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DYSLEXIA: The Symptoms and Causes of Dyslexia
DYSLEXIA: The Symptoms and Causes of Dyslexia By Susan du Plessis / AUDIBLOX "I have been trying to get a promotion for the past 6-8 months and have not yet been sucsesfull I have got quite suvear dyslexia witch i found out about 3 years ago. I was sent to be assesed about 18 months ago and then I went to tuition for a year. in the last 6-8 months iI have aplied for 10 or more jobs with the same company and have been turned down for them all. I am not week in all areas I have got good lodgical thinking I am good at fisical work I just cant read or write that well. " Dyslexia is known to have destructive emotional effects on children, and can leave its scars for the rest of ones life. Besides long-lasting emotional effects, dyslexia can also lead to unemployment or underemployment. The letter above, posted by a dyslexic on a message board for dyslexics, clearly demonstrates the hardships that await the dyslexic child in the workplace. It is therefore of utmost importance that a child with dyslexia be helped to overcome his problems. The term dyslexia was coined from the Greek words dys meaning ill or difficult and lexis meaning word, and the symptoms below indicate that a child has dyslexia and therefore needs help: # One of the most obvious and one of the most common telltale signs is reversals. People with this kind of problem often confuse letters like b and d, either when reading or when writing, or they sometimes read (or write) words like rat for tar, or won for now. # Another sign, which needs no confirmation by means of any form of testing, is elisions, that is when a person sometimes reads or writes cat when the word is actually cart. # The person who reads very slowly and hesitantly, who reads without fluency, word by word, or who constantly loses his place, thereby leaving out whole chunks or reading the same passage twice, has a reading problem. # The person may try to sound out the letters of the word, but then be unable to say the correct word. For example, he may sound the letters c-a-t but then say cold. # He may read or write the letters of a word in the wrong order, like left for felt, or the syllables in the wrong order, like emeny for enemy, or words in the wrong order, like are there for there are. # He may spell words as they sound, for example rite for right. # He may read with poor comprehension, or it may be that he remembers little of what he reads. # The person may have a poor and/or slow handwriting. Most problems can only be solved if one knows what causes that particular problem. A disease such as pellagra, also called the disease of the four Ds dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia and death took the lives of thousands in the Southern states of America during the early part of the twentieth century. Today, pellagra is virtually unknown because we know that it is caused by a vitamin B3 deficiency. A viable point of departure would thus be: what causes dyslexia? A plethora of theories has arisen as to the cause of dyslexia, ranging from brain dysfunction through uncoordinated left/right hemispheres, imbalance of the inner ear, and so on. Treatments have been designed accordingly. However, a more logical explanation for this phenomenon is to be found in the age-old but ageless principle that learning is a stratified process. This is a self-evident fact, yet its significance in the situation of the dyslexic child has apparently never been fully comprehended. Throughout the world in all educational systems it is commonly accepted that a child must start at the lower levels of education and then gradually progress to the higher levels. If human learning had not been a stratified process, if it had taken place on a single level, this would have been unnecessary. It would then not have been important to start a child in first grade. It would have been possible for the child to enter school at any level and to complete the school years in any order. By way of a simple and practical example I have to remind the reader of the fact that one has to learn to count before it becomes possible to learn to add and subtract. Suppose one tried to teach a child, who had not learned to count yet, to add and subtract. This would be quite impossible and no amount of effort would ever succeed in teaching the child these skills. In the same way, there are also certain skills and knowledge that a child must have acquired first, before it becomes possible for him to benefit from a course in reading. |