Understanding Dyslexia: a Brain Disorder that Prevents The Comprehension of People

What is Dyslexia?

Dyslexia is a brain disorder in which prevents people from reading, comprehending what was read, and reading at an average pace. Dyslexia isn’t entirely about letters flipping and disappearing but rather taking a different dimension for those who have it. While dyslexia isn’t talked about so often, 1 in 5 people have symptoms of dyslexia. It is the most common case of a disability in reading, writing, and spelling difficulties.

To exactly pinpoint dyslexia in the best way possible, it is neurobiological in nature: it is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterised by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. People with dyslexia have difficulty with accuracy in their reading fluency (ability to visually and verbally read), and difficulty in word recognition. Some red flags may include but do not define dyslexia include poor spelling and poor decoding abilities. Decoding in phonology is the ability to break down a word, sound it out, read it, and make education-based guesses on what is means: unfortunately it is something that people with dyslexia are not always able to do. It is primarily a phonological and visual deficit.

Some may ask if it has anything to do with race or socioeconomic status: nearly the same percentage of people from different ethnic backgrounds and socio-economic backgrounds have dyslexia. Furthermore, as far as gender, nearly the same percentage of males and females all have dyslexia. Research suggests from brain imaging studies show that children with dyslexia in all languages all showed the same brain deficits involving difficulty in processing in verbal information. Individuals with dyslexia often have difficulty in understanding the sound structures of words: segmenting and blending. Some more red flags as far as interpreting visual material include mis-sequencing or the reversal of letters or numbers, the reader seeing letters move across the page, the reader losing their place when reading across lines of print, and feeling sensitive to the white glare of a page or board or screen. Furthermore, students sometimes develop issues with auditory/speech skills that stem from difficulties in processing visual information. What this looks like is one having trouble breaking words into sounds, one having a difficult time building strings of sounds into words, problems understanding the way sound works within words, and difficulty hearing the difference between sounds.

The main characteristics include speech and word discrimination, phonological memory issues, issues in their phonological learning, issues in their phonological retrieval, and issues in their phonological reproduction. Returning to the red flags of dyslexia, the broadest way to put it would be difficulty in language, reading, writing, and social-emotional indifferences. With the proper insight and information on the basis of what Dyslexia is, it would now be possible to cater to a student with Dyslexia. What educators need to keep in mind is that with this disability, children are not unable to read or apt to failure but rather need more supports and options in learning how to read. The number one thing to do with dyslexic children is to constantly repeat. What this may look like is:

Say ‘M says mmm.’ During this small activity, the child must follow each step the teacher makes, and the teacher must be patient and guide the child, not do the work for the child.

While Dyslexia has yet to reveal more solutions to catering to it, children with this disability are not bad readers intentionally but rather readers who view letters differently than most.