There is no such thing as dyslexia.

[VioletBaudelaire]

www.theherald.co.uk/display.var.1430434.0.0.php?utag=40859
I've had my say!

God no. Being thick is the worst.
IME, you can be as clever as you like, as long as you are in with the in-crowd for the things that matter (music for example, or perhaps sport).

"Why would they want that label" - yes we had that issue as she's just a bit dylsexic and there are disadvantages in having the label. In fact my oldest would be just the kind of person to be picked on by this man but she genuinely needs the extra time in exams, found it very very hard to learn to read and spell, even at 22 has to ask me basic words sometimes. Sometimes won't know the month or year. It's a different way of the brain working and she works around it very well. But it's definitely there.

Obviously some dyslexics are thick and some are clever and some are average. The condition doesn't mean you're necessarily bright of course.

Some conditions need different types of help.

Becky I see. I suppose in a way being clever gives the option of not coming across as a clever-clogs, whereas if you're a bit dim, there's not a lot you can do. I went to a girls grammar school, so it was more about the hair and flat stomachs than anything else

Xenia I'd forgotten that having dyslexia entitles you to a bit of extra time in exams. I suppose that in itself justifies differentiating between "can't read very well" and "dyslexic".

Dyslexia has existed for a long time but teh huge increase in recent years has been CAUSED by the faulty instruction methods of teaching children to read.

it has been shown here that this is correct.

Phonics seems to be the answer as the Gov't has finally realised so lets hope that ALL children will now learn to read, not that 20% are written off, either as 'dyslexic' or 'thick', before they get to secondary school.

Yes, my twins were taught phonics but 13 years before it was not the principal methods by any means when their sister was learning.

She genuinely needs the extra time to process information although I'm sure other people seeing her think she's making it up because she otherwise seems quite normal.

Agree Springbunny
DH was taught Look and Say (whole word recognition method) in the 60's. The headmistress said to MIL that DH would never learn to read using this method, but because it was the current fad in reading they were not allowed to use anything else. Consequences were DH didn't learn to read until he was 12. His certainly not thick and is an electronics engineer. It's laughable that they wouldn't let him take computer studies when he was at school as he was classed as "thick" yet nowadays he designs circuit boards and has built the computer I am using now from scratch.
He would have been diagnosed dyslexic nowadays but he does have other problems with spelling and gets numbers round the wrong way.

Son (11)is the same but thankfully in this more enlightened age his school used a variety of methods for reading, so his reading is good, however he does still have to use a ruler to follow the words on the page of a book. He has problems with time and never knows what day of the week it is. Can recognise notes of music but cannot follow it fast enough to read to play.

His spelling last year was at least 2 years behind whereas everything else he was ahead in, but school has spent a lot of time doing Wordwall and Stareway to Spelling and I have been there has been a big improvement since then.

sorry last sentence should say "I hae been told there has been a big improvement"

I remember reading an article a while back about the Scandinavian countries and the reasons why they taught children to read much later than in the UK. One of the reasons was that it prevented dyslexia and apparently there is a correlation in populations between age of learning to read and percentage of dyslexics.

Has anyone else heard this?

There is no doult there are some people who find reading hard, some people find riding a bike hard and some people are useless at sport.

I think that the problem is what and how we percieve intelligence. The fact that a lot of IQ tests rely on verbal skills is unfair on dyspraxic, autisic or even deaf children.
Tests based on spatical awareness are unfair on children with poor eyesight.

Intelligence has many types. Just because someone struggles to get reading doesn't mean they are useless at everything else.

Giving someone the label of dyslexic does not make someone able to read. For many mildly dyslexic people the cost of the educational pcycologists report would pay for a course of one to one tuition needed to help them learn to read.

Prehaps we need to think how we define the term dyslexia and what we do with children who we label as dyslexic. Also how we best target a limited amount of money to help childen with special needs.

I know but a lot of the skills for the kinds of work most of us do are those that the tests measure these days.

The reason reading and writing in english is taught earlier than other european languages is that it takes a year longer to learn than other languages that have easy rules to follow, mainly because of the irregular spelling of the english language.

Christy - speaking as someone who has learnt four modern European languages, and Latin, I disagree that English is harder... so don't really buy that argument...

I think it is accepted that English is more complex as it has more sounds - at least 44 basic sounds and umpteen more different ways of spelling / saying those e g the sound 'I' can be written as /ie/, /igh/, /i_e/, /y/

Most other European languages have far fewer than that so the children can learn the sounds and letter correspondences much more easily and quickly. I do not think you can equate learning to speak a foreign language with learning to 'read' a foreign language and pronounce it all properly. Latin for example is not spoken so we do not really know how to pronounce the words, we just use the English pronunciation.

I agree that grammar rules etc can be a lot more complex in other languages - verbs at the end of a sentence for example, and matching genders of adjectives - but the actual sounds are easier as there are fewer.

I don't find dyslexia a helpful term so have some sympathy with the suggestion that it should not be used - seems to encompass many different things- reading/spelling/co-ordination difficulties and more. Surely we should be using a more precise term that defines what the problem is and the help needed. I speak as someone whose son has struggled to read- but I prefer the term " reading difficulties" as it make clear that at school SOMEONE SHOULD HAVE TAUGHT HIM TO READ. I have finally in despair taken him through a reading system myself called "toe by toe" - not advertised as synthetic phonics but seems to share some of the qualities from what I have read about synthetic phonics. We are half way through and finally I have seen major improvement - even teacher surprised at his latest results (I haven't had the nerve to tell her I am doing it yet, scared of being labelled pushy mother). Why wasn't he taught like this in first place rather than encouraged to "guess by first letter/context/looking at the pictures" - GUESS? Please teach him to decode the words. Surely national literacy strategy is partly to blame for the large number of non readers - I feel quite angry that I have had to do it myself.

It is fairly well researched that english reading and writing for a native is harder. I also read of a new study that came out recently but not sure where to find it.

Message withdrawn

Since dd has started extra help for her mild dyslexia her performance at school has improved greatly.

Sanae
Interestingly enough it was Stareway to Spelling which is produced by Keda who also produce Toe by Toe that really improved my son's spelling. I bought the book, but the school actually did the work with him.

Message withdrawn

Sanae - I am glad toe by toe has helped your son.

I am intrigued by your report of the school. Did they really not teach phonics at all? That is awful. All the schools I have worked in use phonics as well as the other methods you mention.

But when a child is learning to talk it naturally absorbs the grammer and knows it by the time it comes to reading and writing. Ie a german child will naturally send to the verb to the end of the sentence as it is part of speach.

When we learn a foreign language we usually learn to speak and read and write it at the same time.

When a native child learns its language it learns to speak first then reading and writing comes years later. Things like word order are already learnt by the time the child learns to read and write.
What is difficult for an english is the reading and writing not the speach

Sanae, I find it helpful. I know dyslexic adults (and my daughter obviously) and the mind as a whoel seems to work differently. Another analagy might be to people who are right and left handed, right and left brained. They seem to have different wiring in the head.

Do you think that poor quality teaching damages children's brains and causes dyslexia? The brain is a living organ rather than a computer.

There are children who find reading hard and need extensive help. Do you think such children get completely confused by having a mixture of methods thrown at them.

Surely methods that are good for teaching dyslexic children are good for all children.

I agree that the complexity of English lies in the depth and breadth of its vocabulary and in its frequently non-phonetic and irregular spelling.

Other languages - French or German, for example - are grammatically more complex than English and children have to spend a great deal of time acquiring rules of grammar in primary school.

I don't think that the argument that English takes longer to learn to read and write than, say, French or German, holds.

I wonder whether the fact that the complexity of English lies where it does is one of the reasons for the occurence of dyslexia. And whether postponing reading and writing in English until the brain is more mature (say that of a six or seven year old) might reduce the occurrence of dyslexia?

I don't agree with postponing reading per se, I cannot imagine my dd, who has been reading really well since 4.5, not being able to read yet. She loves the freedom it gives her, and my ds is just beggining to get that too.

I think there is far too much pressure to achieve on youngsters - maybe get rid of the KS1 SATS, and the so called value added and focus on letting the children be children and develop at their own pace