About Dyslexia

Mrs. Vilasini Diwakar & Mrs. Harini Mohan

Special Educators
Madras Dyslexia Association
In collaboration with
Indian Institute of Technology-Madras

Lecture-03
Introduction-About Dyslexia Segment 1

Welcome to the classroom teacher training course conducted by Madras Dyslexia Association. In
this course we are going to learn on how to help children with dyslexia. Previously we have seen
children who have not been performing to their potential in class and have been having difficulty
in achieving success in their lives. The term dyslexia is now more well known, and we do have
strategies and tools that can help the child.

Today’s session is going to deal on how to look at into the world of the dyslexic child. My
colleague Harini Mohan and myself are going to be talking to you on what are the symptoms that
is manifested in this SLD child and how is that we need to understand him. Having done this, the
next segments will deal with all the strategies into this. Can you please take us into this world of
the dyslexic child and tell us exactly who he is.
Yes sure.

First let us understand what is dyslexia. In dyslexia the word dys refers to difficulty and lexia
refers to language. So, dyslexia means having difficulty in processing a language. So what is
dyslexia exactly? It is a neurological condition or a disorder.
(Refer Slide Time: 01:39)
Please remember it is not a disease, the minute and say it is not a disease there is no medication
necessary or there is no medication available for it, it is just a condition. What makes it very
difficult to identify is it is a hidden condition. You look at other types of disabilities and
difficulties. The minute you look at the child you can see some sort of manifestation outside. But
as far as dyslexia is concerned it is a hidden disability or a difficulty, if I have to put it that way.
And there is absolutely no manifestation and I mean other than in academic areas. Disparity
between ability level and performance. So, what do I mean by saying ability, how do I determine
ability of a child? If these children are sent for an IQ test, these children will come out with
flying colors meaning their IQ will either start with 90% or it will only go up. In spite of which
they will have difficulties in performing their usual academic activities.

It affects academic performance in about 10 to 15% of the school going children. Let us
understand this a little more, that means out of every 100 children who go to school there are 10
to 15% of them who have this condition called dyslexia. But the degree of dyslexia might vary
from child to child. So, Harini can you please explain exactly what do we mean by the various
degrees of dyslexia.
Sure Vilasini when we talk of degrees of dyslexia we are going to put the whole dyslexic
children into 3 different groups. The first 1 is called as the mildly dyslexic children, the second
group as moderately dyslexic children and the third group as severely dyslexic children. But let
us remember, we cannot quantify and say that a child is 20% dyslexic or 30% dyslexic. Now
why do we have to distinguish or differentiate as mildly dyslexic, moderately dyslexic and
severely dyslexic?

It is extremely important, because if a child is mildly dyslexic all that the child requires a some
understanding by the teacher who can give classroom accommodation and help with during
school hours inside the classroom itself. For some reason if a child who is mildly dyslexic is not
identified and not helped, he moves into the next group.

So what do I mean by saying moving into the next group? When a child is mildly dyslexic let us
assume that he suppose to be here as per as skill level is concern but his actual skill when tested
will be a little lower that means the gap between what is expected out of him and where he is
very minimal and hence it become easy for a teacher to give certain some bit of help inside the
classroom and she tries to bridge the gap.

But in case if this is not done what happens? The gap widens because the child’s skill level still
stays in the same place but the demand from him keeps moving up. So, the gap widens and hence
it may not be possible for a class teacher to just give classroom accommodation. I am not saying
the teacher cannot give classroom accommodation. But whatever help the teacher gives may not
be sufficient for the child to really bridge the gap. So, what is the sort of help that we need to
give to a child at that time? The child may have to go to a special educator or a teacher after
school hours may be twice, thrice or 4 times a week depending upon what is his necessity that
will help to bridge the gap between where he is and where he has to be.

In case for some reason if the child is not helped then he becomes severely dyslexic. So what is
meant by this severely dyslexic? That means the gap has become even more; that means even by
giving him help after school hour it is not going to help the child to bridge the gap. Then there
might be a possibility that you have got him pull him out of mainstream curriculum and then put
him in a learning center or with the special educator maybe for about a year or 2. So, that he
develops his skill and then he gets back into the mainstream curriculum. Hence it is extremely
important for each and every one of us to understand this condition and start identifying these
children at a very young age and give them the timely intervention.
So, Harini we have you just now told us that you can help the child after school for children who
are moderately or mildly dyslexic and with the severe dyslexic child he needs more intensive
remediation. Looking at it from the point of view of the child’s life, would you consider that
dyslexia is something that is short lived or is it something that is going to be with the child for
his life?
(Refer Slide Time: 06:53)

So, it is a lifelong condition. It is not something that you can’t take away. Let us understand what
happens exactly, where is the problem. The problem is more in the neural connection or the
network that you see inside their brain. It has nothing to do with the strength of the nerves,
connection is where there is a difference. So, when we give remedial help, by remedial help I am
talking of identifying the child at a very young age and then giving them the help.

Systematic remedial education -we are only going to help the child to overcome the difficulty
that this condition gives, difficulty in academic areas to start with but later on it will come up in
certain other areas too. Over here let us remember we can always help this child who is dyslexic
or an adult who is dyslexic to overcome the difficulties that come out of this condition but you
can never reverse the condition, so it is a lifelong neurological condition.

Is it also true that we can say that if you give the child the strategies to overcome or to cope with
his problems then as he grows up and as he faces newer, newer problems he is able to overcome
these because the strategies have already been given in early childhood or in the early
intervention? So, though he may have lifelong conditions, though dyslexia maybe something that
is going to be with him for the rest of his life, he is going to be able to cope and manage.
(Refer Slide Time: 08:27)

Yes, it is very much possible, and that is whole idea of talking a lot about dyslexia and also
talking about the coping strategy that we can give to these children. It is very, very important that
we give them the coping strategy as early as possible. We are not saying that difficulty will not
come up, but the children will know to cope with the difficulties that come up as and when it
comes up.

So dyslexia refers to processing difficulty. Now let us look into what are the various types of
processing difficulties that we see in children.
(Refer Slide Time: 09:03)
Vilasini, could you please tells us what is visual processing difficulty? Yes now visual
processing difficulty is the difficulty with making sense of exactly what you see. Now you are
getting a visual input, now you need to process that input to make a meaning out of it. This is a
very important aspect of learning or reading or any processing in fact for life. This visual
processing difficulties fall into some subcategories, for instance the visual discrimination
difficulty.

Now what do we mean by that? When I talk about discrimination, I am talking about looking at
the fine difference between similar looking letters or objects. Child with visual processing
difficulty will often have the B D reversals in reading or writing or spelling or the P and Q
reversals. Manifestation of the visual processing difficulty is mostly see in academic areas but it
does exist in other areas as well.

The next subcategory of visual processing difficulty is the visual figure ground difficulty. By this
we mean the ability to pick out one particular object in the background of many objects. How
this manifest in classroom? When you have board with full of written materials, the child finds it
difficult to find that 1 word where he has to copy or he may find it difficult to identify that 1
particular main idea in a lesson. So these are the difficulties that show that the child is having
visual figure ground difficulties.
Visual motor difficulties, the integration of what we have seen along with our motor movements
that is what we mean by visual motor difficulties. Now board copying exercise in the classroom
situation is literally a fine example of visual motor difficulty, he needs to see the words on the
board and with his fine motor skills or with his hand and pencil tool he has to copy it and write it
out. This eye-hand movement is what we call the visual motor difficulty and it is an important
processing ability that the child should have.

Ok, is there any other type of difficulty or a sub category that you see in visual processing
Vilasini? Yes, there are 3 more difficulty subcategories, the visual spatial difficulty. Now the
ability to find a sense of the object in space that is your visual spatial difficulty. Now
manifestation in the classroom would be in the form of writing a word on a line or finding and
locating the answer in a text. So, it is important to have this spatial ability; and the visual spatial
ability is a combination of a visual processing along with this spatial ability.

We also have the visual closure ability. Now closure as we know it is completing 1 object by
filling in the missing part, it can be an object, it can be a drawing, it can even be a sentence. A
child with difficulties in the visual closure will find it difficult to identify a car, if the wheels
have not been drawn. So when there is a missing part he is not able to fill up that missing part to
make the whole.

And finally the visual sequential ability, now that is so important because as we know everything
that we do is in sequence. We have our alphabets said in sequence; we have our spelling in the
particularly sequential way; we have a numbers which are also sequence. So that ability is a
required pre-existing skill which the child must have in order to be able to process what he sees.

So the visual processing ability is a very fine but most critical aspect of a child or in fact any
person when he is at seeing anything that he has to do in life. Yes, visual processing is so
important for a child to do extremely well in a classroom.

Similarly auditory processing is also extremely important. Could you please tell us the various
types of auditory processing difficulties that a child could have? Certainly auditory processing is
as important as you visual processing. Now by auditory processing we mean that the child has to
make sense of whatever he hears; now his hearing capacity is absolutely fine but what he needs
to do is to make sense of what he has heard. So, auditory processing difficulty can hamper his
learning or performance in class.

Again here also we have sub categories of the difficulties; the first one being auditory hyper
sensitivity. When we say hyper sensitivity, automatically means of the child is unable to take
loud sounds or when there are several sounds coming in together especially in a classroom
situation where you have the children make a noise, the teacher talking, and perhaps something
happening around the classroom, the child cannot process anything and has a major confusion in
that. So, he has generally stopped processing auditoryly completely. You mean to say that they
are not able to filter out the other sounds that you hear? They are not able to, absolutely they
cannot filter out the other sounds at all. For them it is all just 1 big noise, so it does not make
sense. So then learning does not happen, so then what would the teacher say that you know you
are not listening to me or you are not paying attention. But it is the fact is that there is so many
sounds coming in and the child who is auditory hypersensitive, then is not able to listen to any
one of those.

Then we have the phonetic decoding. Now the phonetic decoding is where the child is unable to
make out the sounds in the language. Language is full of sounds and in order to be able to read,
to spell, to write you need to decode that language; when the child is not able to do it listening
then he finds it difficult later on in the visual and maybe even in the writing. So, the auditory
phonetic decoding is absolutely in essential.

We have auditory integration, again you have decoded the sounds, you have made sense of what
you are hearing, but you need to put those sounds together to be able to make it into a sensible
word or language. So auditory integration and decoding go hand and hand, right.

Then we have the prosodic difficulty. Now that is something that happens to every one of us,
yes. When we hear lots of sounds our capacity to think in our minds, comes down. For a dyslexic
child or for a child with SLD this difficulty it is highlighted because when he hears couple of
sounds together he is unable to think. So, then again what will happen is that it affects it is
performance in the classroom.

So could you tell us more about the phonological processing difficulties that they have.
Absolutely again it is just a third step in the progression of difficulties. Phonological processing
is the ability to process the sounds in the language and to make sense of it. Now when we have
reading it goes into a lot of reading aspect and spelling aspect.

The first sub category of phonological processing is the phonemic awareness. Now the phonemic
awareness is the capacity to manipulate the sounds that you find in a word, so that you are able to
read fluently. This ability is important, so that is why most often we find that when we have
started the remedial teaching, something that we are going to go into a little later, we talk about
starting first with phonemic awareness activity, one of the most important activities.

So, a subcategory of phonological processing could be phonemic awareness. The other

subcategory for phonological processing is the phonological working memory. Now when we
talk later on I think Harini you can take us on this explanation about memory. Yes, working
memory is important and the ability to remember the sound at that instance, so that you can make
the words is an important subcategory of the phonological processing.

Phonological retrieval is as equally important as the others, because you may have the memory,
you may have the awareness but you must be able to retrieve it and especially on demand which
is difficult for the child.

So, apart from the difficulties that we see in the processing there are 2 other difficulties
especially what we call the executive functions disability. Harini please explain to us exactly
what we mean by executive functions. Sure Vilasini. Before that I would also like to tell you all
that when we have a child with visual processing difficulty or an auditory processing difficulty
we are not talking of children having in their eyes or eye sight, it is not anything to do with the
physical part of your eye, it is something that happens after the eye sends in proper input to your
brain, same way when we talk of a child who has auditory processing difficulty most often or
more or less all the cases, their ears could be perfectly fine. When they are taken to a ENT
doctor, the doctor would give a certificate seen that is hearing his perfectly fine or his ears or
perfectly fine but still would have auditory processing problem. Once we come across a child
with severe auditory processing problem, it is always better to take them to a speech and
audiologist rather than to an ENT doctor.

Now, Vilasini was talking about executive dysfunction. There are 8 types of executive
dysfunction starting from shift, planning, prioritizing, emotional control, behavior control,
memory and there are 2 other things which are not that relevant. So, let us talk of few executive
dysfunction that are very, very relevant for a school going child- planning, prioritizing or I would
also use the word management.

So, what are the various types of management that are involved? First is time management. Here
is a child who does not have a concept of time. I am not talking of simple time management
problem all of us have time management issues. Maybe because of factors that can be controlled
by us or maybe because of certain external factors. We have always been a little late for a
particular program. But where is the difference? Whenever we go, we are apologetic because we
know we are aware that we are late for a particular program. But we do come across certain
children who say they wanna use the washroom or they walk in 5 full minutes after the bell, but
they are not even aware. How do we say that the child is not aware? It is by the body language.
They do not say sorry, they walk in straight and try to go and sit in a place. So, what do we say?
We just keep telling the children that they are late and then we want that child to apologize, the
child might even apologize without even knowing that he is been a little late, without being
aware that he is a little late. So, what will happen to a child like that? The child is bound to
repeat it on all the consecutive days and unfortunately when we do not understand this as a time
management problem, we often call them as children who do not want to listen to us, or who do
not want to respect our words. What happens to this child in an exam? I know this particular
child always submits the paper without completing it, so I make a note of it and I go and stand
next to the child and say hey you have only 10 minutes and you have 4 answers to write, the
child might just look at you and may not increase the speed not because he does not know or not
because he does not want to complete, mainly because he does not know what is this 10 minutes.
Can he finish these 4 answers in the in a span of 10 minutes? So, that understanding of time per
say, more the time sense is what we are talking about, that is where some of these children could
have difficulties.

The next 1 is your material management. Some of the children do not bring their notebooks to
school you keep telling them repeatedly that they have to bring their science notebook. They
bring their notebook but it has not their science notebook, it could be their social notebook or it
could be their English notebook. Most often a child who goes to an English medium school
could have difficulties in differentiating between science, social and English. That is mainly
because the minute they open the notebook to see is the same type of figures or the structures
that you see and they are not able to really read through and understand.

At this point of time, let us remember the dyslexic children always think in terms of pictures.
That means A is the picture for them and B is a picture for them and C is another picture for
them. So when they open the notebook it is just a group of pictures put together, be it is science,
be it social or be it English and hence they are not really able to differentiate. Unfortunately these
days school insist on using the same brown cover and the same label, we do not understand that
these children cannot differentiate.

Is there color coding you may help the child. Yes, yes color coding will definitely help the child.
What is it that we can do? How can we color? Take a nice big label and put it on the notebook on
all the sides. That means if the child takes out the notebook the color should be visible. One more
thing we need to remember when we use color code is once we assign the particular color to a
particular subject, the same color has to be followed till the end; we cannot keep changing colors.
So, Vilasini it becomes very important for all the teachers to sit together and decide on the colors
that can be used.

The next difficulty that you could see is spatial difficulty. What is spatial difficulty? Vilasini, can
you take us through what is meant by spatial difficulty? Spatial difficulty is simply knowing
yourself with respect to the space around you. There is a lot of judgment required for a spatial
ability and that is something that dyslexic child will find it difficult. Because he is unable to
judge, if I am standing here and there is a table there that I need to go in between the table and
perhaps another table without banging on it or without hitting on it. So, that is spatial difficulty-
that planning that is there in the mind on exactly how I should make my steps go between the 2
tables that is the spatial ability. That requires again planning and in hence is the executive
function, yes.

So, children with spatial management problem will have difficulties both in non-academic areas
as well as in their academic areas. First let us talk of non-academic areas. These are children who
generally very clumsy they keep knocking things down, they go bang against something forever.
You could also see another type of difficulty or a manifestation in classroom. They take their bag
and they do not know they have to move only little bit to put their bag on their back. And they
could move a lot more. What will happen? He will go and hit another child and that child keeps
complaining; this is 1 of the general things that you will see.

In academic areas everything and whatever you do involves a lot of spatial arrangement, thinking
and management. Let us talk of handwriting. 1 instruction that we keep giving children is
maintain 1 finger space between words. Most children will actually keep their finger for the
initial 1 week, or so when they start writing sentences, after which they are able to estimate what
is this 1 finger space. But children with extreme spatial management problem may not be able to
estimate this finger space and hence they might put all the words together. It is a difficulty that
they have and they are not doing it deliberately. Over here we need to do something to help them
overcome the spatial difficulty or spatial management problem rather than giving them general
oral instruction.

Another area where you will definitely see a lot of issues or problem is in math. Think of
geometry it involves lot of space. They do not know as far as geometry is concerned they do not
know whether to start in the middle of the page or start from the bottom or start from the top, you
need to keep changing it depending upon the height of a triangle, for example. But these children
may find it difficult they may not be able to do it. Map work you give them a map,
they do not know where to start and where to end. And there is a possibility that you will have
Pacific Ocean map next to India not because they do not know the concept that Pacific Ocean is
not next to India, mainly because they do not know with the given complete space of a open map
without any marking, where to start and where to go. So these are some of the manifestations
that you will see with the child who has difficulties in spatial management.

The next one, the executive dysfunction where these children could have difficulties is the
thought management. They are not able to manage their thoughts very well. It is extremely
important for them to manage their thoughts, meaning the thought relevant to a particular topic
that they are expected to write and give it a good structure. Otherwise they might not be able to
cover all the points or they might not be able to present it really well.

The last one that we see is memory. Memory per say might look like it is a problem. You ask
them for the answer that they learnt 2 days back, they may not be able to give out an answer. But
ask them about to movie dialogue that they saw 2 years back, they be able to give you verbatim.
This leaves us a little zapped. Where is the difficulty? Or is he doing deliberately is the sort of
feeling that we might get.

Let us understand the types of memory based on time span, the first is short term memory and
the next is long term memory. Anything and everything when we put it into our mind or when
we learn it or when we hear it for the first time, always goes into short term memory. But from
there unless you consciously shift to long term memory it gets deleted because the capacity of a
short term memory is pretty limited. Let us take an example of learning 6 answers. If the child
learns answer 1 and 2 on day 1 and on day 2 if the child goes on to learn answer number 3 and 4,
without pushing it to long term memory, 1 and 2 might just look a little familiar where as 3 and 4
will be very, very fresh because that is where the short term memory is. Unless the child pushes
this 3 and 4 again to the long term memory, and if the child goes on to learn answer 5 and 6, 1
and 2 would be completely lost, meaning the child want remember anything at all. Answer
number 3 and 4 the child will remember little bit not the entire answer that he is learnt, but he
will remember answer 5 and 6.
So, how do we stop this happening, what should be done? Something has to be done to keep
pushing the content that is there in the short term memory into the long term memory. Most of
us what we do is we learn, we relearn, we revise it. So, what do we do we keep it actively in our
mind and we manipulate it or we do something and hence the content is pushed from short term
memory to the long term memory. This is called as your active working memory, meaning it is
the memory, it is sort of in between their short term and long term but which is extremely
important for the content to be sent to the long term memory. So, these children and when I talk
of these children, I am talking of children with dyslexia may not be able to push content from
short term to long term memory because their active working memory is not as it is for any of us.
They need certain other ways of learning or to push the content from short term memory to long
term memory. Or in other words their active working memory works a little differently. They
need certain study skills, color coding, visualizing and verbalizing to push the content from the
short term memory to long term memory.

Then how is it they are able to remember movies? That is because movies actually result to multi
sensory approach and the lot of colors through which gets transferred, that means it caters to the
active working memory, the way it works for all these children and hence they remember things
for a very, very long time.

So, Harini we have seen now how there is a visual processing difficulty, an auditory processing
difficulty, a phonological awareness difficulty, executive dysfunctions and memory. All together
when there is a difficulty in any of these areas either in isolation or in combination, this leads to a
slow processing speed. And this affects the ability of the child to perform in a classroom and to
achieve success. We have come to the end of the first segment. In the next segment we will talk
about other co-existing of conditions along with dyslexia and the skills that are affected in the
dyslexic child.