Inadequate stimulation (talking and reading with the child).
2. Delayed general development (‘global delay’), cognitive development etc.
3. Specific difficulty with language learning. Not very interested in language, prefers other modalities e.g. physical activities.
4. History of speech and language delay. Has difficulty with spoken language skills (listening and speaking) which makes learning written language skills (reading and writing) more difficult.
5. Specific difficulty with the concept of reading, i.e. we read words, not pictures, and interpret the printed word as a symbol for how we read them aloud. (Just as people who ‘read’ music scores and notes can interpret the symbols of notes to tell how to sing: how high or how low, how long or how short each note is etc.)
6. Specific difficulty with reading in English where we read words made up of letters that represent sounds. We have to remember the sounds the letters represent and combine them in sequence (e.g. ‘p-o-t’ and ‘t-o-p’ have the same letters but in different order and therefore have to be read as different words).
(In other languages e.g. Chinese, words are made up of individual pictogram symbols you recognize visually as separate units with its own meaning.)
7. Difficulty with the visual processing necessary in reading e.g. visual discrimination skills in differentiating words that look similar, visually tracking visual attention from left to right in reading English etc
8. Difficulty with auditory processing of sounds and awareness of sounds (phonological awareness): hearing the difference in sounds (e.g. ‘bat’ vs ‘bad’), hearing and blending sounds in sequence etc
9. In terms of how the brain works, neuro-cognitive studies indicate that there are words in English we process by sight (sight words) and recognize the meaning of the word immediately, without having to interpret how it should sound according to the letters. Difficulty with learning to do this would mean laborious reading and difficulty reading fluently.
10. Until a reader is able to perform all the visual, auditory and cognitive processes quickly, easily and confidently, it would not be surprising that even when they read, it may not be fluent; even when they read fluently, they may not be able to interpret the meaning for reading comprehension, and even if they do read and understand, the process may be effortful and not enjoyable.
Reading and literacy is one of the most important tools you can give your child for doing well in school, for language proficiency, for sheer reading pleasure and for continued self-improvement in life. If s/he is having difficulty, please seek professional help so that you can give your child the gift of being a confident and happy reader.