Visualising words …
September 28th, 2009
I was just looking at one of your documents and wondered why you believe that “Dyslexics, in particular are not able to visualise words”. There often have the letters moving around to start with but it is relatively simple to help them stop doing that. I should be delighted to explain to you how you can teach them and you can try it out for yourself. All the best for the great work you are doing.
hi,
I am always interested in hearing helpful advice. I have assessed and worked for 35 years with thousands of dyslexic and never found one who can properly visualize words. This has led me to believe they cannot do this. I believe that, and I work closely with Developmental Optometrists in this, the moving of letter is to do with the perception channels, because the two hemispheres are fighting for dominance and because of eye tracking problems. We help this with eye movement exercises, teaching the kids to “look” at the beginning of words and to decode a syllable at a time, and with the use individual corrective glasses.
But as I say I am very interested in how you do it. I spend my life learning form other experts.
look Forward to hearing from you
Cheers
Dawn
3 Comments Add your own
1. Teena Moore | October 8th, 2009 at 10:24 am
I live in Melbourne Eastern suburbs. My 8 yo boy has dyslexia and there do not seem to be any resources available apart from FRANCHISE type businesses which i am quite sceptical of. Can you please send me any information? Also my son was deaf for almost 6 years so speach is also an issue.
Regards
Teena
2. Antonia Canaris | November 10th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Check out Speld Victoria
they seem to offer a range of assistance. I have not looked it over personally since I am in Sydney.
contact details (03)94894344 http://www.speldvic.org.au
3. Sean Martin Hingston | November 23rd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
That is an interesting way to look at it Dawn. My understanding, and I only have the experience of my 9 year old daughter and everything I have read in the last 5 years, is that dyslexics are in fact visual thinkers, who lack the internal monolgue or ‘voice of God’ or whatever you want to call it that the majority of us have. Instead the think in pictures. Which makes them great creatives. By which I mean that dyslexics associate visual imagery to words, except for those 250 or so words in English that that have no obvious visual reference( “that” is one of them). These, is, often, as, the, of, etc. illicit a blank screen in the mind of the visual thinker. With a diminished short term memory the dyslexic then has trouble recalling exactly what may have preceded the “blank Screen” word, thus causing reading and comprehension problems. I taught my daughter phonetics, yet her first impulse is to guess the word from it’s shape, or the first syllable as you suggest. Simply remembering to employ the phonetic sounding out of words has taken a good four years for her to incorporate. It’s still not her tool of choice. Since she started at The Chuchill School here in Manhattan a year ago, she has had great success remembering how to spell words. Yet I dont known for certain if it’s through the visualisation of the whole word ( Most American schools teach the ‘whole word’ approach having abandoned ohonetics 50 years ago, sadly), learning spelling rules by rote or phonetic practices. Or a combination of all. Probably a combination. Also she worked through a year of eye exercises , as you suggest, at an LD program run by the State Uni of NY, when she was six to help her track, horizontally, vertically and to recognize letters shapes, numbers etc. and also with lenses that exercized her focus transitioning from up close to a metre away.
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed