Lockdown reveals dyslexia failings
Teaching from home during lockdown highlighted learning difficulties for children that might not otherwise have been noticed. Katy Jones reports.
No-one expects their seven-year-old to tell them they would rather be dead. But mother-oftwo Paula Short heard that regularly from her eldest son.
Her ‘‘formerly curious, passionate’’ child began losing his spark in October 2018. He started to become disruptive in class and refused to write.
Short and her husband, who lived near Motueka north of Nelson, couldn’t understand why until he was diagnosed with dyslexic tendencies.
While the news was a shock, it helped explain his falling selfesteem, Short said.
His mental health ‘‘deteriorated rapidly’’, as they scrambled to find him the right help. Tutoring was available at the school for students with dyslexia, if they were aged eight and over, and compliant. But he was neither, Short said.
She discovered the education support service, Learning Matters, and hired one of their dyslexia tutors. One year on, their ‘‘sparky little kid was coming back’’.
But the family could have been spared the ordeal and his dyslexia picked up earlier, Short said, if schools changed the way they taught reading.
The Covid-19 lockdown period highlighted failings, she said.
Dyslexia tutors from Learning Matters saw a surge in enquiries when parents noticed problems while helping their children learn from home.
The service’s founder, Carla McNeil, said they were now booked out months in advance for the first time.
Most schools in New Zealand were using an outdated literacy model that didn’t support the way children learned to read, let alone those with dyslexia (difficulty interpreting words, letters and symbols), McNeil said.
Under the ‘‘whole language’’ model, new entrants were given books with words and pictures ‘‘and through some magical osmosis, [hope] they will absorb that word and it will be stored in the filing cabinet in their brain.’’
Research was clear that a more structured ‘‘phonics’’ approach was needed across the board in early schooling, in which children learnt to read words accumulatively through sound patterns, she said.
New entrants should be screened for things like the alphabet sounds they know, ‘‘to build up their bank of words and take those systematically into a text’’.
‘‘We now know through neuroimaging that that’s how all brains learn to read, not just a dyslexic brain,’’ McNeil said.
She was working with 26 schools that had adopted ‘‘explicit systematic phonics’’ similar to the approach in some US and Australian states.
‘‘Children who don’t come to school with neurodiversity or have any literacy learning differences, they fly further and faster than ever before.’’
Some schools in New Zealand had introduced phonics, but weren’t teaching it in an effective systematic way, she said.
McNeil, a former principal, set up Learning Matters five years ago after realising she didn’t know how to teach her dyslexic son. About one in five people have some form of dyslexia, but teachers did not get extensive training in how to recognise and deal with it, she said.
Some parents failed to notice dyslexic tendencies in early school years because children often memorised books read out in class, which they then took home to ‘‘read’’ to their parents, McNeil said.
With dyslexic people overrepresented in prison populations and mental health statistics, the model needed to change, she said.
Ministry of Education publications still reflected the whole language philosophy, and it was ‘‘irresponsible’’ to ignore research showing systematic phonics was better, McNeil said.
The ministry maintained a one-size-fits-all approach to reading was not the right model.
‘‘We know that too many children don’t learn to read through context and meaning alone,’’ associate deputy secretary pathways and progress, Pauline Cleaver, said.
But research also showed best practice included using a range of methods appropriate to individual children, Cleaver said.
The ministry was working with the University of Canterbury to develop a set of early reading texts with a more ‘‘explicit progression of phonemic/word level learning in relation to a scope and sequence framework’’.
‘‘An explicit systematic phonics-based approach within a broad literacy curriculum’’ was the best way to help dyslexic learners, who had different strengths and needs, she said.
Resources, developed in consultation with dyslexia and literacy experts, had been provided to all schools and learning support staff as part of the Government’s commitment to help identify ‘‘dyslexic-type traits’’ early, and to help teachers adapt.