The reasons for ongoing reading difficulties?
The good reading brain needs...
Precise information coming into the brain
Dyslexia is a neurological problem -
Find out how reading and learning are affected...
The main kind of information required for reading is through sight and hearing. If the information brought in to the brain is not precise, even if the brain is good at organisaing and planning, it won't have good data to recognize, understand and store.
If the letters being read appear to move around and cross over each other it's hard to learn the shape of letters. Auditory/phonological problems mean they cannot easily distinguish letter sounds.
“There is evidence that most reading problems have a fundamental sensorimotor cause”
John Stein, Dyslexia, Vol 7, Issue 1 pp 12-36, Jan/Mar 2001
Find out more about Professor Stein
All the parts working together efficiently
All learning is "brain re-wiring", including programs which deal directly with reading and rely only on reading practice.
For fast change, you want programs which work directly on the brain to deal with the underlying causes of difficulties.
Find out more about Professor Berninger
"the most important brain functions for literacy acquisition (are) - sensory, motor, aural/oral, language, cognition/ memory, and attention/executive control...
Learning depends on these various systems working in a cooperative manner in a functional system"
Berninger & Richards, Brain Literacy For Educators and Psychologists: 2002 p 109
Those with dyslexia have less activation in
the part of the brain that connects the pictures
of the letters to the sounds (posterior)
and over-reliance on the sounds themselves. (Sally Shaywitz)
More efficient readers tend to combine the different functions more smoothly.
Balanced Attention
Precise information/sensory processing
Accurate, fast processing of what they hear
Accurate, fast processing of
what they see
Attention and
synchronisation
Synchronise
reading brain
Build good attention
Is Dyslexia a "gift"?
Even though some adults say that the Dyslexia helped them become "stronger" and "more resilient", most would say that school was hard. The "learning difference" was a "learning difficulty".
Most with Dyslexia say it was and is a problem for them.
Even with "dyslexia friendly" schools, why would we want students to spend up to 13 years trying to work in a "hard" environment, when by making the necessary brain connections quickly, learning, reading and school/life quality can also improve quickly?