Features Of Teaching Pupils With Dyslexia

As a specialist teacher, it is important to understand the behaviours which could indicate dyslexia and understand the learner’s particular needs to support the intervention process. I am dyslexic myself and as a teacher, I have always been interested in difficulties dyslexic people encounter over and above poor reading and spelling difficulties. I think in education this isn’t always widely understood. One of the difficulties many of my dyslexic learners have is a long time and the amount of overlearning needed for skills to become automatic.

The theory that a dysfunction of the cerebellum results in a lack of fluency in developing skills which should be automatic would certainly provide a strong explanation for the difficulties experienced by these pupils. Nicolson and Fawcett explain a ‘square root rule’, whereby the number of repetitions needed for a dyslexic pupil to acquire a skill is the number of repetitions normally required multiplied by its square root, is a stark representation of the enormous challenge faced by many pupils when they are developing the skills of accurate and fluent word reading (Nicolson and Fawcett, 2000). As a teacher this demonstrates the need for constant verbal repetition of skills throughout the lesson and a continuation of this learning throughout the following lessons, therefore giving as many opportunities for over learning as possible. The cerebellar deficit suggests that there is a problem in central processing linked to learning and automaticity. Nicolson and Fawcett (1990, 1994) have pointed out that even highly competent dyslexic readers show a distinct lack of fluency in written language skills: their reading and writing is more labored, more prone to error, and more susceptible to interference from other tasks, due to a lack of automaticity.

As a teacher, I have noticed in 1:1 lessons that it can take a long time for a pupil to retain information or retrieve it quickly. My current learner often comments that he can remember the word but can’t say it. Nicolson and Fawcett since 1990 have focused their research on the automation of information such as letter-sound recognition and motor coordination, which can also affect early speech. Rae suggests that the larger left cerebellum found in people with dyslexia leads to slower information processing and motor tasks, such as eye movements, compared to people without dyslexia (Rae, 2001).

However, Stoodley and Stein also point out that these motor difficulties haven’t been seen in all people with dyslexia (Stoodley and Stein, 2013). They make the point that impaired cerebella cannot be seen as the primary cause of dyslexia as some of their reading difficulties been seen across a whole range of reading difficulties. Nicolson and Fawcett have proposed a ‘square root rule’ to illustrate the number of repetitions needed for a child with dyslexia to learn a complex task compared to a child without dyslexia. For example, if a child without dyslexia can learn a task after 5 exposures to the information a child with dyslexia will take 10. Many interventions are built on repetition and over learning, continuing to review information lesson on the lesson to embed information.

The importance of repetition has also been stressed by Dehaene (2004) who suggested that ‘drills’ or the repetition of information should be done until it becomes automatic. The more exposure the stronger the neural pathways will develop. These tasks are to be cumulative and sequential. Interventions written particularly for dyslexic pupils are built on this knowledge, such as ‘Toe by Toe’ which is a form of precision teaching, being exposed to material several times until it is embedded into the long-term memory. The ‘Hickey Multisensory Programme’ takes this idea a little further and incorporates multisensory elements which will strengthen a range of neurological pathways. Nicolson and Fawcett (2008) argue that the cerebellum on its own cannot be responsible for a lack of automaticity in pupils with dyslexia as it will take in and organize visual and auditory information from the magnocellular system. If there is a magnocellular deficit resulting in faulty information and disorganized neurons being received by the cerebellum, this will impact on the storage and retrieval of information.

This is why pupils with dyslexia need more processing time. I have also found it interesting that this automaticity and the way the cerebellum stores information, including motor movements results in pupils reversing letters, forming letters poorly and the grapheme-phoneme relationships becoming as the brain is having to store and retrieve a sequence of motor movements.