Business & Finance

Most teachers of 5 and 6-year-old children will tell you how baffled they can be by this phenomenon.

There will often be several bright children in the class, who can do most things well and have a good attitude, but fall behind in reading.

Stranger still, everything seems OK at first. But then they start to fall behind and eventually hit a plateau at around the age of 6 or 7. As the text gets more complicated they start to guess wildly and they become steadily more confused.

And then their confidence collapses under the pressure. They can feel everyone’s concern and don’t know what to do to fix the problem.

Because people are not trained to recognise this pattern, it is often diagnosed as dyslexia. But that is quite wrong.

Dyslexia suggests a fundamental problem with reading, despite normal intelligence.

But these children have no real reason not to be able to read. They are just approaching it in the wrong way.

Let me explain the process.

A very visual child will find the alphabet easy to memorise. Then the first words they are show they will memorise as well. Everyone praises their progress and as far as they know, they are reading. The early reader books feed into this by using a very limited vocabulary that repeats a lot.

So all seems well.

But this approach implodes on them as the text gets more complicated. Some children will be able to switch to decoding words phonetically, because they also have a strong natural auditory ability. They can see how the sounds within the speech relate to the text.

The rest stay with their natural visual approach, unless carefully guided away from it. They just cannot hear the phonic structure of the words without the right help.

And these are the ones that have major problems.

They become more and more addicted to wild guessing, using the context and the first letter of the word as cues.

They are baffled by their predicament and have no idea why it has gone wrong. They can feel people’s frustration, but have actually been working hard.

One in five children reach the age of 11 unable to read properly and these children make up a large proportion of that group. It is a disaster for their academic career and working life.

And what a tragedy. We routinely watch them become confident readers in just a few weeks. They only need to be guided back onto the right path.

The label dyslexic carries a great risk that everyone will just relax into acceptance of the situation as inevitable. That leaves the child to deal with a much harder path through life.