Mr. D.

Chandrasekhar
President- Madras Dyslexia Association
In collaboration with
Indian Institute of Technology-Madras

Lecture-01
Introduction 1

Wish you a good day and greetings from the Madras Dyslexia Association.

10 to 15% of the school going children have some degree of dyslexia. Tamilnadu alone has over
2 million children having difficulties with dyslexia. You can just well imagine what should be
the level of the problem when you look at the whole country. Around 60 to 65% of these
children learn in the English language and the rest of them learn in the respective regional
languages.

All these children have an average and above average IQ. If only they are identified on time and
provided the needed remediation, they could turn out to be brilliant contributors to the
community. On the contrary if they are neglected at the school levels and if they are not provided
the needed remediation and support they will definitely fail in the academics and it does not stop
there- because of their extraordinary intelligence they are likely to turn into social delinquents.
Ultimately it all depends on how quickly they are identified and remediated.

Madras Dyslexia Association has been working for the past 26 years to help dyslexic children
through their various activities that include providing guidance, assessments, part-time and full-
time remediations and then creating a general awareness through various media. The Dyslexia
Association has developed simple techniques for identifying and remediating young children and
these have been time tested.

These remediations are now being offered through a digital mode, so that they have a very wide
access. The digital training is in different modules that include how to identify the child, then
there are modules on reading, writing, spelling, maths etc. You may go through these modules at
your own pace and learn how to help the young dyslexic child around you. You may go through
our modules at your own pace and learn them and use them to help the dyslexic children at the
primary level. In case you want to validate your understanding you may take an examination
both in theory and practical.

Primary school teachers are the best agents of change in the given circumstances. They have the
needed techniques, the children are very young and moldable and the gap between the
achievements and the actual potential of the child is also quite small. We call upon the teacher
community to take up this course and complete it with utmost sincerity, so that they will always
be able to help the dyslexic child next to them.

Thank you.