Ruhi Sen was just a few months short of the minimum age when she started KG2 at an Indian curriculum school in Dubai. Soon enough her mother Sunita noticed that her younger daughter was struggling with her words. It wasn’t that she did not know the alphabet or was unclear about her numbers but reading and writing became a serious issue.
“Here was a bright, happy, carefree child who would become sullen the moment words ‘school’, ‘reading’ or ‘writing’ were mentioned,” says Sen, who is a Dubai-based businesswoman. “Ruhi would dread school because she felt she will have to stand in class and read. I did not want my child to spend the next 14 years of school being scared”.
As the school didn’t have a student counsellor, Sen approached the principal to keep Ruhi back for another year. “I had to apply to the Ministry of Education because she did not fail her exams. Fortunately it was accepted. What was difficult was to make Ruhi understand why we held her back.”
Telling a child he or she is dyslexic is not easy. Neither is it easy for the parents to accept their child has learning difficulties.
“It was important for us to be positive in our outlook towards this finding,” says Wanda Bayer, a Dubai-based German mother. It’s just two and a half years since she realised her 10-year-old son Trey is dyslexic through an online article by Rudolf Stockling on learning differences. “Before his dyslexia was identified, we even used to wonder if he had attention deficit syndrome, since he is a very active child.”
“There are mainly three types of learning disabilities identified,” says Stockling, an Australian teacher and psychologist who has worked with children with learning disabilities for over 20 years, and at present heads the Lexicon Reading Centre in Dubai. “Dyslexia or reading difficulty, dysgraphia or writing difficulty, and numeracy or difficulty with numbers. Dyslexia is most common. We develop senses through multisensory, systematic and phonologically-based intervention to teach the brain to do something it doesn’t do naturally in these people. What a normal person will see as words or letters, a dyslexic will see as squiggles on a page because he doesn’t have the ability to distinguish them through sound — mainly because their brain thinks more in visual terms and they see the word as a unit rather than a collection of sounds. To write they have to see it as a collection of individual parts.”
“It was not just the interchanging of ‘b’ and ‘d’ or ‘m’ and ‘w’, Ruhi simply could not form the words,” says Sen, confirming Stockling’s words. “She was getting the sequence wrong. She could recognise the letters but couldn’t put them together”. Without pushing and making her daughter feeling ashamed of her difficulty, Sen nipped the issue in the bud by explaining to her daughter that she’s staying back because she was younger for her class. Also she was fortunate the syllabus changed that year so Ruhi went to a new class with new things to learn. Years later, Ruhi became the head girl of the junior school.
“We gave him [Trey] references of great minds such as Einstein who had dyslexia and yet turned out to be one of the most brilliant men the world has known.” Bayer added. “His school has a learning support teacher who gives specialised attention to groups of 4-5 kids who need help to catch up with what is taught in class. Yet, since these teachers are not specialised in dyslexia, they are unable to provide the right sort of support and understanding. We only wish that some of the teachers who noticed his problems in reading and writing, earlier on, were able to appropriately identify it to be dyslexia. School teachers need to be given sufficient awareness to catch signs of learning difficulties”.
For this reason the centre is organising a talk with mind-mapping guru Tony Buzan next week, whose technique is a widely used practice.
“When you use mind maps on a daily basis, you will find that your life becomes more productive, fulfilled, and successful on every level,” says Buzan. “There are no limits to the number of thoughts, ideas and connections that your brain can make, which means that there are no limits to the different ways you can use them to help you. Every child has a unique way of learning. Children who exhibit completely different learning styles need to be given individual attention and the mind mapping technique needs to tailored to suit the child. For children with dyslexia, it effectively helps them organise and assimilate information since they tend to be good conceptual thinkers and often very creative”.
However, mind-mapping is not the only technique in use to help people with learning disabilities.
“Mind mapping is not a cure or the only teaching technique used for teaching children and adults with learning disabilities. It is important for children and adults to cope with the difference in learning styles. Mind mapping is a way of minimising the effect of the particular learning difference and enabling them to think about the things they want to do and use it to perform at their ability level or above and helps students to try things in different ways”.
The centre uses the Slingerland approach where in the students are taught to understand sounds, associate them with shapes using techniques such as writing in air and lip reading. Phonetic connections are stressed. When the student cannot connect the sounds together, they type it into a computer and the computer tells them what word it is. This helps them learn beyond their level. Talking books can also help and encourage them to read. Finally, a speech to text or dictation is used.
Though early intervention is always better, Stockling says it doesn’t mean you cannot come when older. The more a child practises the wrong thing, without being told by an aware teacher, there will be more problems later. Also, though neither Sen or Bayer mention it, many times children with learning disabilities find it socially hampering at school.
We had approached several parents to talk to us regarding the subject but many refused outright as it’s not just mentally and emotionally stressing for them and the kids but also socially. One young gentleman who had initially agreed to speak to us retracted when he felt his chances to get admission to college could be curtailed.
Stockling agrees that this is a prevalent case in the UAE, though awareness is increasing. As of now, there are only a few schools in Dubai who have dyslexic support units. But the hope is that in the near future, more schools will employ teachers who are trained to support kids with learning difficulties and ensure that they progress at par with other students.
IDENTIFYING DYSLEXIA
Difficulty aquiring and using oral and written language
Difficulty in phonological awareness,including segmenting,blending and manipulting sounds in words
Difficulty mastering the alphabetical principle and basic decoding skills (sounds to letters)
Slow, inaccurate and laboured reading. (lacking fluency)
Difficulty acquiring age appropriate sight words recognition skills (visual coding)
Difficulty learning to spell accurately
Difficulty learning and retaining multisyllabic vocabulary
Limited reading comprehension due to weak decoding and/or word recognition and fluency skills
Difficulty naming colours, objects, and letters rapidly, in a sequence
Weak memory for lists, directions or facts
Needs to see or hear concepts many times to learn them
Distracted by visual or auditory stimuli
Downward trend in achievement test scores or school performance
Inconsistent school work
— Information courtesy: dyslexiaassociation.org.au
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Dyslexia is normally identified during the early years of schooling, around the age of 4, when a child shows an unexplained difficulty in reading despite having all the skills, such as intelligence and verbal ability.
Early detection is always helpful. The earlier a child with dyslexia is identified the sooner that child can be directed to effective instruction for their specific need and receive correct treatment that can bring them up to grade level without causing other issues such as low self esteem,frustration, loss of motivation for learning.
Accept the condition. Accept your child is different and then take steps to overcome a genuine difficulty without pressuring the child.
Seek professional help so your child does not have to face years of humiliation before learning it can be corrected.
For more information, log on to:
www.dyslexia.org
www.slingerland.org
www.lexiconreadingcenter.org
