The idea of “treating” dyslexia is a little misleading. Usually when we think about “treatments,” we think of medicines, therapies or other things that will either cure a disorder or limit its symptoms. In that sense of the term, there is no treatment for dyslexia. People with dyslexia will not be “cured,” and their “symptoms” will not go away. The way your brain is wired at birth is pretty much the way it will always be wired.
However, it’s not all gloom and doom! While you can’t fix, cure, or eliminate the symptoms of a learning disability in reading, you can – and most people with dyslexia do – learn to read and spell. Strategies for teaching people with reading disabilities focus on helping the learner work around the relative weaknesses in certain areas of thinking and use the parts of thinking that are relatively strong.
The ways to teach people with reading disabilities are as varied as the people who have them. Because good teaching relies on knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the individual person, there is no one technique that is right for everyone. A skilled teacher is able to look at the learner’s testing and evaluation, work with them, and devise a personalized plan based on the particular needs of that child. This is called “diagnostic teaching” because it relies on the teacher’s ability to “diagnose” what is happening when the learner tries to read and write and prescribe a “treatment” based on that diagnosis.
It is not at all uncommon for parents of children with learning disabilities to read up on various teaching strategies and come away with the impression that there is one that not only will help their child, but is the only thing that can. While there are some very good, research-backed programs and techniques out there for kids with dyslexia, that does not mean that they are the only good ones or that they are the only ones that can work for a given child. Before you spend tons of money on a specially trained tutor or demand that a school teach your child according to a certain formula, find out more about what your child is being taught, how it is being taught, and whether it seems to be working. Good diagnostic teaching doesn’t have to come out of a manual!
Most programs and strategies to teach children with dyslexia how to read and write work from what is called a “multisensory approach.” If you think about it, the traditional ways we usually teach kids to read rely largely on two senses – sight and sound. The child sees a letter or word and associates it with a sound.
There’s nothing wrong with this approach for many kids. But for kids with dyslexia, something is going wrong in the process of identifying what they see, associating it with sounds, blending the sounds together and coming up with a final product, or with seeing or hearing words and understanding them.
A multisensory approach attempts to use the sense of touch, as well as proprioception (your sense of where your body and its parts are in space) to help bolster the process. It also adds different aspects of sounds and sights to learning to read. The idea is that, if one area is weak, associating the weak part with a stronger sense will help.
This all sounds very magical and mysterious, but it really isn’t. One example of a multisensory approach might be having a child who is having trouble learning to recognize and write letters trace those letters in a box of sand while saying the name and the sound. The relatively weak areas (recognizing the letter and associating it with a sound) get associated in the brain with the physical feeling of the sand and of moving the arm and hand in the shape of the letter. When the child needs to remember the information, he or she can rely not just on sight and sound, but also on touch and movement to retrieve the information.
Multi-sensory approaches, however, aren’t just for little kids. If you are familiar with the “Schoolhouse Rock” videos, you know that setting something you need to memorize to music helps you remember it better. In the movie Akeelah and the Bee, a girl makes it to the national spelling bee. Her main strategy for remembering how to spell things is tapping on her lap as she spells a new word.
One of the most well known programs for children with dyslexia is the Orton-Gillingham method, named after the psychologists who designed it. Orton-Gillingham is a multi-sensory, phonics-based approach to literacy learning. Each new piece of learning is broken down into very small pieces and practiced extensively, out of the context of actual reading or writing. There is always a visual, an auditory and a kinesthetic (movement) component of each skill learned.
Orton-Gillingham works for many kids with dyslexia because it is very thorough and completely multi-sensory. There is something in it for almost any kid who has trouble learning to read, so it can work for a broad range of children.
Orton-Gillingham is not without its drawbacks, however. Because of its emphasis on phonics, and later on word analysis, it spends little time on reading and listening comprehension or writing for meaning. The result for some children may be being able to decode and spell well, but having trouble understanding text and writing well-developed pieces.
At almost the opposite end of the spectrum is a whole language approach to reading and writing. In whole language, kids are exposed to lots and lots of authentic literature well before they can read. They are encouraged to read and write as much as they can for purposes that make sense to them, such as writing letters to friends. They are also given opportunities to look at stories, poems and other texts and analyze what they see by figuring out common words, sounds and endings. Comprehension and content is emphasized over all else.
For some kids with dyslexia, whole language is a godsend. Because no one is telling them the particular strategies they have to use to read and write, they are free to figure things out the way that makes the most sense to them. Kids for whom phonics is a complete mystery may be able to learn to read by memorizing huge numbers of words and filling in others through context.
The downside of a whole language approach is also that it is so open ended. For a child who is struggling, being left to their own devices for figuring out the “how” of reading (as opposed to the “what”) may leave them feeling lost. These kids will need a more systematic, teacher-directed method.