"Dyslexia" is in quotes in the above title for a reason. It's a much-misused term among those involved in teaching or researching reading.
Here are two conflicting statements you will often hear from the dyslexia community, that is, from those who research it, who diagnose it, or who offer solutions in the form of special reading curricula:
- About one in five children have dyslexia, in other words about 20% of all children.
- Dyslexia is exclusively a phonological problem. That is, dyslexics have difficulty processing the sounds in words.
Why are those statements conflicting? Because about 20% of a class of first graders will tend to struggle learning to read. If that's close to true, and it is on average, then statement #1 just means that "dyslexia" = "struggling reader."
But many struggling readers have been shown, time and again, to have various vision issues that can be corrected with a course of vision therapy. Following vision therapy, they can usually learn to read as easily as the average child.
And yet the dyslexia community looks right past the visual explanation and settles on the phonological explanation, claiming that all struggling readers need intensive and explicit instruction in phonics. They regularly ignore the possibility that vision issues might need addressing first.
Parents of a Struggling Reader Should First Consider Vision Issues
I have produced what I believe to be an excellent phonics course, our Advanced Code Phonics Workbook, but it's not the ideal solution for all, or even most, struggling readers. Yes, proficient readers should have internalized almost everything taught in our workbook, and struggling readers can learn phonics using our workbook quite quickly if they're properly prepared to use it. It's also an excellent program to catch a child up if the school's curriculum didn't teach phonics. However, experience has taught me that many struggling readers have untreated vision issues that interfere with learning to read.
Yet, school personnel will only rarely acknowledge that a struggling reader might have vision issues that should be checked out. Instead, they will recommend more intensive reading instruction, much like our own program. But if your child has a vision issue that can be addressed by vision therapy, that's certainly the problem that you should address first.
Instead, You're Likely to Hear: "Dyslexia is Not a Vision Problem"
That statement is parroted by most members of the dyslexia community. They generally refuse to acknowledge the effectiveness of vision therapy in addressing reading struggles. As I indicated above, they do this by having it both ways, by claiming that 20% of kids are dyslexic and that dyslexia is exclusively a phonological issue, hence no struggling readers have vision issues.
Now, if they wish to define "dyslexia" as being characterized exclusively as a phonological deficit, that's fine. But if that's the case then many kids who struggle with reading don't have dyslexia. They have vision problems. They might not know phonics yet, but it's because their visual systems are making it difficult to learn and apply phonics, even if it's been taught to them intensively. It's even possible that only a small portion of struggling readers have dyslexia once it's more narrowly defined as having only a problem with phonological skills. The majority might actually just need their vision systems treated.
Dissent is Not Tolerated
Now, if you take the matter of vision skills up with people in the dyslexia community, you can expect some pushback. I don't know why the dyslexia community is so set on denying the benefits of vision therapy, but it's a prevalent view among many, to the point where a dissenting voice is unlikely to be tolerated, at least among the ranks of many professionals in that community. But parents are another matter.
As a parent, your concern is not with putting a name to your child's problem. Your concern, if you're reading this, is that you have a child who is struggling with learning to read. And, unless you're exceptionally lucky, your school's professionals are telling you that your child needs more intense reading instruction, even if he's already had more intensive instruction than his classmates. You can count yourself among the lucky few if a teacher or administrator has suggested you see a developmental optometrist, and you should consider following that advice.
Why Your Child's Visual Skills Are Important
The bulk of what we eventually learn reaches our brains via our visual system. To process visual inputs efficiently, the visual system must be functioning properly. Your child's eyes must be working well together or a page of print will be visually confusing to him. And your child's visual perceptual skills must be intact for him to build the brain connections that eventually make reading an automatic process where words are recognized on sight. Without either of these, learning to read will be hard for your child.
Mechanically, your child's eyes must be working well together. Both eyes must fixate on the same spot on a page and both must move together to fixate on the next spot. Many children with a reading problem have either convergence inability or convergence insufficiency.
In the first condition, the child isn't able to easily focus both eyes on the same point at all. In the second condition, the child can focus his eyes together for a while, but tires from the effort after a time at which point his reading will become erratic. Both of these conditions, and other mechanical issues as well, are treatable with vision therapy.
And then there are higher order visual skills that fall under the heading of visual perception. There are several such skills. One is picking out an item out of clutter, such as they do in "Where's Waldo?" Another is being able to distinguish between different images, such as picking out five items in one picture that are different from another otherwise identical picture. An important one is visual memory which is used in a game where you are to turn over two tiles that you think match, and must try to remember the location of the ones that you've seen in previous turns.
Visual Perception Skills Are Under-appreciated
Once a child's eyes are working well together, vision therapists will spend time on developing your child's visual perception. Here's why that's important to achieving fluent reading.
Research has demonstrated that words are decoded, when using phonics, down a relatively slow dorsal pathway in the brain.
The child has to look at each letter or digraph, assign a sound to it from memory, move on to the next letter or digraph, assign its sound, add it to the first result, then go on to the next, etc. This is a relatively slow, labor-intensive, process.
But, as that process is repeated time after time, synapses are being built along a far faster, and more efficient, ventral pathway in the brain. Finally, with enough repetitions along the slower dorsal pathway, the synapses connect along the entire ventral pathway for a particular word. Once that happens, on seeing that word, your child's brain sends the visual image of the word down the fast pathway. He looks at cat and just says "cat" instead of "/c/../a/../t/...cat." At that point, the word cat has been automated. He recognizes it and just says it instead of having to sound it out again. It has, in fact, become a true sight word.
And here's the thing about that fast, efficient, ventral pathway. It's where visual perception skills develop. So until visual perceptions skills have been sufficiently developed, it's not yet the fast, efficient, pathway that it can be. That is why some children seem to remain stuck in decoding mode, never seeming to just know that the word is cat, even though they just saw and figured it out a minute earlier. A parent seeing that wonders if their child is just incapable. No, it's just that the route down the fast pathway hasn't finished being built yet. And poor visual perception skills will hinder that process.
A Note on Sight Words
There are two types of sight words. Those developed in the process described just above are true sight words. You see them and you know them. Put another way, your visual system takes in the word from the page, sends its image to the brain, and neurons rapidly fire down the ventral pathway, and you then instantly recognize the word as cat. Decoding it is no longer required.
Then there are the sight word lists. Those words are not intended to be decoded. They are to be memorized.
But memorization can take many routes. One child might associate the word cat with his pet. Another might associate it with a person who has a cat. There are an unlimited number of ways for a child to devise some mnemonic that he thinks will help him remember a word.
Unfortunately for comprehension, this sort of memorization isn't taking place in the ventral pathway of the left brain. No, it's a right brain activity and the right side of the brain is where comprehension occurs. So, as each memorized word is encountered, the reader has to interrupt the story line to retrieve a memorized word using whatever device he's created to do so. Then it's back to the story line until the next memorized word is encountered, which is often.
This is why people who read without using phonics show brain activity in a different area of the brain than people who built their automated sight word vocabulary with phonics. And it's also why those who've used the phonics pathway usually end up having better comprehension ability. The right side of their brain is keeping track of the story without being interrupted by having to drag out memory cues for "sight" words.
Summing Up
An effective course of vision therapy will be expensive, but it will train your child's eyes to work together well, and it will build his visual perceptual skills so that all that reading practice can more easily result in automatic word recognition. Following vision therapy, your child might still need an intensive phonics course, but it is likely to finally be effective for him.
Our suggestion, if reading instruction is failing your child, is to locate a developmental optometrist in your area and have your child evaluated to see if he would benefit from vision therapy. I have personally seen dozens of children where vision therapy enabled them to finally be able to absorb the phonics instruction that I provided.
Also, you can use this Vision Assessment Checklist to get some idea whether your child might be one of many with vision issues that interfere with learning to read. If that's the case, he doesn't have dyslexia; he has a condition that can, in all likelihood, be fixed permanently.
