The Dyslexia Debate

In response to the wholesale damage wrought by whole-language reading programs that exclude phonics, educators around the world are increasingly calling for a “phonics-first” approach to reading instruction. This means keeping reading materials away from a child until he has mastered his ABC’s. The average age for learning the alphabet (including the sounds made by each letter) is three to four.

However, for parents who want to stimulate the reading pathways of their child’s brain in infancy, there is no need to risk the child reading words in the wrong direction, or no direction. While teaching whole words, it is still possible to teach babies to look at the text they’re reading from left to right – hence the arrow running under the words in YBCR (as Titzer explains):

For dyslexia, the most common reading disorder, a lot of the children do not look at words from left to right. [The YBCR DVDs] can help prevent that problem, because they’re being taught, as babies, to look at words from left to right.

Another way to teach reading directionality from babyhood is to point to the text in books as you read to your child. This is a technique recommended by Kailing, who theorizes that some cases of dyslexia could be prevented by fostering “native reading” – that is, enabling children to absorb the written form of language at the same time as they are naturally absorbing the spoken form:

[Many dyslexics] can do as well as anybody at such complex tasks as properly conjugating irregular verbs and correctly using complex syntactical forms. In contrast, distinguishing a “d” from a “b,” a fundamentally simple task, can be bafflingly difficult… The problem is that they are already masters of spoken language by the time they encounter writing. Their brains do not expect to have low-level novelties of language introduced at this point in their development.

A research study published five years prior to Kailing’s book lends support to this theory. In 2003 scientists from Yale University reported the findings of a longitudinal study into the causes of dyslexia. The researchers had detected two types of the reading disability, with the more serious type (which did not resolve itself by adulthood) attributable to the reading pathways of the brain having improperly connected neural circuitry. The reason for this was believed to be an absence of proper stimulation at an early enough age. In other words, early reading instruction would effectively prevent the more serious type of dyslexia.

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The voice in the head…