High Visual Intelligence Can Make Learning To read Difficult

Most teachers of 5 and 6-year-old children will tell you how baffled they can be by this phenomenon.

There are many children who struggle with reading, while being evidently bright and hard working.

Stranger still, everything seems OK at first. But then they start to fall behind and eventually hit a plateau at around the age of 6 or 7. As the text gets more complicated they start to guess wildly and they become steadily more confused.

Eventually their confidence begins to crumble. They can feel the frustration and concern of the adults around them, but don’t know what to do.

Because people are not trained to recognise this pattern, it is often diagnosed as dyslexia. But that is quite wrong.

Dyslexia suggests there is some underlying problem that cannot be overcome.

But these children have no real reason not to be able to read. They are just approaching it in the wrong way.

Let me explain the process.

A very visual child will learn most of the alphabet quite easily. Then they are usually shown some simple high frequency words, which they can sight-memorise. Their first early reader books are usually made up of a very simple vocabulary of these common words and they can apparently read them, using this sight-memorisation and a bit of intelligent guessing.

So all seems well.

But problems develop as the text starts to use a broader range of words. Some children will naturally switch to scanning the words phonetically.

Others cannot naturally distinguish the sounds within the words (phonemes) and so cannot relate them to the letter patterns that represent them in text (graphemes). At least not without quite a bit of careful instruction.

And these are the children that get stuck.

They will use the context to guess wildly, taking the first letter of the word as a guide.

They find themselves down a cul-de-sac and don’t know the way out. At the same time they can feel how worried their teacher and parents are, but can’t do any more than they already are.

One in five children reach the age of 11 unable to read properly and these children make up a large proportion of that group. It is a disaster for their academic career and working life.

And that is a tragedy, because we routinely see exactly these children learn to read in a matter of weeks. They have no underlying reason not to be able to read. They are just going about it the wrong way.

The label dyslexic is very dangerous. It lets everyone off the hook of actually finding a solution. And still consigns the child to a lower and tougher track through life.