Note: I have a Teaching Certificate in Dyslexia obtained in July 2005. So, don’t listen to anyone saying otherwise. Why do people lie about things they don’t know is beyond me. There is a Tamil proverb for this exact thing. Keep one’s large mouth shut to avoid getting in trouble. A not so polite version is, 'Don’t open your big mouth and get your backside hurt.'
From all that I have read since I started researching dyslexia, I understand that there is no cure for dyslexia. There is no cure for exactly what I am not sure. They say dyslexia is a lifelong issue.
It is said that the brain has trouble processing what it reads, especially breaking words into sounds or relating letters to sounds when reading. This is the only aspect that I am concerned with.
I know why dyslexic students have problems with decoding and blending. I have explained this with corroborative examples in my book Shut Down Kids.
I have likened the problem to pouring poison in the well and then giving antidotes. What is the poison? I decided to find out by teaching kids who were intelligent but could not read in English. I discovered that they could read in Malay and Pinyin.
The ‘poison’ is teaching kids the alphabet with extraneous sounds. Here is a video of how letter sounds should be pronounced and videos on how they should not be pronounced. LINK.
Here is another video on clipping the sounds. LINK.
This was my challenge to Julie Safri – to show me one kid who could not read in English and pronounced the consonants as per the video. None of my students could sound out letters correctly. Once they were taught to unlearn the sounds learned and replace them with the correct sounds, they were on the way to becoming good readers surpassing other kids in their class. Most of my students are professionals.
I have many examples of students I have taught. One of them with a psychological assessment is found here. LINK. Ask yourself, how I dared to tell the parent that I could teach the kid to read within four months even after seeing the psychological report.
I also teach parents from overseas and pinpoint why their kids can’t read by listening to recordings of the sounds of the letters. One example is a kid in Australia whose mother I met on Twitter. LINK.
I know many dyslexic adults I have discussed with. Some of them have Auditory Processing Disorder which is beyond me. Some have sequencing problems, some have problems with direction, time-keeping, multi-tasking, and communication. Some find left and right instructions difficult to follow.
I have written about the good and bad days of my first student with a dyslexic certificate from Singapore and Sydney. On his ‘bad’ days we did not do reading. I’d read a story to him and chat.
I have also written about his problem with fractions. He could not understand how ½ was bigger than ¼. I tried explaining for days and was unsuccessful until I took an orange, cut it into two and showed what ½ was. Then I cut it further and explained what a quarter was. I told him the denominator was the number of times one orange was cut into. Once this concept was understood he had no problem with fractions. Once a dyslexic kid can understand something, he has no problem.
I decided to call all my students Shut Down Kids. Some came with certificates and many without. However, the common thing among them was they could not read in English but could read in Malay and those who went to vernacular schools could read in Pinyin.
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