The proportion of people with dyslexia in the population is usually estimated to be between 5 and 10 percent. Even more – nearly every fourth 15-year-old – have difficulties with basic reading comprehension, according to the latest Pisa survey.
But many cases of reading and writing difficulties could be avoided – if students are caught by the school and receive the right help early. This is shown by a new knowledge overview that has been developed by researchers at the Karolinska Institute on behalf of the Prince Couple's Foundation.
If early reading instruction were more effective and evidence-based, it would not be such a large proportion of children who leave ninth grade with great difficulties. And above all, not as many who would need extra support, but then you could put the resources on the children who have dyslexia, says Martina Hedenius, doctor of logopedics and lecturer at the logopedics program at Uppsala University.
”The knowledge is not there”
According to Martina Hedenius, one should already in preschool class train so-called phonological awareness, the understanding that words are built up of different sound units. In subsequent grades, one should work systematically with the connection between sound and letter.
It should be the most important task of the lower secondary school to ensure that all children learn to read and write. But the knowledge is not present to a particularly large extent in schools today.
Another deficiency is that it takes too long – sometimes several years – before the school acts, according to Sven Bölte, professor of child and adolescent psychiatric science at the Karolinska Institute.
We have a little too much focus on diagnosis and investigation and underfocus on early introduction of reading and writing training when one knows that a student has difficulties. Most, even those who do not have the best conditions, can mostly be trained up to a level that one can live with.
He emphasizes that students are entitled to support even without a diagnosis.
Low self-esteem
For children with dyslexia, the difficulties are usually still present in some form even after training, but early support is often crucial for how the student succeeds in school, according to Sven Bölte.
There is no evidence that dyslexia has anything to do with talent, but it is a little the effect that becomes – that one underperforms in school, gets low self-esteem, loses the desire for school and in the worst case maybe refuses to go there.
Dyslexia means a reduced ability to link letters and language sounds. The consequence is that one has difficulty learning to read and write.
Dyslexia is often hereditary and has nothing to do with intelligence or talent.
Dyslexia can be noticed in different ways for different people. Some common signs are reading slowly and stopping at certain words, reading incorrectly and missing words or parts of a word, having difficulty with spelling, difficulty perceiving language sounds in a word, or swapping the positions of letters in certain words. You can also have difficulty concentrating or focusing.
Sources: 1177, Dyslexia Association
