Deborah Sensel-Davis | Dyslexia Tutoring

Dyslexia Tutor

Living with dyslexia—whether in your own brain, or in the brain of someone close to you (often both)—can seem like a life sentence to the tortures of reading stuff that makes little sense and the hard labor of attempting to write words that have no relationship to what’s happening in the real world. Spelling exists only to prove that most of the world is smart and those who don’t “get it” are stupid. Someone else’s fifteen minutes of nightly homework turns into hours of frustration, arguing, humiliation, and anger that affects the whole family. Night after night. Months turn into years with no signs of him “growing out of it” or her developing into “the potential evident in her spoken vocabulary”.

A tutor skilled in the Orton-Gillingham approach to teaching reading, writing, and spelling, in conjunction with additional insight into delving down deep in the structures of written English can help a dyslexic student explore the popular “mysteries” of our writing system. What was previously thought of as the unknowable “craziness” of English spelling can be a rich exploration of history/ancestry etched/woven into the DNA of every word. Students of all ages can possess a gut-level understanding of how English written language works. No memorization required (almost).

A three-page report assigned a month in advance morphs into a “strategy” of timelines; mini-deadlines; and schedules carefully blocked out for research, brain-storming, outlining, rough drafts, Mom’s proof-reading, editing, final draft and accompanying visual aids completed twenty-four hours prior to deadline. Except the research never seems to fully launch and the three-pages looks like it will barely make it to two. After the child storms off to bed in tears, Dad types and prints out the report—with only a few carefully placed spelling errors so it looks like his kid actually wrote it (Dad’s done this before). Using her best messy handwriting, Mom finishes up the math homework. The kid’s three-dimensional model of a frontier fort painstakingly built out of popsicle sticks and cardboard—over the entire holiday weekend blocked out for research and brainstorming—is stunning in its accuracy and design.

What is dyslexia? The human brain evolved over millions of years to express and understand communication via spoken language—individual sounds (phonemes) uttered in sequence over time. The speaker communicates thoughts and ideas vocally and the listener receives the message through auditory senses, then processes the meaning in the brain. Written communication—using visual symbols arranged sequentially on a blank surface—is a much more recent human invention.

A writing system used a few millennia ago for Latin (the Roman alphabet) was adopted by a select few English-speakers a mere twelve centuries ago (give or take). At first it was adapted to record the Germanic languages of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes (lumped into “Anglo-Saxons”) and Vikings who had rarely written anything down before (at least that survived to be found). Over the centuries, English spelling and writing has constantly evolved to reflect changes in spoken English as the language traveled around the world and through time.

Average non-dyslexic readers/writers can very efficiently adapt oral language and other pathways in the brain for the tasks of reading and writing. Such is not the case for the 5–20% world’s population who are dyslexic—definitions of “dyslexia” vary, as does the severity of its effects. The problem is not in the dyslexic’s vision, but in the brain pathways used to analyze and understand the sequence of graphic symbols they “see” on the page. Their brains utilize much less efficient pathways and connections in the brain, requiring significant extra brain power to learn reading, writing, and spelling skills.

Dyslexics are born with this brain and will grow into adulthood with the same brain. They probably have close relatives with a similar brain. They will never “outgrow” dyslexia. Nor does it affect their intelligence and creativity. They may even have superior intelligence and outstanding oral language skills. Contrary to popular education system “beliefs”, scientific evidence shows the dyslexic brain is actually working overtime on school-related tasks. School performance, with its heavy emphasis on reading, writing, rote memorization, and rule-following expectations can be especially taxing for students with dyslexia, requiring the most effort on the things they are least efficient at. They often require extra processing time (in short supply at most American schools) and may have additional deficits that contribute to the need for more explicit instruction, additional repetition, and practice to achieve “ownership” of new material. This doesn’t mean that new material cannot be mastered, just that it will take extra time and effort to get there.

Despite the toll taken by consistently being told they are “lazy”, “inattentive”, “not trying at the level of their potential”, dyslexics often excel in areas that are not held hostage to the grueling standards of fast reading skills (often mistakenly called “fluency”) and the red pen comments censuring less-than-perfect written spelling and grammar.

Fortunately, the brain is a beautifully plastic organ/instrument, capable of learning new ways of doing things. With explicit, skilled instruction—and student-led exploration—dyslexic students can become competent (though not fast) readers. Some actually far exceed this benchmark.

Reading is a “receptive” skill, used to interpret the written communication of other people. Writing, on the other hand, is an “expressive” skill, requiring the generation of unique ideas that must be coherently transcribed onto a page so the intended reader can successfully comprehend the intention of those ideas. Not an easy task. While most dyslexics have little difficulty coming up with great ideas to express, they may always struggle with mastering the writing system—especially spelling. But by delving into the “how” and “why” of written English, they have a more than fair chance of developing a deeper understanding of the content they read. And perhaps even come to enjoy doing it.

What happens in tutoring sessions? All lessons are individualized for the unique needs of each student—there is no “curriculum”—and begin with the multisensory, systematic, phonetically-based, Orton-Gillingham approach. Learning the letter-to-sound (grapheme-phoneme) correspondence of our alphabetic written communication is the foundation of what we do, but exploration at the word and sentence levels of written English is crucial to mastering a system that can make our thoughts “visible” to others.

At their simplest, O-G lessons consist of reading (decoding), writing (including proper letter formation) and spelling (encoding). Once the student can demonstrate a reasonable—not necessarily perfect—understanding of the one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correspondence, lessons quickly come to encompass higher-level concepts such as English language etymology (Where do these words come from? And why are they spelled that way?) and morphology (What “chunks” of the word have meaning?) and semantics (What do we have to do to words to create sentences that make sense and convey our ideas?).

This all may sound like overly detailed nit-picking and a hyper-focus on rigid rules. Nothing is further from the truth. The English orthography system—spelling—evolved over centuries to most elegantly portray the million plus words at our disposal. The historical origins of every English word is forged right into its spelling. Sift through the evidence and the path any word traveled through time is revealed. Understanding how our written words are built is the optimal key to unlocking the “mystery” that is reading and to allow complete freedom in communicating our thoughts and ideas in a “voice” that is visible to others.

How often and for how long? Consistency in attendance and a willingness to explore new ways to look at words are crucial for significant progress. Two lessons per week (approx. 50 minutes each) is recommended to maximize skill growth, but one lesson per week with steady attendance and positive attitude can also give substantial benefit.

There is no “cure” for dyslexia. Fortunately, the human brain is designed for learning new things and the dyslexic brain is no different. A major aim of O-G based tutoring is to achieve an adequate, accurately fluent reading level—not the “speed” most American schools equate with “fluency”. Each person has unique deficits and capabilities and it’s difficult to predict for each student “how long” this can take. At the Children’s Dyslexia Center, students with regular twice-a-week attendance often attain grade-level reading in one to two years, sometimes three.