The Dyslexic Advantage (24 page)

The first key principle is interest.
Individuals with dyslexia learn best when their interest is engaged.
This phrase should be carved into the wall of every classroom. A state of heightened interest is often the
only
condition under which individuals with dyslexia can engage texts deeply enough to make progress with reading skills. That's why the first step in any form of reading practice should be to find something that the student
wants to read
. A book, magazine, website, comic strip, or anything else that truly engages the student's interest will always be better—even if it seems a little advanced for the student's current skill level—than something that seems more appropriate in difficulty but fails to capture the student's attention.

Interest is also important for selecting the right reading materials because a student's background knowledge can provide context and vocabulary that help the student “fill in the blanks” and identify difficult words. Students with strong M-strengths often enjoy books and magazines about physics, chemistry, engineering, inventions, mechanics, computers, airplanes, architecture, landscaping, automobiles, design, fashion, or other topics that engage their spatial interests. Students with impressive I-strengths often enjoy reading books that feature humor, interesting analogies or metaphors (like poetry, mythology, or fables), and multidisciplinary or big-picture approaches to complex topics like the environment, military or world history, or psychology. Students with strong N-strengths may enjoy books with a strong narrative element, like stories, fables, myths, histories, or biographies. Students with strong D-strengths are often drawn at younger ages to books of fantasy, science fiction, or mythology; and when older to books of mythology or to historical fiction that deals with imaginary or past worlds; or to books about business, economics, and finance; or to magazines that feature articles on entrepreneurship and technology. Of course, the individual student is typically the best source of information about what he or she finds interesting.

The second key principle is to take advantage of the top-down, big-picture, contextual processing strengths that many dyslexic students possess. One of the best ways to do this is by equipping students with a general idea of what they'll be reading
before
they begin to read. This practice has been consistently shown to improve reading fluency and to increase the pace of learning. There are several ways to perform this pre-equipping. First, the student can listen to the passage he or she will attempt as it's read aloud by a tutor or a recording. Second, the student can read or listen to a summary of the passage (e.g., from SparkNotes or CliffsNotes or a tutor). Third, reading books that are part of a series pre-equips students because such books usually contain familiar stories, words, characters, and contexts. Fourth, for longer stories the student can watch a film version before reading the book. As a variation of this approach, we've found that many students enjoy watching movies, then reading the script for the same movie, which can often be found on websites like the Internet Movie Script Database (
www.imsdb.com
).

The third key principle is to make sure before starting that the student knows all the words he or she will encounter in the text. Taking time in advance to point out difficult words and to make sure those words are understood and can be recognized will make fluency practice more effective.

The fourth key principle for fluency practice is to make sure that the author's sentence structures are easy for the student to understand. Many students with dyslexia (especially younger ones) have working memory challenges, which make comprehending longer and more complex sentences difficult for them. For these students, an author's choice of words, sentence lengths and structures, and topics can dramatically affect their comprehension and fluency. Students can usually tell whether a particular author “fits” their style of thinking well within a page or two. Authors who stick their subject right up front and avoid complex clauses and passive constructions are generally easier for dyslexic students to grasp.

With these key principles in mind, let's look at three different types of fluency-building practice.

 

Practice That Builds Quick and Accurate Sight Word Recognition.
The first and most basic type of reading fluency practice focuses on building strength and accuracy in decoding and identifying individual words. To read fluently, a reader must be able to decode quickly and automatically and to recognize many common words by sight.

Although many students hate to hear this, for building these skills there's really no substitute for oral reading practice. Oral reading forces readers to accurately identify each word in a passage, and this requirement simply can't be enforced with any other type of reading.

For beginning readers, the method known as
guided repeated oral reading
has been shown to be the most effective. In this method, a “guide” first reads a passage of appropriate difficulty aloud as the student reads along silently. When the guide finishes reading, the student reads the same passage aloud. This passage is practiced daily until perfect fluency is achieved. For beginning readers one paragraph may be enough, but passages should get longer as the reader progresses. Eventually the reader may be skilled enough to skip the first reading and may instead simply read passages aloud while a guide or tutor follows along to check for accuracy and to point out mistakes.

When individuals with dyslexia read well enough to accurately identify most words in the passages they read, they can focus on faster silent reading. They can also practice building their speed by reading along silently while listening to a recorded book.

Beginning readers can also build sight word recognition by practicing with flash cards of some of the most common words. Lists of these words are posted on many websites and can be easily found by using the search term “Dolch words.”

 

Practice That Builds Fluent Word-Level Problem-Solving Skills.
Practice reading silently and independently can also help students build the kind of top-down problem-solving skills that allow them to guess the meanings of words they can't easily decode. For practice of this type, books or magazines with lots of pictures can be useful, as can being pre-equipped with an outline or summary of the passage to be read. Students should be encouraged to read quickly and to avoid getting bogged down on words they can't immediately identify. They should be told to read primarily for context and overall comprehension, and simply fill in the blanks as they move along. This kind of practice isn't sufficient by itself to build a truly skilled reader, but it does encourage stamina, interest in reading, sight word recognition, problem solving, and top-down contextual reasoning.

 

Practice That Builds Speed.
Reading is like riding a bicycle: you need to move forward at least a certain speed to make it work. Many individuals with dyslexia have learned to decode individual words reasonably accurately but still read so slowly or laboriously that they can't absorb a coherent message from the sentences and paragraphs they're reading. Often individuals who decode relatively well but still read slowly aren't identified as dyslexic. Instead they get noticed for underperformance, inattention, lack of persistence with reading, or their tendency to avoid reading altogether.

Students who read accurately but slowly should practice reading along with a guide or with recorded books to help build up speed. Just as with exercise, where a treadmill that forces you to go its speed can keep you moving faster than you might choose to go on your own, reading along with a recorded book can promote faster reading. Newer electronic devices—including the text playback systems on most computers and e-readers—can often be adjusted to different playback speeds, so students can gradually increase their speed of reading.

 

Fluent reading also requires a well-functioning visual system, which is something many persistently slow readers lack. There's considerable controversy in the reading community about the role of vision and visual interventions in dyslexic reading challenges. We reviewed this controversy in detail in our book
The Mislabeled Child
, and as we wrote there, there really does seem to be a subset of individuals with dyslexia whose inadequate visual skills delay their reading progress and who can benefit from visual evaluation and treatment.
⁴

These individuals in some ways resemble those we described above who have difficulty discriminating word sounds. While standard phonics training will eventually help most of the latter individuals improve their auditory discrimination skills, the speed with which they develop these skills often accelerates—in some cases greatly—if they receive computer-based auditory training. Similarly, visual training can accelerate progress for readers with severe visual symptoms. While reading practice by itself eventually improves visual functions in many (but not all) individuals, visual treatments can enhance the rate of reading development for people with severe problems with eye movement control and focusing. For some, the differences can be dramatic and can prevent prolonged underperformance or often uncomfortable symptoms like eyestrain or headache while reading; visual wobbling (where the letters seem to move); eye tearing; doubling of visual images; skipping lines or frequently losing place while reading; or behaviors like squinting, tilting the head, closing one eye, or putting the head very close to the page. Individuals with dyslexia who often experience visual symptoms while reading or doing other forms of fine-detail close-up work deserve a thorough visual evaluation. The appropriate specialist to perform this exam is a developmental optometrist who has specialty training in the kinds of functional eye skills that allow the eyes to work well for fine-detail work. These specialists will usually have the letters F.C.O.V.D. in addition to O.D. after their name, and many can be located at
www.covd.org
.

To
comprehend
written materials, a reader must understand not only the meanings of the individual words used but also how those words relate to each other at the sentence level, and how higher-level language features like literary style, genre, implied meanings, and metaphorical language affect passage meaning. The reader must also have sufficient working memory capacity to keep all this information in mind during processing and must read fluently enough to register all the information before the memory tracing fades away.

It's important to recognize that not all problems with reading comprehension are caused by dyslexia. Students who read fluently and decode well but still comprehend poorly generally have other issues with attention or language. In contrast, students with dyslexia will generally show problems with decoding and fluency but will understand texts much better when hearing them read than when reading themselves. This difference helps pinpoint the source of their comprehension problems to the reading process itself.

Fortunately, once problems with decoding and fluency have been solved or bypassed through the use of recorded texts, the MIND strengths often make individuals with dyslexia especially good at comprehending texts. I-strengths often aid in recognizing associations (like symbolism, analogy, metaphor, irony, humor, or relationships of correlation or cause and effect), in using different perspectives or points of view to analyze texts, in comparing different texts to each other, and in identifying big-picture elements like gist and context. N-strengths can help dyslexic readers create scene-based imagery and keep track of the narrative threads connecting different parts of texts. D-strengths can help individuals with dyslexia think ahead as they read, which can make them very active, imaginative, and analytical readers. People are often surprised when we tell them that many of our older students choose to major in subjects like English literature, comparative literature, or history, fields that require a lot of reading, but when problems accessing textual information are solved, dyslexic students often become ideally suited to these subjects. In the next section, we'll discuss ways of increasing access to textual information for all students with dyslexia.

The fundamental point of reading is to gain access to written information. Fortunately, with advances in technology that allow verbal information to be stored and transmitted in many ways, there's no longer any reason why individuals with dyslexia should lack access to information of any kind.

Civil rights advocate Ben Foss is a great example of how viewing dyslexic challenges as an issue of information access rather than as reading issues per se can lead to creative approaches at school and work. Ben is currently executive director of Disability Rights Advocates, a national civil rights organization that seeks equality and opportunity for people with disabilities. But until recently he worked as director of access technology at Intel's Digital Health Group, where he supervised the development of assistive technologies for individuals with disabilities. Ben's final project was the Intel Reader, a portable device small enough to carry in a purse or backpack that combines a digital camera with a text-to-speech reader. It can be used to read aloud, at up to five times normal speed, any kind of printed text that's in a location where it can be digitally photographed—whether from books, magazines, package labels, or signs on walls. The idea for the Intel Reader first started with Ben, and his team ultimately received two U.S. patents for technology related to its design.

Ben's interest in making texts more accessible to dyslexic readers came from his own experience as an individual with dyslexia. Learning to read was so hard for Ben that he abandoned it—in the conventional sense. As he told us, “You want to insult me really fast: tell me you can teach me to read. Because you can't. I've done all the remediations there are, and they just didn't take.”