Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Reading, numbers and learning differences
Most children do not pick up reading by sitting near books. Around a fifth need very structured, repetitive teaching before it clicks, and about half of the rest still need a good deal of deliberate instruction, so structured teaching is the ordinary case rather than a special measure.
It helps to stop asking who qualifies for help and start asking how much teaching each child needs. A child left to fail badly enough to earn support loses the years when the work is easiest to do. If you are advocating in a school meeting, this is a useful way to put it: what the children who struggle most require is teaching that nearly everyone else in the room benefits from too.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God is described as the one who taught man what he did not know (Quran 96:5). Knowing is given and taught here, so a child who cannot yet read is waiting on teaching rather than short of something.
عَلَّمَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ مَا لَمۡ يَعۡلَمۡ
who taught man what he did not know
Qur’an 96:5read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Current reviews describe dyslexia as arising from several risk factors interacting rather than from one deficit, which is why two children with the same diagnosis can look quite different in class. That fits a range of need better than a clean line between disordered and fine. It is a theoretical review rather than a trial, so take it as the field's best account rather than a measured effect.
van Bergen E, van der Leij A, de Jong PF. (2014). The intergenerational multiple deficit model and the case of dyslexia.. Frontiers in human neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Reading is built from small skills that have to be taught, so the real question is how much teaching a child needs rather than whether something is wrong with them.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Invent words together. Say a made up word, pull it apart into its sounds, put it back, then take one sound out and hear what is left. The nonsense is the point, because there is nothing for memory to fall back on.
Ask someone to repeat a made up word and memory cannot rescue them. That is exactly why this small task keeps finding difficulties a clever, well practised person hides everywhere else.
After a course of intensive work, this student's sound skills moved from the middle of the range to near the top. Average was never the ceiling. It was simply where an untreated difficulty had left them.