WHAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH COMMON SIGHT WORDS?

Besides punctuation marks (touched on in my earlier post), another source of confusion for dyslexics which impacts their reading comprehension is the common sight words, which makes up about 75% of each page of text.

Dyslexics tend to think primarily in pictures and images as opposed to words. They typically get confused by the common sight words because they cannot picture the meaning. When they cannot picture those words, they cannot make sense of what they read. They are merely mouthing the words they see in a text.

A way to assess whether they know what they are reading is to get them to retell the story. Identify how many facts they can recall.

Also, ask them questions (both explicit and implicit) about the passage and you will notice that they struggle to give you the correct answers, especially the implicit ones where they will need to draw an inference or they’ll give a different version from what was in the text.

Very often while reading, dyslexics will also trip up on those high frequency words, either omitting, substituting or altering those words.

Ron Davis, the creator of the Davis Dyslexia Correction Programme says, “if you remove the reason why a problem exits, the problem ceases to exist”. Therefore, knowing the why is critical in identifying the solutions in order to eliminate the problems.