Dyslexia and learning to read?

‘As with all aspects of study, the adult with dyslexia who wishes to become an efficient reader must be organised and know how to process the text.’ (1)

True or false? 

When I first read the above I thought well, obviously I need to learn to read differently.  And I probably do, but there’s a nagging doubt that I have about this concept.  It seems to assume that large sections of the information that we need is dull.  In other words we need to find techniques to help us store data that we really wouldn’t want to look at were it not for the fact that it is necessary for us to know it to achieve something.  But how true is this? 

 

Who needs dull information?

It seemed to me at first that it must be true of most of the information that I take in on a daily basis, but as I thought about it more and more I realised that there’s not a great deal of dull information that I take in and I suspect that this might also be true for many people who are not dyslexic.  Let me give a simple example.

 

 

             Traffic Lights

 

 

If you sat me down and said that you would like a discussion about the history of traffic lights I suspect that I might be asleep before the end of the sentence.  If you then said that it is important that I know about this history I would want to know why, because at the back of my mind would be the thought that the only thing that I really need to know about traffic lights is that I stop at red, go at green and get ready to do something when amber appears.  This ‘important’ information is only important because it helps me to drive my car safely and thereby get to destinations that I want to get to and achieve something that I want to achieve.  In other words my interest in traffic lights is conditional on a higher purpose.  It is this higher purpose that helps me to be interested in what traffic lights do and allows me to retain the information.  If the history of traffic lights was essential to my ability to drive properly, would this then make information about it easier to recall?

 

Let me tell you a story



Let’s look at this by thinking about a children’s story.  ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,’ is the beginning of what is supposed to be one of the best opening sentences to a book.  I find it particularly easy to remember because it immediately conjures images in my mind.  So too does the phrase, ‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’ from Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.



In both of the examples above the words serve the purpose of conveying the reader into a different or a greater realm, the realm of the story.  They spark the imagination into life - but only if you like the stories.  If you do not they may cause the imagination to shrink and to go to sleep.  However, the point is that the information given is memorable because it serves a higher purpose – the whole story.

 

Word or Picture?

So, in terms of language which comes first the word or the picture?  When early humanity first got thinking did it have a list of words to attach to objects or did words emerge from images and a desire to convey something about that image to others?  If it’s the latter then maybe the opening quote is wrong and it should be that dyslexics are given the opportunity to teach the rest of the population how to relive language so that it is no longer just dull information.   Who really struggles with reading?

 

(1)    Reid, Gavin & Kirk Jane; Dyslexia in Adults, Education and Employment.  John Wiley & Sons Ltd, UK 2001.