One of the most frustrating things for educated parents to deal with is when their child does not learn to read. When the child is obviously intelligent in other ways, following directions or solving puzzles, but is just unable to learn how to read, the parents may blame the teachers, or get angry with the child for being “lazy”. They might even hit the child for not paying attention in school.
While it’s true that there are sometimes poor teachers and lazy children, parents should consider if the problem is not caused by dyslexia. Dyslexia is a condition of the nerves and brain that interferes with the decoding of letters into words and sentences. Blaming a child with dyslexia for being unable to read is just as bad as getting angry with a blind child for being unable to see or a deaf child for being unable to hear.
There are different types and degrees of dyslexia. Perhaps a fifth of all children have at least mild forms of dyslexia, and there is some evidence that boys are affected more than girls. In the most severe cases, the child just doesn’t get the idea of linking writing and sound at all, and the whole idea of reading remains a mystery they cannot understand, even though they show high intelligence in other areas, such as oral comprehension or oral mathematics. In more common and less severe cases, the child will confuse similar letters, such as “b” and “d”, or be unable to combine individual letters into words. Sometimes the child will be unable to read consistently in the same direction, confusing “tap” and “pat”, or understanding a written sentence like “Peter saw Susan buying the rice” as “Susan buys Peter seeing rice”.
Dyslexia exists in all societies, but the writing systems of some languages make the problem more difficult in some languages than others. It seems that because the problem is linked to a confusion of sound and letter correspondence, and because dyslexic children do not have problems drawing pictures, languages such as Chinese, where the characters stand for words and ideas rather than individual sounds, are easier for dyslexic children to learn to read than languages such as English, where the written symbols represent sounds and are not linked to any kind of a picture. Evidence for this comes from the experience of dyslexic children in Japan. Japanese has three different writing systems. One system is derived from Chinese, where a character is a little drawing that stands for an idea and not necessarily a sound. It is like drawing a little abstract picture for each word. Dyslexic children can usually learn these. They have much more difficulty with the other two systems, which are based on abstract symbols representing the sounds of syllables, and have the most trouble with the European alphabet, where each letter stands for an individual sound.
There are therefore relatively few dyslexic children in China and Japan compared to Western countries, which use an alphabet system of writing with letters representing individual sounds, which are joined to form words. In some Western countries, dyslexia is recognised as a physical handicap, like blindness or deafness. Because dyslexic people are often very intelligent and with good memories, they can learn well by listening and speaking if they are given the right kind of support. In these countries, the government provides dyslexic children with interpreters, who read their school books to them and write down what they want to say. In the United States, one dyslexic man even studied law and became a lawyer in this way, even though he needed an interpreter to read to him and to write down the university essays and reports he dictated orally.
While we still do not know exactly what the causes of dyslexia are, specialists have developed diagnostic tests to identify children at an early age so that their education can be geared towards their special needs. There are even tests online for parents to use when their children are having reading problems to see if they are caused by dyslexia.
In Papua New Guinea, where most children learn to read in English, a language they don’t speak at home, a heavy emphasis on reading before they become completely fluent in English means dyslexic children are taught using techniques that will never help them to develop fluency. It also means that the tools that have been developed for diagnosing dyslexia in countries where English is the native language cannot be used to diagnose Papua New Guinean children who do not yet speak English fluently.
In this country, children who are suspected of having dyslexia can be helped by developing oral fluency in English as soon as possible without relying on books or writing. Once their English is fluent, they can be tested for dyslexia and diagnosed using the same tools that are used in English-speaking countries.
Another useful tool can be teaching them to read in their own language. While this will not help children with strong cases of dyslexia, for children with mild dyslexia, separating the issue of linking sounds to letters from the issue of learning a foreign language can sometimes be enough to develop literacy in their own language that can be transferred to English later on.
In either situation, it is important to try to use dyslexic children’s natural eagerness to learn and ability to follow oral instruction to educate them using techniques suited to their abilities. It is important never to blame the children for a situation that is not their fault. Reading can be very stressful for dyslexic children, so it is important to lessen the stress related to reading as much as possible.
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