DYSLEXIA Awareness Month is celebrated worldwide each October. Dyslexia was first identified by German physician Oswald Berkhan in 1881 and officially named ‘dyslexia’ by ophthalmologist Rudolph Berlin six years later. Berkhan discovered the existence of the developmental reading disorder, later named dyslexia, while studying the case of a young boy who had severe problems learning to read and write properly despite being overall bright and intellectually and physically capable. Dyslexia Awareness Month was created by The International Dyslexia Association and takes place over the course of October each year.
Early detection of dyslexia can work miracles for a child’s self-esteem by helping the child understand he/she is not worse or less intelligent than other children, and that steps can be taken to reduce their problems at school. To commemorate Dyslexia Awareness Month, Caxton Local Media will be running a three-part series speaking to professionals and parents who have children with dyslexia and adults with dyslexia who have defied the odds and built successful lives for themselves. This week, Caxton Local Media journalist Nia Louw spoke with four professionals from Livingstone Primary School, including two speech therapists, a remedial specialist and an occupational therapist.
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Dyslexia is not a disadvantage
Remedial Specialist and founder of the Achievement Room at Livingstone Primary School, June Norrie, started teaching in 1975 and moved to Livingstone Primary in 1986. She says helping empower children is her passion. “I want to make children believe in themselves, I want them to love reading and I want them to know that they are smart. Often children who have been labelled as dyslexic don’t know that they actually are very smart,” said Norrie.
Norrie says that about five years ago, the principal of Livingstone Primary asked her to open a room in a certain section of the school that helps children with dyslexia. “I was delighted and accepted the offer, and I called my room the Achievement Room. My main goal is to empower these children. They learn differently because they are wired differently, and I prefer the term ‘dyslexic learning style’ over dyslexia because there is a bad stigma attached to the term ‘dyslexia’, and people treat it like it is a terminal illness. When children come to my room, they are so disheartened and their self-esteem is so low. I don’t like to label dyslexia as a disability – children with dyslexia have their strengths and weaknesses, as we all do, and it’s just the way they are wired. You just have to find the way they learn and then work with them from there. I think it can be a strength if you allow the empowerment of that strength,” said Norrie.
Speech therapist and audiologist Ingrid Robertson, who has been at Livingstone Primary since 1996, says that when a child is diagnosed with dyslexia, it shouldn’t be a reason for them to give up. “I’ve been at Livingstone since 1996, and about 12 years ago, I started doing the dyslexia testing at the school. Once I’ve done the assessment, I pass the children on to June, and I also work with the children in speech therapy, based on what their difficulties might be,” said Robertson.
“I also don’t like labelling a child as dyslexic – it seems there are a lot of children being diagnosed and labelled now, and I understand why, because it does help provide accommodation, but sometimes, the children and parents tend to use it as an excuse – not always, but in my opinion, it’s no reason to give up. I think it’s essential to provide empowerment and support to the child and then look at ways they can be accommodated in the way they learn,” said Robertson.
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There are different types of dyslexia
Janelle Bricknell, a speech and language therapist at Livingstone Primary, is currently completing her Award in Literacy and Dyslexia, a course that delves into a deep understanding of dyslexia and enables educators and therapists to profile learners with literacy difficulties, including dyslexia, and which provides appropriate evidence-based educational intervention, which is offered by Bellavista School. She gave insight into the modern theories surrounding dyslexia.
“There are so many definitions of dyslexia, and based on theories that I have been studying in my course, there are two types of dyslexia that have been identified. Then there is another type where you can see a mix of both of them. With the one type, there is a deficit in the phonological side: This is the person’s understanding of the sounds from words within a sentence and an understanding of how sounds and words all relate. The other side is a retrieval deficit, and this deals with the linking of a sound going with a letter, and sometimes you can have both deficits, which is known as the double deficit,” said Bricknell.
“Treatment, therapy or intervention look at providing support that depends on whichever side needs improvement – or both sides. It also ties into the transparency of a language – how clearly the sound system ties into the writing system. English isn’t a very transparent language, meaning that we have different writing and spelling combinations, and one sound can have multiple different rhyming combinations. The research showed that in languages that are more transparent, the incidents of dyslexia are a lot lower,” said Bricknell.
Janine Browning, an occupational therapist at Livingstone Primary School, says that occupational therapy can aid a child with dyslexia and help them learn how to interpret visual information. “Occupational therapists definitely play a role with your dyslexic children in that we can look at how they are interpreting visual information when they are reading words because we look at visual-perceptual difficulties. We work a lot with the letters and letter formation, and we use a very multi-sensory approach, where the children draw letters in sand and shaving cream and they make the letters with play-dough because it’s very good and well knowing the sounds of the letter, but they also need to know what the letter looks like,” said Browning.
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Browning says that there is a common misconception that reading words or letters in reverse is dyslexia, but she says that instead, it is a symptom of dyslexia. “With the reversal, like children reading ‘saw’ as ‘was’, the assumption is if they are reversing the words or letters, it is dyslexia, but reversals point to a spatial difficulty, which could be a dyslexia symptom, but it is not dyslexia – it is not the core issue.”
“We work on sequencing, as well, where we help the child learn to read from left to right on a page. The child has to learn on a kinaesthetic-movement level and on a three-dimensional level, which is why we use so many tactile activities like the play-dough. This helps them learn the letter shape in a three-dimensional form. We start with that and then we work with them on a two-dimensional level where the letter is on the page. Visual tracking is also very important when it comes to their reading skills because their eyes have to track left to right – they must not skip any lines, so if we see that the child is doing that, we note it and pass the child on to a professional, such as an optometrist, who can help with that issue. That is the role that occupational therapists play,” said Browning.
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