14/03/2008 by Tony Attwood.

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14/03/2008 by Tony Attwood.

A study by The University of Hull of 1300 children has suggested that dyslexia affects a far larger number of children than was previously expected.  In fact over half those who did not achieve expected levels in SATS tests displayed signs of being dyslexic.

This raises an interesting question.  Supposing many more pupils and students than we previously imagined are dyslexic?    This would be in accordance with findings from Durham University which recently suggested that a significant number of young people suffer from short term memory problems - something regularly associated with dyslexia.

I’m interested because in the 1990s I spent several years working on a project to develop materials for dyslexic pupils and students - and what we found was something very simple.  The pupils who were thought to be dyslexic all had the same problem.  They could not (almost by definition) make much progress when taught with any of the conventional methods of literacy teaching.  However virtually every single pupil would respond if taught using two simple techniques.

The first was the making of the written language ordered and logical.   If the written language was broken down into individual rules, without any exceptions allowed, it then became possible to take these children through the processes.  The key was the order in which the rules were introduced - and indeed it was in the 1930s that the idea of starting with the letters I T P N and S arose - an idea that we followed.   Start with those letters and you get a lot of words with only a limited number of spelling rules.  In each lesson we introduced one or two new letters or new sounds - all in a very organised way.

The second was to use a multi-sensory approach introducing touching alongside saying writing and reading the words.  

Basically that was it.  An ordered sequence of learning, and a multi-sensory approach.   In the end we also concluded that testing the children wasn’t very beneficial in most cases - it was better just to get on and use this structured multi-sensory approach.   The approach helped everyone we saw, irrespective of whether the underlying condition was dyslexia or not.

Of course there will be children and students who don’t respond - there are of course other special needs.  But everyone we saw got significant benefit.   The downside was that we didn’t find a way of teaching these students and pupils in large groups - we always did it in groups of up to three.  But maybe that technique will, one day, be developed.

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