Section 6 – Dyslexia, and the problem of spelling
I started exploring these ideas by helping my own children learn to read long before they went to school. My younger daughter was just two when we began. When she was two years and eight months I stopped ‘teaching’ her. She could read anything she could understand, and sound out any written word. She had a reading vocabulary of at least 1000 words, and dived into new books with gleeful passion.
Both girls were fully literate by the age of four, and have loved reading and writing ever since. See my first book, Reading and Writing before School (Jonathan Cape; Pan Paperbacks), written when my name was Felicity Hughes, for a detailed account of working with my two daughters and other pre-school children. It is out of print now, but still available on the Internet.
We came back to England some time later, and I resumed my school based teaching career, at secondary level. I wanted to find out if it was possible to teach literacy, ‘even’ in a school, using a similar approach; and this meant I gravitated towards the literacy strugglers.
I couldn’t understand at first why they were having problems. Most of them could talk the hind leg off a donkey, and clearly understood what other people were saying. So they must have all the mental processes necessary for understanding and sounding out written words. (See Section 8, How about deaf children?, for my explanation that learning phonics is exactly like learning to speak.)
I set about teaching ‘like a parent’, investing in goodly amounts of books at their interest level, plus matching word-for-word tapes. My young students would curl up in the armchairs dotted around the room, cocooned in headphones, and following the print while they listened to the tape. They whizzed through my phonic programme with all possible speed. I arranged after school sessions for parents and offspring together, sharing with them my ideas about massive exposure, massive help. (Often this was the way parents wanted to work anyway, and they were delighted when they realized it was being encouraged by the school.) We set up a paired learning system, students working together and helping each other.
After a while, my strugglers began thinking of themselves as people who could read, rather than people who couldn’t.
The problem of spelling
It was a different matter altogether when it came to spelling. Often what the youngsters wrote was gobbledygook, and when I asked them to read me what they had written, they stared at their own work in bafflement. They could write the same word on a page four or five times, using a different spelling each time. I suggested to one such lad that it might be a good idea if we worked on his spelling, and he was quite taken aback. “Is there something wrong with my spelling, Miss?” he asked, sincerely.
I tried to determine how my own spelling ability worked. It seemed straightforward enough. There were mental images of written words in my head, and when I wanted to write them, I simply copied these mental images onto the page.
Whatever else my strugglers were doing, they weren’t doing that. If the correct mental images had been recorded in their brains, they would have referred to them, as I did: no one spells badly for the fun of it.
I had to find some kind of explanation, but ruled out virtually all the standard reasons for literacy difficulties before I started. I knew that the acquisition of spoken language was a highly intelligent process, so the cause of dyslexia could not be a lack of intelligence or ability. Nor could my strugglers be poor learners, since spoken language was the product of sheer learning. Then, spoken words and sentences were particular sequences of sounds, so children who could manipulate sounds adroitly couldn’t be bad at sequencing as such, either.
It looked as if the cause was indeed some kind of perceptual disorder, or ‘word blindness’ – but how could it be that children who were able to see everything else in their environment perfectly well (chairs, tables, doors, blackboards, each other) suddenly lost the power of vision when it came to black squiggles on white paper, which essentially were no different from the chairs, tables, doors, etc.?
Orton’s explanation
To my surprise I found what I was looking for quite speedily, in Samuel Torrey Orton’s Reading, Writing and Speech Problems in Children, published as long ago as 1937, by W. W. Norton. Orton points out that the brain is divided into two hemispheres, and the left side of the brain is the language centre, where most words are recorded. But certain aspects of language are recorded in the right hemisphere, and when this happens with written words, they are the mirror image of their counterparts registered on the left.
Most children succeed in blocking out the images, or ‘engrams’, that are recorded on the right side of the brain, when they are learning to read and write. But some children don’t. So sometimes they visualize a word the right way round. Sometimes they visualize the mirror image. And sometimes the two images merge and overlap, so they visualize bits of the word the right way round, while one end snakes back on itself, and turns up in the middle, back to front. Or it rolls itself over, from top to bottom. Or it can do both at the same time, neatly transposing ‘p’s into ‘d’s, ‘y’s into ‘h’s, ‘m’s into ‘w’s.
This means that the word ‘apple’, for instance, could appear in the child’s head in different forms at different times. It could be ‘seen’ as ‘alepp’, or ‘pelap’, or ‘abble’, or ‘plead’ – or ‘apple’; but the child has no way of knowing that that is the correct version, they are all equally correct to him.
Children who copy these jumbles, faithfully, produce the bizarre spelling which baffles teachers, parents, friends – and the children themselves:
The jumbles give rise to reading problems too, because the child has great difficulty in recognizing the words on the page. The words in his head may match up with the words he sees, or they may not – so he may seem to ‘know’ a word one day, but the next day he doesn’t. This, then, explains why dyslexia has been called ‘word blindness’ – but the word on the page behaves itself beautifully; it’s the word in the child’s head which is playing tricks. He can see the words in front of him perfectly well, he just can’t recognize them.
Orton calls the condition ‘strephosymbolia’, or ‘twisted symbols’ – an illuminating definition. He also indicates that it is more frequent in boys than in girls, and seems to be hereditary, often being passed down from father to son.
The unblocked routes
Children travel by various routes in order to become literate, and the ideal is for all children to be able to travel by all the routes.
The snag is that, for the ‘word jumblers’, some of the routes are blocked. They cannot learn to read through the performance based ‘look-and-say’ approach, used in many primary schools, because of their difficulties with word recognition.
They cannot learn to spell through ‘look, cover, write, check’, because by the time they have looked away from a word, its mental image has jumbled itself up into something completely different.
The good news is that there are unblocked routes to these areas. Massive exposure to meaningful print is just as vital for dyslexics as it is for anyone else. As they gradually form mental clusters of words (like ‘alepp’, ‘pelap’, ‘abble’ etc.), they can match the word ‘apple’, on the page, with this mental cluster, and learn to recognize it that way. The ‘experience’ approach means that they are under no pressure to perform, and can sail ahead in their own good time, building up an understanding vocabulary as they go.
Another unblocked route to reading is, of course, by way of the matching spoken words. Spoken words behave themselves for dyslexics to a much greater extent than written words do – evident from the fact that the youngsters can usually understand what they hear without any trouble, as well as talk intelligibly.
Matching print with speech, bit by bit, means that a dyslexic child can bypass the visual jumble of the word in his head. For instance, suppose he is trying to read the word ‘frog’. He is ‘seeing’ it, mentally, as ‘grof’, (which doesn’t yet form part of a useful cluster of visual images, all meaning the same thing). The word on the page won’t match this mental version. But if he has learned to sound out written words, he can say “fŭ, frŭ, frŏ, frog” to himself – “oh, frog!” – and the words have matched perfectly.
So systematic phonics is not just useful for the word jumblers, it is a life line. It means they always have recourse to a reliable form of word recognition, and can teach themselves to understand written words by transferring meanings from speech to print, like everybody else. And because we are using an experience based approach to teach phonics, as well as understanding print, they can plunge straight into books at their interest level, from the start, secure in the knowledge that they will be shown how to do it, and get all the help they need, until they can manage on their own.
(Practising reading aloud is important; and, as with other children, there is no harm in helping dyslexic children work through a series of reading books, at their ‘ability’ level, for this purpose. But we must continue to bear in mind that it is a different process entirely from understanding print, and every child needs massive experience of both.)
The sound route to spelling
Reading aloud is also the best possible basis for accurate spelling. This is because the process of writing is the mirror image of the process of reading aloud.
When we read aloud, we look at the words on the page, and match them with the words we say. When we write, on the other hand, we usually say the words to ourselves, under our breath, and match those spoken words with the ones we are writing.
So if we are accustomed to matching written words with spoken words, bit by bit, while we read, it is very easy to reverse the process, and also match the two forms of language, bit by bit, while we write. The letters in a word automatically arrange themselves in the proper order, because it is the same order as the sounds in the spoken word.
This is clearly a tremendous help for the word jumblers. A youngster can say ‘gŭ’, and write a ‘g’; ‘grŭ’, and write an ‘r’; ‘gră’, and write an ‘a’; ‘grab’, and write the ‘b’. It doesn’t matter if the visual form of the word is muddling itself up inside his head: he can use the sounds in the spoken word to straighten it out again, and make it behave.
A child who has worked through my phonic programme, and practised reading aloud until he is fluent, can therefore spell all regular words correctly without any trouble. We just need to make sure that he does sound out words, whenever he writes, and matches letters to the sounds. (Which explains why it is a good idea for him to spend time occasionally sounding out spoken words by themselves, as described in the section on phonics: the experience will pay off in spades when it comes to writing, and he needs to begin by thinking of the sounds first, then match them with letters.)
There remains the question of what to do about irregular words – the ‘sneaks’ that trip us up because bits of them are not spelt the way they sound.
It’s surprisingly easy to deal with the sneaks, however – most of us have always known how, without consciously realizing it. When we tackle a real maverick of a word, like ‘Wednesday’, we alter the way we say it, first. We say ‘Wed-nes-day’ to ourselves, inside our heads, and each bit of the word comes out right.
What we have done is to change ‘Wednesday’ into a regular word! It doesn’t occur to us to say ‘Wed-nes-day’ when we’re talking to someone. But the alternative pronunciation is available for use when we’re writing.
If we can do it with three or four words – ‘temper-a-ture’, ‘par-lī-a-ment’, ‘Feb-ru-ary’ – we can do it with hundreds. The human mind can store an infinitely large spoken vocabulary, and an infinitely large reading vocabulary. It can just as well store a third vocabulary, parallel to the first two. A ‘saying-for-spelling’ vocabulary, which all children compile if they find it helpful, so that anybody with problems will thereby have the means of choosing the right spelling. ‘Bee-cay-use’ (because), ‘pe-op-lee’ (people), ‘ee-nor-mo-us’ (enormous), ‘ex-tinc-tī-on’, ‘dee-kī-sī-on’, ‘wăl-king’, ‘brid-ge’, ‘sō-und’, ‘trot-ting’, (so the double letter won’t go missing) – well, you get the idea. It’s surprising how easily children can work out and remember these repronunciations, once they’ve had enough initial practice; and also mnemonics for the really awkward letter patterns: ‘old uncles like doughnuts’ (ould), ‘old uncles get heavy’ – because they’ve been eating too many doughnuts! (ough), ‘indians get hot’ (igh), or ‘all unicorns grow horns’ (augh).
The basic theme is storing a way of saying any word which will give you the spelling – and then making sure that you think of the sounds while you’re writing. It’s an effective and reliable means of bypassing the spelling problem. So how can we make it readily available to all children who need it?
The easiest way of bringing this about is to make sure that the spelling dragon never has even the slightest chance of getting a grip – by teaching all children to operate the Key to Sound Spelling from the start of their writing experience. (See below.)
Dyslexics who can use this Key, whenever they write, have every chance of growing up to spell just as accurately as their peers. It’s also a very handy aid to spelling for any child, so nothing is lost by teaching it to whole classes of young children.
These ‘saying-for-spelling’ versions of words form a series of spelling cues, ensuring that youngsters can not only spell words correctly, they will know they are spelling correctly. As long as the words they write reflect the spelling cues in their heads, they know the spellings are accurate. I often say to my students, “Isn’t it lovely, you don’t have to learn any more spellings, all you have to learn are the spelling cues, which are much easier.” Children can be quite demoralized when I start working with them, resigned to scoring 2 out of 10 on their school spelling tests. “Would you like to get 10 out of 10, every time?” I ask, and they look at me as if to say, “Pigs might fly.” But we work through the list of spellings for their next test, thinking of cues, and when I see them again I ask casually, “Well, what did you get?” They try not to grin, to be nonchalant, but the corners of their mouths twitch. “Oh, 10 out of 10,” they say airily – knowing, now, they can score full marks on their spelling tests whenever they want.
THE KEY TO SOUND SPELLING
LOOK at the word and ask:
1. Does it tally? (Is it spelt the way it sounds?)
If YES - tally it while you write it.
If NO – go to Step 2.
* 2. Can you make it tally? (Chunk it and ‘re-say’
each chunk. E.g. Wed-nes-day.)
If YES – make it tally; tally it while you write it.
If NO – go to Step 3.
3. Think of a mnemonic.
E.g. ough – old uncles get heavy
ould – old uncles like doughnuts
igh – indians get hot
augh – all unicorns grow horns
Say the mnemonic to yourself while you write
the word. E.g. ‘n – indians get hot – t’
*For Step 2 – Identify the ‘sneaky bits’ in the word before you think
of cues. The THREE SNEAKS are:
SNEAK 1 – Silent letters – must be said (e.g. lat-e, lam-b)
SNEAK 2 – Double letters – say sound twice (e.g. trot-ting)
SNEAK 3 – Letters making a different sound – say ordinary sound
(e.g. wō-mĕn)
Cursive handwriting and typing
Cursive handwriting is recommended for dyslexics primarily because it is learned ‘by the feel’, and does not have to be visualized accurately. Each word in lower case is written as a whole, without lifting the pen/pencil – the fingers steadily remember the spellings.
Capital letters, however, are drawn – i.e. you can lift your pencil between strokes. So the feeling of writing them is quite different. Then, you don’t join on to capital letters – which helps dyslexics to avoid the common mistake of writing capital letters in the middles of words: the feeling of writing them like that is wrong.
Touch typing is beneficial for the same reason: it is learned by the feel, and therefore helps the fingers to remember the spellings. It’s also a useful and marketable skill in its own right, so has much more kudos than spelling lessons as such. I always began work on spelling, at secondary level, by teaching students to type – quite often I was waylaid by indignant Year 7s who wanted to be included in the typing programme: “My spelling is awful, Miss, honestly it is!”
(See my book, Conquer Dyslexia – described below – for ways of training a roomful of typists, without having to resort to lengthy and meaningless drills, and even if you don’t type yourself… Also Section 9, Adult literacy; working with prisoners, Part C - Writing, typing and spelling.)
Coloured overlays
Another perceptual disorder giving rise to literacy problems is Scotopic Sensitivity (Irlen) Syndrome. Some youngsters find it difficult to read black print on white paper.
After years of research, Helen Irlen, an American school psychologist, discovered that many strugglers experienced a dramatic improvement in their ability to read when transparent coloured overlays were placed over the page. Glasses with coloured lenses helped even more, in more areas: copying text from a blackboard or overhead projector, using computers, and writing.
One explanation Irlen has offered is that the separate colours combined in black print can register in the brain at different speeds. This causes blurred, shaky, swirling or moving images of written words. (See Helen Irlen, Reading by the Colors, Avery Publishing Group, 1991.) The coloured overlays or glasses filter out the colours coming in at the wrong speed.
It makes sense to screen whole classes of children for the condition, and an inexpensive way of doing this is by using coloured theatrical gels. See Section 7, Testing, for more details.
Teaching all children ‘as if’
The best methods of teaching dyslexic children are the best methods of teaching all children. All primary school children benefit from being read to and reading back, rapid systematic phonics, practising reading aloud, compiling a ‘saying-for-spelling’ vocabulary, and learning joined handwriting and typing skills. Make coloured overlays generally available, plus coloured worksheets, and coloured paper for writing on.
The way forward is to teach all children as if any single child could be dyslexic.
Then no child will fall through the net, you will be stopping literacy problems before they even begin – and you will save the money that might have been spent on extraction lessons.
It is useful to identify dyslexia at an early age (see Section 7, Testing), but you don’t have to identify the dyslexics in a class in order to teach them properly. My philosophy now is to assume all children are dyslexic until they’ve proved they’re not. It doesn’t affect the way I teach them one iota. Why not do the same in every primary school classroom – and watch all the children flourish.
Conquer Dyslexia – without losing the gift
Dyslexics can be gifted in unusual ways: seeing all the way round a problem – and then penetrating directly to a solution that we lesser mortals would never have thought of.
The common theme seems to be that they can visualize in three dimensions. The images recorded in the two hemispheres of the brain merge and overlap, causing the acute difficulties with word recognition, and spelling. But it’s when two images merge that we see ‘in the round’, stereoscopically. Many great architects, sculptors, artists, chess players and IT experts are dyslexic – all fields where three dimensional visualizing is a positive asset, rather than a liability. This is the ‘gift’ of dyslexia, which often compensates more than somewhat for the struggles with literacy during the years in school.
In my book Conquer Dyslexia – without losing the gift (ISBN 0-952093-71-5), I have described this gift in more detail, plus ways of tackling dyslexia at both primary and secondary level.
It’s available from libraries and bookshops, or directly from: Felicity Craig, 33 Newcomen Road, Dartmouth, Devon TQ6 9BN, UK. Price: £12.95, including postage. Please send payment (by cheque) with your order. Overseas customers: £17.25 including postage. Please send a sterling cheque with your order.