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High Visual Intelligence Can Make Learning To read Difficult

By: David Morgan

In every class you will find children displaying this phenomenon.

There will often be several bright children in the class, who can do most things well and have a good attitude, but fall behind in reading.

Initially everything can seem OK. But, while other children's reading progresses steadily, these children will hit a plateau at around 6. As the text they are expected to read gets more complicated, they will get more and more confused, often guessing wildly.

And then their confidence collapses under the pressure. They can feel everyone's concern and don't know what to do to fix the problem.

Because people are not trained to recognise this pattern, it is often diagnosed as dyslexia. But that is quite wrong.

Dyslexia suggests a fundamental problem with reading, despite normal intelligence.

But these children have no real reason not to be able to read. They are just approaching it in the wrong way.

Let me explain the process.

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 their parents and teacher believe all is well.

But problems develop as the text starts to use a broader range of words. Some children will naturally switch to scanning the words phonetically.

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 children are heading for failure

They will use the context to guess wildly, taking the first letter of the word as a guide.

They find themselves down a cul-de-sac and don't know the way out. At the same time they can feel how worried their teacher and parents are, but can't do any more than they already are.

One in five children reach the age of 11 unable to read properly and these children make up a large proportion of that group. It is a disaster for their academic career and working life.

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.

I hate children being labelled dyslexic because it reduces the sense of urgency to actually finding the solution. Acceptance creeps in, consigning the child to a much harder track through life.

Article Source: http://www.articlecamp.com

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