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It is something that every teacher will have seen.

There will often be several bright children in the class, who can do most things well and have a good attitude, but fall behind in reading.

Initially everything can seem OK. But, while other children’s reading progresses steadily, these children will hit a plateau at around 6. As the text they are expected to read gets more complicated, they will get more and more confused, often guessing wildly.

Eventually their confidence begins to crumble. They can feel the frustration and concern of the adults around them, but don’t know what to do.

Because people are not trained to recognise this pattern, it is often diagnosed as dyslexia. But that is quite wrong.

Dyslexia suggests there is some underlying problem that cannot be overcome.

But these children have no real reason not to be able to read. They are just approaching it in the wrong way.

Here is what’s really happening.

A child will always approach a problem in what seems the easiest way. To a visual child, memorising the alphabet and simple words seems easy. People praise their achievement. So they think that they are reading. And early reader books encourage this with a very limited vocabulary.

So their parents and teacher believe all is well.

But problems develop as the text starts to use a broader range of words. Some children will naturally switch to scanning the words phonetically.

Others cannot naturally distinguish the sounds within the words (phonemes) and so cannot relate them to the letter patterns that represent them in text (graphemes). At least not without quite a bit of careful instruction.

And these are the children that get stuck.

They will use the context to guess wildly, taking the first letter of the word as a guide.

They are baffled by their predicament and have no idea why it has gone wrong. They can feel people’s frustration, but have actually been working hard.

One in five children reach the age of 11 unable to read properly and these children make up a large proportion of that group. It is a disaster for their academic career and working life.

And what a tragedy. We routinely watch them become confident readers in just a few weeks. They only need to be guided back onto the right path.

The label dyslexic is very dangerous. It lets everyone off the hook of actually finding a solution. And still consigns the child to a lower and tougher track through life.

Tags: Education

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