Dyslexia Children

The existence of reading-disabled children of normal and superior lQ who manifest reversals and related "scrambling" difficulties in reading, writing, and spelling, despite adequate emotional and educational stimulation, was first recognized in 1898 by two British physicians, J. Kerr and W.P Morgan. What makes these dyslexia children special is their inability to read, write, speak, and spell correctly. These are the children with learning & reading disabilities. For reasons not yet known, the brain jumbles the information it receives from the child's senses, causing difficulty in concentrating, in using symbols (letters and numbers), in grasping the concepts of time, distance, direction, etc.

Learning Disability

Dyslexia is a rather variable learning disability. Some cases are quite slight and respond to relatively simple therapy; others are so severe that they require highly specialized multidisciplinary treatment. Systematic errors are often observed in the reading and writing of dyslexia children, and they tend to read words from right to left. These children with reading disabilities also had difficulties with letters whose orientation contributed to their identification (for example, p and q, d and b), and they often "mirror-wrote" (b for d or p for q). Some of the children read as efficiently upside-down as right-side-up; others wrote with either hand.
By the time most children start learning to read, cerebral lateralization has already occurred. This means that one hemisphere of the brain, in most cases the left (which controls movement on the right side of the body and it normally responsible for language functions), has established dominance over the other, usually the right. The right hemisphere controls movement of the left side of the body, and normally plays a minimal role in language function. The two sides of the brain then work in concert, with the dominant hemisphere leading the other. In dyslexics, the two hemispheres may still be competing for dominance.

It is believed that dominance was necessary for consistent left-to-right reading; that incomplete dominance could result in a tendency to read right-to-left.

Recent research indicates that dyslexics show less unity between the two hemispheres of their brains, and more rapport within each hemisphere. There are some medical researchers who theorize that dyslexia is related to incomplete cerebral dominance. Other experts think that the dyslexic's principal problem is blending a sequence of letters into an English word, due perhaps to a neurological deficiency. It is recommended that dyslexics be taught a system of easily recognizable characters that represent words rather than individual sounds. There are other researchers who believe that reading should be taught to dyslexia children solely by the "look-say" method, drill in phonics, tactile involvement with letters, teaching machines, etc.
 

More Special Parenting Articles