Dyslexia Growing Children

As a psychologist, I'm fascinated by how the brain develops

when children grow from babies into adults,

and why sometimes things don't follow the typical pattern -

when they lack the usual social skills,

when they struggle with learning,

and when their anxieties mean

they can't deal with the daily pressures of the world around them.

Over the last 50 years, neuroscience has begun to unlock

a new understanding of how the brain works,

and what happens when it develops differently.

Sometimes I'm quite angry for myself cos I'm not doing this properly.

And I got to the stage where I thought, "I'm not going to have this

"because this is actually ruining my relationship with my daughter."

In this film, I want to explore how growing children are affected by

the common learning disability dyslexia

through the eyes of the children and families affected by it.

It's always been my difficu... difficulty.

'Words that I'm not really familiar with, like things that don't normally come up every day.'

And it seems that the brain of someone with dyslexia has more difficulty

with that change in sound intensity.

I want to find out why it is the brains of dyslexic people

process information so differently.

So for her to do an exam and try and get it all down is a real struggle.

You have to face the world in a different way.

We live in a world of words.

Almost everything we do involves reading.

Instructions,

computers, phones,

newspapers.

It's a skill that is fundamental to functioning properly in today's society.

And with the internet, it has become ever more crucial.

It has now been estimated that we see or hear over 100,000 words every day.

"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity.

"They must have action and they will make it if they cannot find it.

"Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine,

"and millions are in silent revolt against their lot."

At this moment, my brain and yours

are performing an amazing feat to understand these black marks.

Light photons are bouncing off the page

and hitting a thin area of flesh at the back of our eyeballs.

Then the information is fed into our brains,

where those black marks suddenly take on meaning.

I think it's hard to quantify how important reading's been in my life

that it's opened this window of opportunity to expand my mind

and to help me to learn things about

the subject areas that have interested me,

but also in every aspect of my life, it's been at the heart of it

because if there's been something I've wanted to find out, reading has been the key.

But for as many as one in ten of us,

reading is not a joy but a daily ordeal.

What if I picked a book that wasn't your favourite?

-I might be able to read it, I don't know.

-Shall we have a go?

-OK.

'Lettie Gillespie is ten years old.

'Ever since she began at school, she has struggled with her reading.'

Oh, gosh, you look very worried.

Yes, I can't... I'm not very good reading these.

'At her age, Lettie would typically be expected to be almost fluent

'in her reading, but she suffers from dyslexia,

'a learning disability that affects the way she reads, writes and spells.

'It's got nothing to do with intelligence

'and can affect people from any sort of background.'

Bank...

-BOTH:

-Back...

for the winter term.

Well done.

At, ats...

St Clare's had stowed...

-BOTH:

-..stood.

Stood...

t... tw...

-Silent...

-Silent...

and...

-..empty...

-Empty du...

During...

I think it was reception

they started saying that she was a bit slower.

But she's an August birthday so, of course,

you'd expect that anyway

cos she was a year younger than some of them in her year.

And she was talking normally, very bright and bubbly,

and I don't know when it was really, about year two I think,

they started saying there could be some problem, she's a bit slow.

So before that, all of her developmental milestones were fine?

-Everything was fine.

-What was her interest like in books?

She always loved stories, but she wouldn't ever read them.

She learnt the letter sounds, probably quite slowly.

Obviously she's reversing a lot of her letters when she's writing.

It took a while. And, you know,

she'll confuse capital letters with small letters, Z and S,

a lot of things appear backwards.

I mean, even yesterday you said that you spelt "dog" and you did it G-O-D.

I think that's quite a classic one, isn't it?

When dyslexia is combined with that crucial period of children's lives

when they are first starting to learn, it can be disastrous

because the way we learn is so dependent on reading and writing.

Without the right help, dyslexic children can suffer from

poor self-esteem, high stress and low achievement.

It's bad enough getting children to do homework normally,

but with Lettie it's a question of sort of standing behind her,

spelling out every single word, telling her where to put the gaps,

and then telling her, "No, I said B, not D.

"I've written them down here for you. Why aren't you looking?"

And it just becomes a really sort of volatile, stressful situation.

And quite a breakdown in confidence levels as well?

Yes. And I got to the stage where I thought, "I'm not going to have this

"because this is actually ruining my relationship with my daughter."

It's just soul-destroying, the whole thing is such hard work.

It affects your self-esteem, doesn't it,

and she's just getting to an age now when she's realising

she's not able to do things the other children can do.

And it's quite hard for her.

-So that unfortunately can lead to frustration?

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-You agree?

Do I ever get cross with you, Lettie, when you're doing your homework?

-No.

-Oh, that's nice of you.

-I try not to, don't I?

-Yeah.

But sometimes you have to sort of walk out the room

and count to ten and then come back in.

If you had to make a list of what it feels like to be dyslexic,

what would you say?

Um, I don't know. It'll be a huge list.

Can you give me three things?

-Well, you get worried very easily and there's a lot of pressure.

-Mm-hm.

And everyone sees and thinks so much easier than you.

-That's how it feels?

-Mm.

And what about your reading,

because we've talked about the writing and the spelling,

what happens when you read, what do you feel happens?

Well, when I'm really concentrating, it just gets all blurry

and makes two of them, and it doesn't make sense to me at all.

And I just, like, can't read it,

and when I do... and when that doesn't happen,

I'm just like, "I don't understand this one bit."

To help me to begin to understand what effect dyslexia might have on children like Lettie,

I have been given a series of passages from my favourite book,

Jane Eyre, that have been made deliberately difficult to read.

"Who blames me? Many, no doubt, and I shall be called discontented.

"I could...not help...

"I could not help it.

"The...restlessness was in my nature."

Some dyslexics like Lettie describe a variety of different symptoms

that occur when they pick up a book.

Some say they see blurry words or double words.

For others, the letters are transposed

or the words can appear to move on the page so that sentences don't make sense.

Something is happening in their brains that makes reading so difficult.

"For suffer, though rigid restraint...

"absolute...stagnation,

"precisely to...

"Men would too suffer."

It feels quite important to say that

I can't really know what it feels like to be dyslexic,

but having been given the opportunity to see what it might be like,

I actually felt as if I was having to work really, really hard.

So I imagine that - and I can only imagine it - people who do have dyslexia

really have to find something from deep within themselves

to persevere in order that they can experience the pleasure of reading,

that they can feel that books, print offer them

an opportunity to expand their world, their knowledge.

Before I became a child psychologist,

I was a teacher in a London primary school.

CHILDREN TALK OVER EACH OTHER

Tidying and tidy. Well done.

'My favourite time was always the beginning of the school year

'when the new intake of children first began to read and write.

'It was always a rather magical process,

'in that one minute they appeared to be struggling,

'and the next they had got it.

'It has always been a process that has mystified me.'

If you swap the I for the Y, it would say..."tidding".

So what do you think you have to do?

-Add the Y.

-I think you have to add the Y, don't you?

-Yeah.

'The generally accepted way children are now taught to read

'in the UK involves phonics.

'One method teaches children how to connect the sounds of spoken English

'with letters or groups of letters and encourages them

'to blend these letter sounds together to produce

'approximate pronunciations of words they don't know.'

So hands up if you think the first word says "hopping". OK, hands down.

Hands up if you think the second word says "hopping".

All right. Interesting.

Well, this top word does say "hopping".

The sound of our vowel that has changed, hasn't it?

We've gone from hopping - "o", a short vowel sound -

to "oh" - "hoping", a long vowel sound.

Jenny I was in your lesson this morning, which was great, cos in some ways it covered

a whole spectrum of the whole issues that I'm thinking about.

What are your thoughts about learning to read?

Well, initially we need to get children enjoying reading,

we need children to understand that reading is a pleasurable activity,

because if they're not associating reading with pleasure

and enjoyment, they're never necessarily going to want

to pick a book up and start reading.

Once they realise that it's a fun activity,

that's when, as they join school,

that you want to be teaching them that

different letters stand for different sounds

and groups of letters stand for sounds as well,

and then blending them together to actually make words.

There's something else that had to happen in this word

to stop it just from saying "hoping".

We had to double the consonant, didn't we?

Ah, interesting.

And then one of these words says "hopped" and one doesn't.

What's interesting is that those letter sounds,

you suddenly have to be able to transpose those into print.

Well, some children do struggle with it more than others,

so we do get children entering the junior school who normally know that

"ay" can be "a", so can sound out the letters individually,

but as you said, it's when those letters come together to make words

that we really have to make it very visual for them,

so using pictures to go with the different sounds.

Sometimes we'll put actions with the sounds as well.

Reading is the key. It's the key to them understanding

work in history, in geography, and all of those other subjects.

We want children to be leaving at the end of year six being able to cope

with any reading they'll need to do in any subject in secondary school.

In order to gain an insight into what happens in our brains

when we process language,

researchers at the University of Southampton's Centre for Visual Cognition

are investigating what our eyes do when we are reading.

They have agreed to demonstrate to Lettie

how our eyes work when we read.

Still as you can, and stare right at the middle of these dots for me.

That's great. OK, here we go.

Simon, I wonder if you could take me through the processes that the eye goes through when it's reading.

Of course. Here we have a model of the eye,

and what you can see is that the light will be coming from the page,

passing through the pupil and hitting the back of the eye here.

And at the back of the eye, in the centre here,

there's an area called the fovea, and the cells in the fovea deliver

high acuity detailed visual information about the words on the page to the brain.

In the first demonstration, Lettie is asked to read

a series of simple sentences as her eye movements are scanned.

The computer only displays a few characters

each side of the centre of her gaze,

while all the remaining letters on the page are replaced with Xs.

OK, so the one that you just did,

it's called the moving window paradigm.

Now, what we could probably see more easily than you,

cos you were the one who was doing it,

was that most of the sentence was just Xs.

We replaced most of the letters with Xs, yeah?

-Did you get a bit of a sense of that?

-No.

No? So when people are doing it, you often don't really notice,

and it's because when you're reading your brain is really, really clever.

So your brain is working out a lot about the word you're looking at.

And it can also start to get some information about

the next word in the sentence before you ever even look at it.

This is a clever demonstration of how the eye works when it reads.

Despite the Xs covering up some of the words,

we believe that we can still see the whole sentence.

Although at any moment our eyes will only ever focus on a small area of the sentence,

they move so quickly over the page

that we believe we see the whole sentence.

This illusion happens so fast that we are not aware of it.

Because the area beyond the fovea delivers less detailed information,

this causes us to make a series of eye movements called saccades,

as well as fixations where the eye pauses and is still.

The saccades and fixations are the things that we actually see

when we record people's eye movements on the eye tracker.

Lettie's eyes are no different from anyone else's.

Her dyslexia doesn't impair her vision.

So her problems with reading are not caused by her eyes

and must lie elsewhere.

The clue could be in how hard her brain has to work

in processing the information from her eyes.

So when we saw Lettie performing the task...

I mean, I've met her before, so I know that actually this is quite a struggle for her, reading.

That's something that we see a lot with children who have got reading difficulties.

They will spend much more time reading the sentence and make many more fixations -

that's the pauses when the eye is still looking at the different words -

and then going back and reinspecting them to reread them.

In the second demonstration, Lettie is again asked to read a series of simple sentences,

but this time, several of the sentences contain deliberately placed non-words,

words that may sound or look like they are real, but are not.

It's designed to test how fast people make the connection

between sounds and words, and their meaning.

Even with somebody like Lettie, I thought there will still be a flow,

but, actually, it was a backward and forward movement.

-That's right, that's right.

-And the stopping, as you say.

And you weren't quite sure what the stopping was about.

Yes. I think another thing that's important to point out

is that the backwards and forwards movements,

the to-ing and fro-ing that we saw Lettie making,

we think that comes about as a consequence of the difficulty

that Lettie's experiencing as she's reading.

So it's not that the poor eye movements are causing the difficulties she's having,

it's in fact the difficulty that she's experiencing

that's actually producing these eye movements back and forwards,

to try and re-read the text over and over.

And so for a more typical reader,

what would the flow have been like, would it have been similar?

There would be far fewer periods of time where the person would reread the sentence.

Overall, they would read it much more quickly,

and maybe they would look at most words once, maybe twice,

not so often, particularly if the words were easy to read,

so it would be much more fluid.

Unlike Lettie, typical non-dyslexic readers can still read

these non-words, even though they are meaningless.

They can at least make that connection with the sound of the word.

Lettie is at a mainstream primary school where

she receives some extra help with her reading and writing.

But for the last three and a half years she has also worked with a specialist dyslexia teacher.

OK, now I want you to listen, please,

cos we're doing a new sound today, OK?

I'm going to read you a list of words,

and can you try and tell me what letter you can hear in all of them?

Tact. Act.

Scan. Tactic. Panic.

This is the next clue as to what is happening differently in Lettie's brain.

For dyslexics, it's when their brains try to make the connection

between sounds and words that problems occur.

Cuh.

It is, well listened, cos a lot of people tell me "a" with that one,

so you are a genius! Good girl.

To help her overcome this difficulty,

Rosemary is trying to get Lettie to focus on

the sounds of each word that she reads,

a more intensive version of the phonics system taught in my old school.

Beginning, beginning, middle, middle...

It's what all the assessments Lettie's had recently are saying,

because you'll see, I hope, in this next bit,

that we're using all the different senses.

And really, on that activity,

really paying attention to the different sounds that letters make.

It's really hard, isn't it?

Lettie's dyslexia means that she can't easily make the link

between words on the page and their sounds,

and so can't quickly decode their meaning.

'It's such a complicated process when you actually look at our alphabet,'

and you transpose that into the sounds,

and there are a number of combinations that make the same sounds.

'It's a bit of a minefield for children.

'It's been an area of focus for research to try to understand whether

'there's an aspect of processing the sound from the letters in dyslexics'

that is simply not working properly.

It's not quite...

It's certainly those children aren't doing it in the same way that a child who can read fluently would.

Now, this is quite tricky in that you've got to say "cuh" is "cee".

So you're tracking along here and catching the "cuh",

and as you catch it, you're saying "cuh" is "cee".

"Cuh" is "cee". "Cuh" is "cee".

Once children have mastered phonics,

that connection between sounds and written words

should become faster and faster and more automatic.

But it's a process that's hidden from sight.

So what I want to understand is what is actually happening in the brain when we do this,

because it's something dyslexics like Lettie really struggle with.

At the Medical Research Council's

Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge,

researchers are conducting an exciting new brain scan experiment.

They are trying to mimic that process when children learn to read for the first time,

but under laboratory conditions,

to study how their brains process visual information.

Matt Davis and his colleague Jo Taylor are using a state-of-the-art brain scanner

to help identify the different neural pathways in our brains that are associated with reading.

The start is in the eye, so light hitting the retina

and passing through the thalamus to the very back of the brain here.

So this is the occipital lobe.

It's only as information gets passed forward

through the occipital lobe, in the bottom of the brain here,

and into the temporal lobe, that we start to see processes

that are involved in actually recognising that word.

That's one pathway for reading that involves recognising words as a whole and accessing the meaning.

There's another very important pathway that goes up through the parietal lobe.

There's also some interesting evidence that suggests that

that might be one of the areas in which there's dysfunction in people with dyslexia.

What this research has already shown is that there are

at least two pathways in the brain associated with reading -

one which is mostly associated with new words,

and the other with words we already know.

It's the one that deals with new words that seems to cause

dyslexics like Lettie the most problems.

Now, most of the time when you're reading,

actually these two pathways are not separate,

they're working in conjunction, working in parallel.

OK, Rachel, we need to make sure that you've got no metal on you whatsoever.

It is not yet practical to scan young children's brains

over the several years spent learning to read,

so in this experiment,

older volunteers are put into a brain scanner.

And in order to mimic the learning process as closely as possible,

the volunteers are taught a completely new language

with its own alphabet, symbols and sounds.

Beth. Bem. Bez.

Fap. Fod.

During the process,

the volunteers are scanned to discover which areas

of their brains work as they learn this new language.

The goal of the experiment is to understand what happens in the brain

when a child begins to read for the first time.

So you're recording Rachel's brain activity.

Rachel's brain activity, and what she's saying,

so we can kind of put those two things together,

so when she's speaking, what's her brain activity doing?

When she's looking at the word and listening how to read it,

what's her brain activity doing?

And then we can also look at, when she gets better,

does her brain activity change?

It's generally agreed that to become a fluent reader,

one of the first things a child must learn

is that letters correspond to sounds -

the system of phonics taught at my old school.

So to mimic that process here in the laboratory,

the volunteer listens to each new sound

and sees the symbol associated with it.

Buv. Bov.

And so they can begin to decode this new language.

Well, it's one of the challenges in the educational neurosciences -

how do you study processes that, in a developing child,

last from the age of five to ten,

when they hopefully become a fluent reader.

And the really exciting thing with this experiment is that

we can get a glimpse of what might be going on during

that five-year process in the space of a relatively short experiment.

'This research is not yet complete

'but it hopes to de-mystify one of the greatest enigmas of childhood -

'why it is some children can learn to read without much effort,

'whereas for others, it's a major obstacle to their development.'

Good!

So far, we've learnt that dyslexia can seriously limit a child's ability to learn.

'Unchecked, it can lead to a severe loss of self-esteem,

'high stress and low achievement.

'We have also learnt it is not a problem with the way the eye works,

'but more a difficulty with processing language and, in particular,

'how the brain makes that crucial connection between sounds and written words.'

In order to make that connection,

dyslexics like Lettie have to work so much harder.

And as she grows older, Lettie's dyslexia won't go away.

It's something she's going to have to learn to cope with for the rest of her life.

Dyslexia doesn't just affect people's ability to read,

it can impact their life choices, too.

Alyce Browne was diagnosed with dyslexia at age seven.

She is now 16 and has just done her GCSEs.

I want to start with results.

So do you want to tell us how you did?

I got an A in maths,

a B in geography and four Cs,

and then I've also got my distinction in childcare level one.

-So, happy people today?

-Very.

-Very happy girl.

Yeah, yeah. She's worked really hard.

-And even more so because Alyce has dyslexia.

-Yeah, yeah.

So this is a huge achievement for her.

Alyce is at a crucial point in her life.

In two years, she will leave full-time education

and join the working world.

Her greatest anxiety is to what extent her dyslexia might hold her back.

She knows that any job she might get will involve a lot of reading and writing.

Reading, it's quite slow.

I used to... Everybody used to read a chapter,

within reading time at school and stuff,

and I only used to read a page.

And, also, if there's lots of noises around me,

I can't concentrate,

cos I'll just pick up what they're talking about and stuff,

instead of actually physically reading,

because I find it so hard to read.

So if you had to write a bit of a menu

of the sorts of issues that are tricky for you,

what would you say is the main thing?

The sort of the top of the list that,

"Oh, my goodness, if that comes up, I'm going to have to get myself in a good space?"

-Spelling.

-Spelling.

It's always been my difficu... difficulty,

especially...not really little words now,

words that I'm not really familiar with,

like things that don't normally come up every day,

or really long words I struggle with.

So have you got a strategy for how you manage that now?

Not really. I just try, I still try and sound it out,

if I don't know the word, or I'll ask somebody.

But I just, normally, if it's wrong, I just accept that it's wrong,

but it looks something like it,

so somebody will spot that I mean something else.

It just means that you sort of, you know,

worry that she's sort of putting so much effort into everything,

and that the complications of the dyslexia don't allow her

to express what she's learnt,

and she's not able to put it down on paper, because it all gets jumbled up,

so for her to do an exam and try and put that down, and get it all down

is a really, really real struggle.

-It's a bit of a battle.

-It is, yeah.

One teacher never used to spell for me.

He used to put "SP" meaning spelling.

But I never... He used to always say, "Use a dictionary."

I didn't know how to use a dictionary,

cos if you don't know how to spell,

it's really hard to use a dictionary.

So that's when I started to struggle.

-How would you feel if I asked you to read?

-Erm...

-Nervous?

-Yeah.

-Yeah?

-Yeah.

-OK.

Will you give it a go maybe?

If it was a more simpler book.

If it a was more simpler book? But you're reading this book, aren't you?

I know, but I sometimes get the words wrong and it's embarrassing.

With her GCSE results, Alyce has now moved on to college,

where she is hoping to get the right qualifications for a career in childcare.

As it has been several years since she has had a full assessment,

the college authorities need to check the severity of her dyslexia

so that they can decide what extra help she might need in any written examinations.

They have agreed I can sit in on the process.

So, today, what we're going to be doing is some assessment to see

what exam arrangements

you might be entitled to in your functional skills,

English or any other exams you'll be doing while you're at college.

-We've talked about that bit before, haven't we?

-Mm-hm.

So can I just check some details you gave me when you started,

-that when you did your GCSEs you had a reader?

-Yeah.

-And you had 25% extra time, didn't you?

-Yeah.

-OK.

In a moment I want you to look at each of these words carefully,

and I want you to read the words across the page so that I can hear you.

When you finish the first line...

'These tests are deliberately designed to put Alyce's ability

'to read, write and spell under some pressure,

'to place her in a position where she can't rely on her usual coping strategies,

'and so reveal the extent of her dyslexia.'

Cat. In. Book. Tree. How.

Animal. Hair.

Spell. Even. Size.

Finger. Felt. Laugh.

'The first thing she did was from the wide range achievements test and was a test'

of single-word reading, and it wasn't timed,

so it's looking at reading accuracy.

And she had to read a series of items of increasing difficulty.

And they did get quite difficult, didn't they?

They do quite rapidly become quite difficult, yes.

Dyslexia is not just something that affects children when they're learning to read.

It's a lifelong incurable condition,

and it can affect other aspects of a person's life, too.

From a very early age, I used to get

very frustrated with Alyce

because we would go through a page of a very simple book

and we'd turn over the page, and she wouldn't remember the cat, the dog,

which was very evident with the older boy, who hasn't got dyslexia,

and it sort of stemmed from there, really,

and that was as early as three, maybe.

Particularly a bit later on when she got into years one and two,

when she started to be able - should have been able to know -

very small words, you know, "in", "on", "at",

all the things that were starting to build up your reading skills,

she was still struggling with.

So in a moment, you're going to have two minutes to think about the topic.

The topic you're going to write about for me is My Perfect Day.

I'm then going to give you 20 minutes to write about that topic.

Your time starts now.

Compared to non-dyslexics,

the brains of children with dyslexia have to work so much harder when they process language,

when they read and write.

And other areas of their daily lives can be affected, too.

They often have bad short-term memory,

a difficulty with time keeping and poor organisational skills.

What would you say are the primary things that she really struggles with?

That you think, "OK, I know she'll struggle with that."

We'd all be talking about various things, and Alyce will get

the conversation completely mixed up to what we actually mean sometimes.

And I think it's important to note that we all laugh and joke about the situation,

and she laughs along with us, you know,

and we all stop and say, "Can you go through that again?"

Stop writing now when you've finished that sentence. Your 20 minutes is up.

I do have to think about it a lot more than most people would,

and then I have to make sure that they're right words...

cos sometimes I say the wrong word, meaning another word.

-Do you want to try the next one?

-Yeah.

Alcove.

Tranquality?

She found it very difficult to attempt to decode

sort of unknown words at all,

and she was a couple of times, quite early on for example,

"bulk" she read as "buck", and "knowledge she read as "unknown",

and "horizon" as "horizontal".

She was making a guess based on the sort of picture of the word

that maybe she had, or the shape of the word, I should say.

I mean, did you feel she was interested in learning?

She definitely didn't seem to portray any difficulties with her friends in the classroom,

and she seemed to enjoy going to school,

and difficulties came then when she got a little bit older,

when she wouldn't be able to write down the homework that was set from the board,

because she couldn't understand it quick enough to write it down,

so we got the tears and the frustration.

Municipal - do you just want to tell me a little bit about what you are doing

in terms of trying to decode that, trying to read that?

Break it up, so "mun"...

.."icipal".

The words are obviously getting much, much harder now,

so I just want you to have a look down the next few

and see if you are able to read them.

If you're not, that's fine, and we can stop the test now.

-Do we stop there?

-Yeah.

-OK, well done.

-'You had as much information as you needed at that point?

-Yeah, absolutely.

'And what I did, therefore, was I stopped the test.

'The test was discontinued before the discontinue criteria,

'because I could tell she was becoming very uncomfortable.

'There was no point in prolonging that process for her.

'Your sheet gives some clues as to'

-how you might decode a word.

-Mm-hm.

And, as you say, at some points, Alyce didn't seem to have

the skills or the strategies to do that.

She wasn't able to at all.

She didn't seem to be able to attempt to do that.

So those decoding skills she finds very difficult,

which is going to mean every time she comes up against new vocabulary on her course,

she's going to find that hard, independently,

to know what that means, or how to pronounce it.

Although she tries to break words down into their sounds

and then blend them together,

she doesn't necessarily have the phonological awareness skills,

the phonological processing skills to be able to do that effectively.

And that was actually something that came out of the two previous assessments she'd had done.

-So she's going to struggle?

-Yeah.

A new theory for Alyce's inability to easily distinguish between different word sounds

is now being investigated at the Centre for Neuroscience in Education in Cambridge.

Professor Usha Goswami is engaged in some ground-breaking research

into how the brain processes sound

and why this may be different for people who have dyslexia.

Just pop your headphones on.

She agreed to run some of her tests on Alyce and me,

and compare the results.

The first one measures how much time

Alyce takes to spot certain rhythmic sounds.

Well, we know that children with dyslexia have problems

when they're listening to spoken language,

and what we're interested in is why those problems are occurring.

It's not that they can't hear,

it's probably more similar to something like being colour-blind.

So we know that when you're colour-blind,

you can still see the visual world, you can see objects in the world,

but there'll be certain distinctions like, for example, red versus green,

that your brain isn't making very well.

And we're finding it's the same in the dyslexic brain

for listening to speech, because speech is a very complex signal

and there are many different frequency bands in that signal.

In fact, speech itself is a sound pressure wave,

so what comes to your ear is initially a sound pressure alternating as you speak syllables.

And it seems that the brain of someone with dyslexia

has more difficulty with that initial change in sound intensity,

as one syllable after another is produced,

which translates in the brain into a problem with speech rhythm.

This is an extraordinary theory, as it appears to challenge

the popular perception that dyslexia is all to do with words,

whereas, in fact, it's a difficulty with distinguishing

between different rhythmic sounds that appears to be the real problem.

-How was that?

-It was a lot harder.

-You did really well.

What we know is that as you learn to read, your brain basically

remaps the sound system of English to reflect letter categories.

So I'll say a word to you like "tomato" and you feel intuitively that you're hearing

a "tuh", "o", "mm", "ah", "tuh", "oh" sequence of sounds,

but actually when you're a baby, or before you learn to read,

your brain was hearing "mm-MM-mm",

a sort of weak-strong-weak syllable stress pattern,

which is what we're finding that the dyslexic brain can't hear very well.

So it means that the whole way speech representations are laid down in the brain

is actually different, subtly different, but still different,

for a child with dyslexia.

'Usha has discovered that the way we naturally speak to our babies

'when they are very small - baby language - may in fact

'be a very clever tool that has evolved to help babies learn.'

Remind me of the instructions again.

OK, so you're going to hear three different sounds...

There are two things, cos we can't help speaking to babies in a special way

that exaggerates rhythm, because if you were a baby, I wouldn't just say to you

"Here's a cat." I'd say something like...

IN CHILDLIKE VOICE: "Here's a cat."

I'd be really emphasising these rhythmic aspects of the signal.

That's probably a language learning support system.

'According to Usha, the problem for children with dyslexia is that they

'don't fully benefit from this early language support system

'because of the difficulties their brains have with distinguishing rhythm.

'And it's only when they begin to learn to read and write that these problems become apparent.'

With print, of course, we're not mapping any of that intensity change

in how we write down words.

Languages like Greek will mark syllable stress, but English doesn't,

and so it means that when the child is reading,

these cues aren't even there.

So because dyslexic children don't make that automatic link

between sounds and letters, reading can become very difficult.

They're having to go from a sort of brain representation

that isn't the same as everyone else's, to a print representation

that doesn't match in any neat way to the syllable level.

-So, really hard work?

-Mm-hm.

Excellent. Well done.

They all started to sound the same towards the end.

I was thinking, "My goodness, I don't know how you did it!"

Well, we can see quite a big difference in your threshold compared to Alyce's threshold.

You can probably hear a difference of around 30, 40 milliseconds

-between the rapidity of the sound beginning.

-Right.

Whereas when we looked at Alyce's number, it was 31.8.

That threshold would translate into about 200 milliseconds,

so, for the brain, that's quite a long time difference

from the 30 or 40 milliseconds for Laverne.

So that means that because of her dyslexia,

Alyce needs a cue that is six times as long as me

to recognise a rhythmic sound, such as a syllable.

Usha's latest research is also beginning to uncover how

the brains of dyslexics might compensate for this problem.

The experiment varies what Alyce sees and hears to measure how much

visual and auditory information her brain needs to understand sounds.

And sometimes she won't be able to hear the "bah",

she'll just be using the lip cues.

We actually expect children with dyslexia to be better in that condition than other children.

Other times, she might have a blank screen and she'll just be hearing the "bah", "bah".

That's where we think children with dyslexia might have more problems.

Then this would be the natural speech condition, where children with dyslexia should do OK,

because they've got the visual cues supporting the auditory cues.

Usha Goswami's research has already shown that it is

the sounds of words that dyslexics like Alyce really struggle with.

Her latest results indicate that they seem to cope best when they

can see, or lip-read, the words as they are made by someone's mouth.

When you're reading, that's not true, so then you're really relying on

the quality of these speech-based representations

that your brain has developed because someone's telling you,

"This is B, it's "buh", this is P, it's "puh",

but your brain may not hear it quite like that.

So it's very complicated.

-It makes me think you we've got quite caught up in print...

-Yeah.

..being the indicator of dyslexia, as opposed to sound.

In the future, Usha's research could have a profound effect on how we teach babies and young children,

and the importance of learning rhythm in those early years of life.

So you really need to put a lot of emphasis on building up these structures?

We do, and I think, again, that it's so interesting that,

as a culture, we've invented things like the nursery rhyme.

I think it's in training, this system, from day one.

Maybe we've forgotten the importance of that?

Yeah, and singing, actually.

Babies love to be sung to and they'll try and get their mothers to sing to them by being happy when they do,

and people can feel embarrassed doing this. They think,

"Oh, I'm tone deaf. I can't sing,"

but you're still giving that syllable level structure to your baby

and if you're singing, again, it's emphasised, and the rhythm is emphasised.

For the brain, that's a very important learning.

Alyce remains undeterred by her dyslexia.

As part of her childcare course,

she's doing a placement at a local pre-school

where she's expected to read to a class of four-year-olds.

My brother Ryan, he was always reading and he also used to put pressure on me.

So I never stopped...

I stopped reading for a while cos I just didn't like reading.

It was midnight, er...night-time

on Mel...bury Farm.

Time to, time to sleep for all the baby animals.

The chicks were cu-cuddled up snug-snugly in the henhouse.

'Because he was a lot better than me, he'd come up to me

when I was reading to Mum and go,

"Nuh-nuh-nuh, you should be reading better books and stuff."

But now I just go, "Whatever."

But high up in the ol... the roof of the oldest barn,

Oliver Owl wasn't sleeping.

Oliver practise, practised his,

practiced being quieter in the soft...the softest, of softest...

Can you remember learning the sounds of letters and then the blends,

do you remember that stage?

Definitely.

Still used to do it in year nine, I think,

and I've also, cos I've been doing childcare,

also started to do it again with the younger kids, so it's quite amusing!

In what way?

'Just going back to actually how I used to do it, and I thought,

' "Well, I've got to teach these kids how to do it as well."

'And how does that feel?

'A lot of them, you read to them,'

or you spell something for them, and they go, "Oh, no, that's wrong.

"You're meant to spell it like this or say it like this."

I'm like, "Oh, OK." But...

Alyce has discovered that

one of the school's full-time assistants is also dyslexic.

You'll have to wait until she's finished, then, sweetheart...

'I still sometimes get nervous if it's a new book,'

but I tend to take them home and practise at home first,

so then it's in my head, and then I come and bring it in to work.

And if there's a word sometimes that I get stuck on,

then, generally, there's someone there to help prompt me.

Like you say, it usually helps to look at the pictures as well

and, like you say, the children do enjoy the pictures,

so it's not so pressured!

Any childcare job Alyce is offered

will include a number of daily written and reading tasks.

For non-dyslexics, they would be ordinary,

but for her, they are a real worry,

particularly as she will have to cope with them on her own.

How do you find writing the observations?

I quite enjoy, actually, writing the observations.

I usually do it in pencil first and then a colleague will help me

with the spellings if there's a word that I find difficult to spell,

and then I'll go through it and then put it in pen.

-So, not too bad.

-That's all right, then.

-I think I may struggle, but I'll get through it eventually.

-Yeah.

There's quite a lot of different methods for observation.

You've got your written, you've got your checklist,

-and I think the checklist will be the easiest.

-It is the easiest one.

-Or Post-it notes.

-Yes.

I think that's the only way I'll be able to cope

with getting on with this course,

and doing placement and things like that.

You have to face the world differently to other people,

because you have to learn to work around things,

but certain things you're a lot better at than others,

like maths, for me, is a lot easier than for people that struggle and don't like it.

Also, the doing subjects, like textiles

and things like that, the practical side of things,

I'm a lot better at as well.

So you have to face the world in a different way,

and just learn to challenge yourself,

and get on with it.

It's, it's hard, but you can get on with it.

Don't, don't let it destroy you, cos you don't need it to.

Today, new technology plays a major role in education

and can help dyslexics, too.

Schools are full of sophisticated learning aids and computer software

designed to make learning as easy and enjoyable as possible.

But one piece of technology still manages to create controversy

as to its value as an educational tool.

If you said to a teacher

you can go down the high street

and for five pound or ten pound,

you can buy a cheap piece of technology

that every child in your class will want to use,

and it will give them daily practice at reading and spelling,

the teachers would be out, down the street buying it,

and they would be willingly giving it to their children.

But when you say it's a mobile phone, for some reason people become very anxious,

and often they feel that children are being exposed to something that will

potentially be quite detrimental to their literacy development.

Like most other people, I've got a mobile phone,

but like other people of my age,

I have a real problem with text language.

My children are often sending me texts

that I simply don't understand and, to be quite honest,

it always annoys me a little bit because it seems very sloppy

and a bit lazy, and doesn't seem to help their spelling at all.

But the latest research could actually suggest the complete opposite.

Professor Clare Wood studied a group of 8 to 12-year-olds

over an academic year to analyse how mobile phone use, in particular regular texting,

might affect their educational development.

She discovered that rather than be detrimental,

texting on mobile phones can actually help children learn.

If we analyse how those children are spelling those words,

actually, the spellings aren't as unconventional as you might think.

In other words, they don't actually violate any of the rules of English.

What children are doing is demonstrating to us that

they understand how language is composed of sounds,

they understand how those sounds map onto lots of different letter combinations.

Now, that's incredibly creative

and it's actually a very sophisticated level of language use.

Clare also believes that dyslexics could particularly benefit from texting on mobile phones.

I think that that would be a good way in for those children.

I can see how that would work, that they are much more likely to want

to copy the types of representation that they see their friends using.

Another way to help dyslexics is through intensive teaching.

Because Lettie's dyslexia is affecting her schoolwork so badly,

her parents are thinking of sending her to a specialist school.

Before she can be accepted, she has to come for a day of assessment,

to see if she is suitable.

Lettie, how are you feeling?

A bit nervous, but all right.

Frewen College was one of the first schools to offer

specialist dyslexia teaching in the UK.

-Hi, good morning. You must be Lettie.

-Yes.

If Lettie's accepted,

the school will be able to tailor teaching

to suit her particular problems with processing speech and written words.

They can also give her more one-on-one teaching in phonics.

-Is it in the right place?

-No.

-No, the whole school is in a muddle.

'There are children who can cope in mainstream'

and if they can, it's a good place for them,

happy confident children who already have the strategies they need,

and, of course, sometimes we aim to place children in mainstream,

but there will always be some children - and I think Lettie may be one of them -

who, because they are very slow processing,

they will always need more time and more space,

and more quiet, and more room to learn,

cos often these are children who have been left out,

because they were less able, because they were a bit odd,

because more able children were impatient with them or whatever.

They are often children who've found they haven't successfully worked

in a team with other children,

and that's a very important part of what we do.

'I spell really simple words wrong cos I'm just trying to write.

'So, like, I spell "was" how it sounds - W-O-S.'

And what do you think when you're doing that,

when you're writing, do you notice?

I don't notice cos I'm just trying to write the story, really.

And then when you look at it afterwards?

Yeah, I know I spelled a lot of mistakes, normally every word,

and there's a lot of mistakes, and so I just get really nervous and stuff.

Quite a lot of anxiety about spelling,

so I was trying to reassure her,

"You don't have to worry about the spelling."

We have a lot of lessons where we get the children very used to

using, for example, the sound chart.

So we're teaching phonological awareness and skills all the time,

so that a child who's presented with, you know,

who is trying to write a word like "porcupine"

can sound it out so they've got to the point where they go,

"puh-or-cuh" and so on.

They can sound it out and then they can access a chart to give them spelling choices.

Frewen is a fee-paying private school,

so not available for everyone.

Lettie's parents now need to decide

whether they can afford to send her there.

When dyslexia was discovered 100 years ago,

it was seen as a defect, as a disability that had to be overcome.

It was all about the difficulties that dyslexics had with reading and writing,

and how they could be taught to cope with this.

But over recent years, it's been seen less as a disability,

and more as a difference in the way some people process information.

One popular belief suggests that because dyslexia is so prevalent

in the population, that it could involve benefits of some kind.

If the dyslexia genes were all bad, the argument goes,

evolution would have weeded them out.

But so far, there has been little scientific research

to either back this up or refute it.

One new area of research is investigating why

there are apparently so many dyslexics in the creative arts.

Well, actually that statement was kind of the starting point

for my work, in that there is so much anecdotal evidence

pointing to the link between dyslexia and visuospatial talent,

and people often talk about these very high-profile dyslexic artists,

such as Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg,

award-winning designers, Paul Smith and Tommy Hilfiger,

dyslexic architects, you know, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster.

And a lot of these people themselves

actually credit their visuospatial talent in some way to their dyslexia.

Right, well, thank you very much for volunteering to take part in the study this afternoon.

Researchers at the University of Middlesex are trying

to quantify what advantages dyslexia could bring and in what way.

I just want you to copy the images as you see them on the screen,

and you'll have a set time for copying each one.

Dr Nicola Brunswick is currently studying students from

the Royal College of Art to discover why it reports

a much higher than average rate of dyslexia.

Whereas some people might argue these students are trying to avoid the typical language-based subjects,

you don't get into these institutions, these prestigious art colleges,

without having a great deal of talent,

and so this is something that we wanted to explore through our work.

To perform these tasks, it does require a type of processing called global processing,

where you can sort of step back and see the bigger picture,

rather than focussing necessarily on the individual details.

And it's these particular skills that have been associated with

things like art, design and architecture,

in which these high-profile dyslexic readers tend to excel.

Some people have actually spoken in terms of a pathology of superiority,

where, if some part of the left side of the brain

which is normally associated with processing of language,

if that hasn't developed as it would be expected in a dyslexic reader,

then perhaps the suggestion is that some parts in the right side of the brain,

the right hemisphere, might develop over and above the level you'd expect them to,

to in some way compensate for that.

You have one minute left.

Nicola's research is also beginning to uncover

how some of the compensatory strategies that dyslexics often use might work.

So it may be that those who do have visuospatial abilities anyway

are then relying more on those, and using visuospatial processing skills

to try and help them to deal with problems.

Rather than thinking through problems in words,

they think through them in pictures.

OK, that's the end of that task. Thank you.

I wonder if there are any particular characteristics that you've noticed

that might help teachers or might help parents

when they are thinking about the difficulties their children are having.

I think there's a lot that can be taken from this.

I think it's important that,

rather than just trying to teach children just verbally,

and just keep focussing on the language,

to bring in the multi-sensory teaching, to make it more visual,

and make it more tactile, and just to make it more real for the children,

to try and reinforce their learning of reading

and their learning in school,

by using the different senses to try and support the language problems that they're having.

So we need to play to their strengths?

Absolutely. Definitely play to their strengths.

Dyslexia is one of the most common problems for growing children.

As many as one in ten are now thought to be affected by it in some way.

Lettie has now been accepted by Frewen College

and is hoping to join later this school year.

I just try and do my best and get really nervous.

-And it probably is something you take very seriously...

-Yeah.

-..because you want to do it well.

-Yeah, I want to do it well.

Alyce is making good progress on her childcare course

and is now thinking of going on to university.

You can do it, even with dyslexia,

and there's a lot of support within settings to help you get along.

Reading and writing are such fundamental skills

that anything that hinders their progress is a real worry for parents.

But we're now beginning to better understand the way the brain works

when it processes language,

and what causes children like Lettie and Alyce to struggle,

and so can come up with new ways to tackle their problems.

We are also starting to discover that dyslexia can actually

have some benefits as well and, rather than being a disability,

it's just a different way of seeing and understanding the world.

To learn more about dyslexia,

and to separate fact from fiction,

go to the website and follow

the links to the Open University.

# The teacher thinks that I sound funny

# But she likes the way you sing

# Tonight I'll dream while I'm in bed

# When silly thoughts go through my head

# About the bugs and alphabet

# When I wake tomorrow I'll bet

# That you and I will walk together again

# I can tell that we are gonna be friends

# Yes, I can tell that we are gonna be friends. #