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Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Dyslexia—A hidden disability

by

2049 days ago
20191128

Imag­ine not be­ing able to write a cheque or to read your child a bed­time sto­ry. Imag­ine hav­ing to say that your glass­es are bro­ken so that you can ask some­one to fill in a form for you. As the world ac­knowl­edged Dyslex­ia Aware­ness Day yes­ter­day, we reached out to the Dyslex­ia As­so­ci­a­tion to help fur­ther raise aware­ness. Here’s what they shared with us:

Truth be told, there should be no one whose every­day life is se­ri­ous­ly chal­lenged like this by dis­abling dyslex­ia. Since the 1930s we have known how to teach dyslex­i­cs us­ing spe­cif­ic learn­ing pro­grammes, so that they can learn to read, write and spell like every­one else. The Dyslex­ia As­so­ci­a­tion here in Trinidad has been train­ing teach­ers since 1990. The As­so­ci­a­tion has trained over 1000 teach­ers. Dur­ing the East­er hol­i­days and in Ju­ly, teach­ers at­tend the train­ing ses­sions from all cor­ners of Trinidad and To­ba­go to learn how to teach fail­ing stu­dents in their class­rooms.

The Dyslex­ia As­so­ci­a­tion puts par­ents and adult dyslex­i­cs in touch with these teach­ers for screen­ing and the tu­tor­ing they so bad­ly need.

We have al­so known for a very long time that a core deficit in fail­ing read­ers is poor phono­log­i­cal aware­ness (the abil­i­ty to judge the sep­a­rate sounds in words; and this in­cludes rhyming abil­i­ty). The chil­dren af­fect­ed are not on­ly dyslex­ic chil­dren, but al­so chil­dren who come to school with lim­it­ed lan­guage ex­pe­ri­ences be­cause there may not be enough lan­guage in the home or in day care cen­tres; or whose hear­ing has been chal­lenged in pre-school years by chron­ic mid­dle ear in­fec­tion (some­times called ‘sticky ear’). We know that if we train phono­log­i­cal aware­ness ear­ly we can change the read­ing out­comes of these chil­dren.

We could vir­tu­al­ly guar­an­tee that all chil­dren will be read­ing by Stan­dard One, if they had just half an hour a day in tar­get­ed phono­log­i­cal aware­ness train­ing while they are in the first two years at school. The skills to pro­vide this train­ing are right here. We do not have to im­port ex­perts to do this. To date the Dyslex­ia As­so­ci­a­tion has trained 400 teach­ers in a spe­cif­ic pro­gramme to train phono­log­i­cal aware­ness, the NOW! (Neu­ro-de­vel­op­ment of Words) pro­gramme for Speech, Read­ing and Spelling. If these teach­ers were as­signed to In­fant 1 and 2 class­es, at lit­tle or no cost, a start could soon be made.

A fur­ther 600 teach­ers have been trained in a struc­tured mul­ti-sen­so­ry phon­ics pro­gramme. Most of these teach­ers are in the Teach­ing Ser­vice but not able to ful­ly im­ple­ment the pro­grammes in their schools. In time, these teach­ers could be used as ded­i­cat­ed re­me­di­al teach­ers in all ‘at risk’ schools, and as train­ing con­tin­ues, even­tu­al­ly to all pri­ma­ry schools.

Do we see the day when dyslex­ia will just be an ‘ed­u­ca­tion­al hic­cup’ de­tect­ed in the ear­ly stages of a child learn­ing to read; just a low hur­dle that the child is helped by a trained teacher and then runs off on their own to gain the prize of read­ing flu­en­cy? The time to act is now! No child should be left strug­gling to learn to read while the adults around him/her put the blame firm­ly on his/her shoul­ders. It is not the child’s re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to ‘learn to read’, it is our re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to TEACH read­ing, and to re­fer chil­dren who are strug­gling for as­sess­ment and tar­get­ed in­ter­ven­tion with a tu­tor who has been trained in spe­cif­ic tech­niques to teach fail­ing read­ers.

Lit­er­a­cy fail­ure is a se­ri­ous prob­lem. If a child or young per­son can­not read, of what use is go­ing to school? Every sub­ject re­quires the abil­i­ty to read, even Maths. Think of the class­room sit­u­a­tion and a strug­gling read­er em­bar­rassed at his/her in­abil­i­ty. The snick­ers, the fin­ger point­ing, the blame, the shame: would it not be eas­i­er to skip school, to feign sick­ness, or even to go re­luc­tant­ly to school and be dis­rup­tive to mask the dis­abling con­di­tion? As young peo­ple strug­gle with this spi­ral of fail­ure and blame, many of them be­come de­pressed, have sui­ci­dal thoughts or worse, skip school to join gangs where they can be ‘suc­cess­ful’. The link be­tween school fail­ure, frus­tra­tion, anger and vi­o­lence is well recog­nised and is no doubt con­tribut­ing to the cri­sis of vi­o­lent crime now plagu­ing the coun­try. We are reap­ing the re­sults of fail­ing to teach our chil­dren to read. In short, we are spend­ing our tax dol­lars bad­ly.

The Dyslex­ia As­so­ci­a­tion can pro­vide screen­ing and tu­tor­ing in your com­mu­ni­ty. The Stu­dent Sup­port Ser­vices of the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, and UWI Psy­cho-ed­u­ca­tion­al and Di­ag­nos­tic Cen­tre (PEDIC) can pro­vide as­sess­ment.

Con­tact the Dyslex­ia As­so­ci­a­tion

Tel: 625-5869

www.dyslex­i­att.org

Face­book dyslex­i­att


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