Dyslexia Rooted In Phonemes

Q. My 6-year-old is having difficulty learning to read, and his teacher who teaches by what she calls the “whole language” method has suggested he might have dyslexia. When I asked her to explain what she meant, she went around in circles, basically saying it was a reading disorder that affects children who have difficulty learning to read. He also reverses certain letters, which she says is a red flag. Can you tell me what dyslexia is, what causes it and how we might find out whether this is our son’s problem?

A. The most recent research indicates that dyslexia traditionally defined as a paradoxical difficulty learning to read despite adequate intelligence, motivation and education reflects a deficiency in an individual’s ability to process phonemes, which are the distinct linguistic units that make up all spoken and written words.

Researchers now understand that language consists of several discrete abilities, each mediated by a different part - or module - of the brain. These abilities are further organized within the brain in a hierarchy. At the lowest level is the phonological module, dedicated to processing phonemes. (There are 44 phonemes in the English language.)

Before words can be identified, understood and stored in memory, they must be broken down into their phonetic units by the brain’s phonological module. Where spoken language is concerned, this process occurs automatically because it’s instinctive in humans. But reading is another matter entirely because it’s an invention. As such, reading must be learned through conscious effort.

In learning to read, a child must first learn to associate individual letters and combinations of letters with specific phonemes. As Dr. Sally Shaywitz, co-director of the Yale Center for the Study of Learning and Attention, has pointed out, this requires that the child come to a conscious understanding of the phonological (phonetic) structure of words. Dyslexic children have significant difficulty doing this. This impairment - which exists, remember, at the lowest level of the language system - effectively blocks the child’s ability to access higher levels of the language system and, therefore, ascribe meaning to text.

The cause of this processing impairment is as yet undetermined, but researchers agree that whereas dyslexia may ultimately prove to be organic in nature, it can be remediated.

The once-popular idea that more boys than girls are dyslexic has been proven untrue. In fact, dyslexia affects boys and girls about equally, but girls are more adept at developing compensations because, whereas boys process phonemes on only the left side of their brains, girls process phonemes on both sides. Their language systems are, in other words, more flexible; therefore, girls are more successful at “cloaking” reading deficits.

The idea that letter and number reversals are diagnostic of dyslexia is also myth. Dyslexic children do not - as I’ve maintained for years - “see things backwards.” In fact, the visual system isn’t at all involved in dyslexia, and reversals are not unusual in dyslexics and non-dyslexics alike until age 8.

Concerning teaching methods, it is increasingly clear that “whole language” (non-phonetic) methods of reading instruction, while they don’t cause dyslexia, don’t help, either. Researchers at the University of Oxford have found that training in phoneme recognition significantly improves any child’s ability to read, and more recent research by Shaywitz and others have demonstrated that phoneme-based instruction, rather than general language-based, is crucial to a dyslexic child’s ability to make improvements in reading.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Rosemond The Charlotte Observer