Misunderstood Minds on Dyslexia

Contrary to popular misconception, dyslexia is not characterized by letter or word reversal. In fact, dyslexia is a language-processing difficulty caused by the inability to break words into phonemes. Experts estimate that dyslexia, the most common reading difficulty, affects as many as 15 percent of all Americans.

So goes this summary from Misunderstood Minds, a wonderful documentary first aired in 2002 on the challenges of dealing with a variety of  learning issues.

What mystifies many parents is where and why the reading process breaks down. Although problems may occur in any area, decoding, comprehension, or retention, the root of most reading problems, in the view of many experts, is decoding.

Reading Facts

• Roughly 85% of children diagnosed with learning difficulties have a primary problem with reading and related language skills.
• Reading difficulties are neuro-developmental in nature.
• Neuro-developmental problems don’t go away, but they do not mean that a student (or an adult) cannot learn or progress in school and life.
• When children’s reading problems are identified early, they are more likely to learn strategies that will raise their reading to grade level.

We could have written this summary ourselves!  It is why Gemm Learning exists.  It’s dyslexia programs help students resolve reading issues by working on the often unseen underlying auditory processing difficulties.

Here is a link to the PBS website on this documentary.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/misunderstoodminds/readingdiffs.html