Parents are often concerned with the question of whether their child could be dyslexic or could become dyslexic. This article talks about a precursor to dyslexia that parents need to know about. The article also offers practical suggestions to help these children.
1. WHAT IS THIS PRECURSOR?
Dyslexic children fall into different categories and probably have different types of processing problems. However, a major difficulty many dyslexic children have is a problem in the area of ​​phonological awareness. This is likely to affect oral language before reading for the obvious reason that oral language, especially comprehension, begins to develop at birth. These difficulties in processing oral language may not be obvious to parents and healthcare professionals.
2. WHAT IS PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS?
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that deals with the sound patterns of a particular language and most of us develop our knowledge of phonology without any formal teaching. For example, we learn what sound patterns are and what are not acceptable in our mother tongue. Most young children will know that the / sn / sound combination is acceptable to start a word in English, but that / nb / is not. Phonological awareness is also about rhythms in language that are made up of stress patterns in words. The ability to identify and create rhymes are an important part of this awareness, as is the ability to break words down into their individual sounds or phonemes. A child with phonological difficulties may have difficulty clapping syllables and identifying rhyming words. They may also not be able to divide a word like “cat” into the three cat sounds.
3. WHY IS DYSLEXIA DISCOVERED SO LATE?
Because dyslexia is a reading-related disability, it cannot be diagnosed until the child has begun to learn to read and has shown difficulty in acquiring the necessary skills. This is the reason why dyslexia is often discovered around the age of 7. However, some parents suspect a potential difficulty much earlier, especially if the child in question is a boy or if other family members have been diagnosed with some form of language disorder.
4. HOW CAN PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS BE DEVELOPED?
Phonological awareness can be supported by playing a variety of language games with your child. Parents can make up games with their child where the child has to listen, identify or make up rhymes, depending on their skill level. Also, games in which the initial sound of a word is removed can be a lot of fun for children while supporting their phonological awareness. Children often like to do this with names. If your child’s name is Benjamin, talk about removing the first sound so that it has the new name of Enjamin. You will probably want to go ahead and play with the names of the whole family, your friends, and pets. Reading children’s books that have a lot of rhyme and rhythm together is also great for developing a child’s phonological awareness.
A series of books is currently in development to do just this and can be found at http://www.booksfordyslexics.com.