Learning To Read Is Harder For Visual Learners

Most teachers of 5 and 6-year-old children will tell you how baffled they can be by this phenomenon.

There will be bright children in the class, who work hard but struggle to read.

Stranger still, everything seems OK at first. But then they start to fall 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.

Eventually their confidence begins to crumble. They can feel the frustration and concern of the adults around them, but don't know what to do.

Because people are not trained to recognise 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 trying to read the wrong way is not dyslexia. And that is what is happening.

Here is what's really happening.

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 early 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 able 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.

They become more and more addicted to wild guessing, using the context and the first letter of the word as cues.

They are frustrated and puzzled by their situation and don't know the way out of it. They can sense the frustration of their teacher and parents, but have actually been doing their best.

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 each 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.

The label dyslexic carries a great risk that everyone will just relax into acceptance of the situation as inevitable. That leaves the child to deal with a much harder path through life.