Developmental Dyslexia

 Do you have one or two children in your class who are struggling with reading for no obvious reason? These children may have dyslexia.

Dyslexia is a severe difficulty in reading which cannot be explained by general cognitive difficulties or lack of educational experiences. Dyslexia occurs in at least five per cent of the population and often runs in families.

Many teachers do not realise that there is now strong agreement among researchers that in most cases dyslexia is related to difficulties in phonological recoding, which is the linking of letters in print words to pre-existing phonological (sound) representations of words in the brain.

Compared to their peers, dyslexic children are usually poor on phonemic awareness tasks, letter-sound knowledge, and blending. Such knowledge is used for explicit phonological recoding (decoding).

There is evidence that dyslexic children may also be poor on what is called lexicalised phonological recoding, which depends on letter-sound patterns that the child’s brain automatically induces from stored information on the letters and sounds of words, obtained from the experience of reading words.

Symptoms of dyslexia often overlap with other developmental disabilities, such as language impairment, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and dyscalculia. This is why dyslexia can only be properly identified by a professional psycho-educational assessment.

Unlike other children with reading problems, children with dyslexia will not just catch up with a small amount of extra help, but need ongoing remediation. For most children this should focus on aspects of phonological recoding.

Parents should be cautioned against methods which do not do this, and which are often expensive. It is common for companies to claim that their methods are ‘research based’ whereas, in fact, the research evidence is inadequate.

It is important for teachers to be aware of the difficulties that some dyslexic children may be experiencing, and to support their learning with daily reading practice consisting of books that contain a large amount of familiar words and a small amount of new words.

This will help maintain their existing reading vocabulary and help consolidate new vocabulary.

It may also be useful to include instruction on letter-sound relationships by having them listen carefully to sounds within spoken words that match printed words.

By pronouncing the words slowly while looking at the printed word, the child can learn how these sounds are blended together. In this way, an attempt can be made to improve both types of phonological recoding.

Dyscalculia

Dyscalculia is a severe difficulty in mathematics which, like dyslexia, cannot be explained by general cognitive difficulties or lack of educational experiences.

It is estimated that about six per cent of children have dyscalculia, and it also tends to run in families, and overlap with other developmental disabilities (although it may occur alone).
Dyscalculic children may have little understanding of the meaning of numbers or mathematical procedures. They may be inaccurate or slow at counting, and have difficulty with the following: simple addition or subtraction, memorising arithmetical facts, following procedures, and using strategies (e.g. ‘bridging’ for subtraction).

They often exhibit a dislike of or anxiety toward maths, and display avoidance behaviours.

Difficulties with numbers do not disappear and continue to affect the rest of mathematics into secondary school and adulthood.

Research on the cause of dyscalculia is only recent. One theory is that the main difficulty is in ‘number sense’; our ability to represent quantity. This representation is non-verbal, associated with a particular area of the brain, and present before schooling.

During childhood our brain has to establish a fast automatic link between number sense and representations of the symbols we use for number (words and digits). In dyscalculia this link appears to be less efficient.

As with dyslexia, professional assessment and remediation is important; a child with dyscalculia will not catch up on their own, or with a small amount of help.

Teachers can help within the general class by trying to give children work at their own level, allowing extra time, focusing on understanding (especially of quantity), using concrete materials to help link mathematical symbols to quantity, providing a lot of practice, and reducing the need for memorisation where possible.

You can read more about dyscalculia (including more remediation pointers and references to books) at: http://www.aboutdyscalculia.org a public information website created by the second author.

— Drs. Claire Fletcher-Flinn (Senior Lecturer)
— Anna J. Wilson (Research Fellow)
Department of Psychology, University of Auckland