In this video, we are talking about children with difficulties in their school work. Some parents may suspect or they may take an extra step to get a diagnosis of their child to see if they are suffering from ‘dyslexia’. But what is ‘dyslexia’? Is it simply about reversing of ‘B’s and ‘D’s?
It is a common misconception that a lot of parents think that dyslexia is about reversing of ‘B’s and ‘D’s, or if a child reverses their ‘B’s and ‘D’s, the child has dyslexia. However, it is not very much related.
Dyslexia is about reading. It is about a child who has specific difficulty in reading. They may be normal in all other aspects like being able to talk and have a proper conversation.
However, unlike other children, a child with dyslexia may not be able to read all the words they see, be it if it is something that is printed on a page, a book or a piece of paper. Generally, they may find difficulties in reading a sentence or a story.
For example, with a sentence like “He likes to fly a kite.”, when a child who is dyslexic sees the word “likes”, they may say something like “like”, “lock” or anything that starts with “L”. Similarly, if they see a word that starts with “K”, they may read it as “kitten” or any other words that begins with “K” instead of the word “kite”. This is generally because the child may not know how to turn the word that is on the page into a sound and say it aloud.
In English, what you need to do is to be able to take the words of the letters and convert them to sound. That is what people talk about in phonics.
In phonics class, children learn the sound of letters, like letter ‘S’ has a ‘ss-’ sound and letter ‘A’ has an ‘aa-’ sound. Part of reading is about being able to change the letters, converting the letters into a sound that you can read it aloud. Thus, when you see a new word, example ‘s-o-f-t’, you know it is read as ‘s-oft’, and will be able to read it.
However, in English, a lot of words are ‘not regular’. In other languages like Italian or Malay, if you know the sounds of the letters, you can more or less read anything. It may not usually mean that you understand the meaning. Nonetheless, if you see a printed word or see the television subtitles, you can actually read it along and say it aloud.
In English, there are a lot of words that do not follow the regular spelling rules. When it comes to words like that, usually a child will learn to remember them by reading and sight. That means they recognise the word by memory of how the word looks like and a recognition to match with a certain pronunciation. That is a little bit like how people will read a Chinese character.
For example, if a foreigner comes to Singapore, even an American who does not know Chinese, they may recognise the word on the toilet door, knowing that this particular character that looks like ‘this’ means it is a toilet for men. While another particular character that looks like ‘this’, means it is a toilet for ladies.
Hence, there are actually different types of dyslexia. Some children are not so good at figuring out the letters in a sound, this is called phonological dyslexia. They may be very good at memorising ‘this word looks like this, I had read it before’. If the teacher read it a certain way, the child will just memorise that it should be said in that particular way.
Some other children have a different type of dyslexia, and it is called visual dyslexia. They are actually the opposite. They may try to memorise or read everything according to the rules, but they may not be very good at recognising that certain words look different and they should pay attention to the different words.
That is why it is important when you are assessing children like that to find out where exactly the difficulties are, so that when you are doing intervention you can actually address the difficulties.
Have fun and bond with your child in this learning process.
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