What Teachers Need to Know About Dyslexia
An Interview with Dr. Jan Hasbrouck in Honor of Dyslexia Awareness Month
The following has been adapted from an interview with literacy expert Dr. Jan Hasbrouck. Find the full recorded interview with Dr. Hasbrouck here:
In your book, you often discuss the myths we associate with dyslexia. Could you help us to dispel some of those myths?
Dr. Hasbrouck: There are some very pervasive myths because we, as a profession, started taking note over one hundred years ago of readers who, for mysterious reasons, just struggled with reading and writing. Most of these people who have dyslexia are at least quite competent, sometimes extraordinarily competent, at other things. So we had a lot of theories and opinions about dyslexia before we had the technology and the research ability to understand what was going on. Informative technology and research have only really been available to us for only about twenty years.
We’ve had many, many decades of theories. Probably the most pervasive incorrect theory — which is how dyslexia was labeled one hundred years ago — is the idea of word blindness. It seemed something must be wrong with these people’s eyes, but only when they look at printed text. World blindness really did seem like a good description. There was this notion that dyslexia is an eye-based disorder or a vision-based disorder, and that’s what many people still think of when they think of dyslexia.
But dyslexia is a neurological, brain-based disorder. It’s a physical manifestation of the brain’s inability to process the components of speech — the sound level of speech, not just spoken language. Most people with dyslexia process spoken language. We’ve relatively recently discovered that the issue lies in taking it down to the word level, and the sounds within words. So it’s better thought of as an auditory processing-based disorder. It’s not an issue with the ability to hear, although children who are deaf or severely hearing impaired often have difficulties learning to read that mirror dyslexia.
Another pervasive myth is that children with dyslexia reverse letters, write words backward, or mirror writing. That, like many myths, has some basis in fact. A lot of children with dyslexia do reverse letters. There are a lot of letters in the English alphabet that are mirror images of each other, and a lot of young learners have difficulty with B and D, P and Q, and sometimes M and N. The mythology of that is that that is an indicator of dyslexia. It is in fact an indicator of early reading development, but our students with dyslexia stay in that early development stage for much, much longer. They have a great deal of difficulty becoming skillful readers. We see reverse letters and backward writing well into the grade levels — students with dyslexia may still do that in grades three and four, whereas most students who may have done that in kindergarten at first grade have sorted that out. It is not an indicator of dyslexia.
Another myth I hear very frequently is that more boys than girls have dyslexia. When we weren’t as sure as we are today what dyslexia was, more boys were being identified as having dyslexia for varieties of reasons. We now know, though, that gender, IQ, and language don’t predispose you to dyslexia.
Do you think the understanding that dyslexia is a language-based disorder is having beneficial effects on the interventions we try with students?
Dr. Hasbrouck: It certainly should, because if we are more accurately targeting the true cause of the problem, then we can zero in on those interventions. There are still lots of areas about dyslexia that even research scientists still disagree about. But one of the areas of really solid agreement is that the primary difficulty is the brain’s difficulty or inability to process phonemes. We also have come to understand dyslexia as a spectrum disorder, so the brain can have an absolute inability to process phonemes or moderate or mild difficulty.
There’s good news that comes with that in terms of intervention: the brain is malleable to rewiring. Of course, if you’re on the severe spectrum of the disorder, it’s going to be even harder to rewire the brain, to change the brain to correct that processing. But we do know, like all aspects of learning, that the earlier we start, the better, because of what we’ve come to understand of neuroplasticity: our brains age and become less able to be rewired. We’re all better at learning a new language when we’re younger than when we’re older.
How have learning science and cognitive science changed what we know about how to identify students with dyslexia and support them?
Dr. Hasbrouck: There has been a sort of explosion of information that we’ve acquired even over just the last twenty years because of non-invasive technology that enables us to look at functioning brains. We’ve been able to look at functioning brains for quite a while, but in a very invasive way that involved shaving the head and planting electrodes in the brain and that kind of thing. Now we can do this in a non-invasive way.
With what we’ve learned from scans, we can find early signs of dyslexia even if we can’t do a brain scan on a child. These early indicators are often language-based and evident in young children around three and four years old.
As a neurotypical child’s language develops, they will begin to notice auditory patterns like rhyming around four or five years old, and they will enjoy the whole process of hearing nursery rhymes and playing rhyming games. They may even start to pick sounds and letters on their own. They see that great big “M” on McDonald’s, and they may take note of the fact that that “M,” or that sign they may not even know the name of, is the same sound as “mommy.”
Hearing is key. As a parent, I would play little games with my children like: What sound do you hear at the beginning of horse and honey? What sound do you hear at the end of monkey and money? Children with dyslexia don’t hear those sounds — that’s not a fun game for them! They won’t be able to answer those questions. They don’t hear those patterns, so right around as early as three and four years old we can take note of those indicators. If everything’s working as it should, we can get those children connected with age-appropriate interventions. For really young children the interventions look and feel like games and are often the same kind of activities that I played with my children, but with much more structure and support. It’s not necessarily a fun thing for them. We’re asking those young children to rewire their brains in a very effortful way.
Knowing what the causal factors are has led us to earlier and more appropriate interventions. But the challenge then becomes to deliver those interventions to children earlier in a way that’s age-appropriate and makes the process as enjoyable as possible.
What are a few of the most important actions that a classroom teacher could take today to support learners in their classroom who have dyslexia?
Dr. Hasbrouck: The good news for teachers is that the activities they do to support their children with dyslexia are the same kinds of things that benefit all early learners. In preschool, kindergarten, and first grade, we want teachers to be aware of and have resources to teach what we call phoneme awareness or phonemic awareness, which is part of the broader category of learning called phonological awareness.
We should have children become at first aware of and then recognize words in speech. We don’t think about that as adults, because we’ve made sense of these things. But when we speak, we’re not speaking in individual words that are separated. It’s one long string of sounds. So the one early step in phonological awareness is just helping children recognize that speech is made up of individual words.
We should help them recognize words of speech and words in print if we’re reading from a book. We should also help them separate words into syllables. Getting that sense of rhythm and awareness is critical, and we can do that with all children. Use multimodality, which we know affects learning, by having students hear the word, say the word with you, clap the word, or even having young children up out of their seats and jump with the word and the syllables they hear.
Students with dyslexia need all those activities, but more and more and more practice, and more and more often. So the challenge for our preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade teachers is to get the right dosage for our students with dyslexia to reach awareness level — the foundational precursor to being able to read words. It takes structural organization. It’s about how we manage the classroom and provide what is being called often schools a tier-two, or tier-three service, which simply means adding on to the foundational information that’s being shared for all the students in tier one, but more opportunities for practice and engagement.
