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Dyslexia is one of the most widely known, but greatly misunderstood, disabilities in children. While most people understand that Dyslexia is a form of reading disability that makes fluent reading a difficult task for a small percentage of individuals, many people still believe that it is a visual-based deficit.
The popular notion of dyslexia is that people with such a disorder literally "see" letters and letter combinations backwards or reversed. However, there is research more than 15 years old which indicates that there is no difference in the visual acuity between good and poor readers. The National Institute of Health (which has been conducting longitudinal research in reading for many years) concedes that the research to date indicates that we know less than half of what there is to know about how people learn to read. This is not unusual since studying the working of mental capacities is limited by our inability to concretely measure what we cannot observe. Still, there is some logic to abandoning the notion of dyslexia as a visual disability.
When children are first exposed to the concept of written letters, it takes some time for them to understand that, while most things in their world retain their meaning in any position (a spoon is still a spoon when it is turned upside down), suddenly, letters can change meaning depending on which direction they are facing.
Consider "b", "p", "d" and "q" as examples. Add that to the increasing need to both distinguish the sounds of language as individual units and learn to combine them into syllables and phrases. Just when children start to understand that letters have a specific orientation and specific sounds, they are then exposed to the exceptions, and, unfortunately, in the English language, there are many irregular spelling patterns (Who hears the letter "f" in "enough"?).
Basically, learning to read is a task of trying to crack the code of language, learn its specific sounds and remember those unique exceptions. Many children are able to learn these patterns and the irregularities through the repeated experience of reading. For the dyslexic reader, however, the code is simply not that easy to crack, and in his stumbling efforts to identify words in connected text, he finds himself "mixing up" letters and letter patterns. Even the most proficient reader has a "mind's eye" that sometimes "sees" or fails to see a letter in something he reads (reading "thorough" as "through" for example). Research tells us that when we read, we must rapidly scan and identify every letter and word that we process, and in that course of action, we will naturally make errors. For those readers who are slower to see the patterns in the code of our language, these errors are more frequent.
To challenge the idea that dyslexia means that someone literally "sees" letters in reverse, questions yourself-Why would such a visual deficiency be limited to only written letters? Other visual difficulties, like nearsightedness do not exclude themselves to certain objects, so why is it so easy to believe that one could actually see only written symbols backwards. If dyslexia were truly a vision-based disorder would disabled readers see other images in reverse and find themselves driving on the wrong side of the road?
Sadly, the popular media continues to endorse the notion that dyslexia is a vision-based deficit and families continue to ask for the wrong types of evaluations and solutions for their children. Dyslexia, in truth, is a language-based reading disability that, while not entirely correctable, can be supported with hard work and a strong system of phonics-based instruction combined with increased opportunities to read and re-read quality books.
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