I am sure many parents can identify with the scenario depicted in the video below. It explains how a picture thinker and disorientation could lead to the challenges a dyslexic encounters, as well as suggestions you can adopt when communicating with them without getting frustrated.
0 Comments
From time to time, I will hold sharing sessions for parents of dyslexic children. Besides creating an opportunity for parents to meet and share their journey, I also wanted to create awareness about the intervention programme that helped my daughter correct her dyslexia and allowed her to tap into her full potential. Many parents did not know that there are alternative intervention programmes available to help dyslexics and most have not heard about the Davis Dyslexia Correction Programme, an approach that was developed by Ron Davis, who is himself dyslexic and autistic. Some queried if its evidence based so I thought I'll put the research here for anyone who is interested to find out more. It is widely believed that human beings think in two different ways, “verbal conceptualisation” and “non-verbal conceptualisation”. Verbal conceptualisation means thinking with the sounds of words. Non-verbal conceptualisation means thinking with mental pictures of concepts or ideas.
Dyslexics are non-verbal/picture thinkers. Very often, when dyslexics look at words that describe real things, they don’t cause much trouble. In non-verbal thought, we can think with the word dog easily if we know what dog looks like. The animal we call “dog” is the literal meaning of the word dog. Seeing its picture is seeing its meaning. It is impossible for a non-verbal/picture thinker to think with words whose meanings can’t be pictured, such as common sight words ‘by’, ‘the’, ‘if’, ‘to’, etc. These common sight words trigger disorientation in a dyslexic because he/she does not have a picture of the meaning of the word. All words have three parts to it: 1) what it means, 2) what it looks like and 3) what it sounds like. To truly master a word is to know all three parts. Dyslexics often have missing picture of the meaning of a trigger word (which is often common sight words), and when that gap is addressed, the trigger word stops causing confusion for them. |
Categories
All
Christina TanChristina has a Diploma in Disability Studies and is a licensed Davis Facilitator. |