ThatReadingThing

Adult Visual Learner 1

Not all ThatReadingThing students are disaffected and disengaged.

Working with an adult “visual learner”
A recent post on the Reading Reform Foundation discussion forum.

Pete is in his twenties recently and formally diagnosed as severely dyslexic. He reads well but his spelling is a huge embarrassment to him. He’s accomplished in many other areas and can clearly explain his strategies for reading and writing. Reading: “I know all the words by sight”. (and he does) Spelling: “I just remember what they look like” (but he doesn’t) “I’m a visual learner.” (who needs to use his ears)

His initial assessments predictably indicated problems with blending, segmenting and manipulating phonemes but his word reading was perfect. I explained to him that words are made up of sounds: he said his head hurt because he’s a visual learner. We did a couple of sorting exercises and, for some reason, the word “catch” came up. “Now I could read that but I couldn’t spell it.” We’d hit the appropriate wall. I showed him that there are 2 ways to write the sound “ch” at the ends of words: ch and tch. I read out a list of words with “ch” at the end. He instantly knew that the only way he was going to figure out the correct spelling was to write them down and “see” which was correct. He found that he could spell 16 of the 18 words that I gave him.

The next week I asked if he’d been able to use his new strategy at all. “Once I thought I couldn’t spell a word then thought, that’s one of Tricia’s “ch” words, wrote it down and knew it was right.”

The 2nd session we looked at ways to write “ee”. Again, it was entirely around spelling and he had to choose the correct spelling of the “ee” sound in the word. I read the word taxi. “I don’t know which part’s “ee” but I do know how to spell it.” With that he wrote t a i x.
What’s the first sound? “t” second? “a” next “don’t know” (gave him “ks” and he knew to write x) and the last sound in taxi is? “ee”. How do you write that? “Ahhhh, I get it”

I tried to come up with an analogy of what happens when visual learners don’t use their ears. Let’s say we need at least 15,000 words to communicate in the adult world. For a visual reader, this is like being able to recognise and name any one of 15,000 people. (For anyone over 40 who can no longer name their own children, it’s easy to see why people give up on reading) For spelling, it gets worse. A visual speller must be able to name and draw each person, getting each one of their features correct and in a certain order. You can see why taxi becomes taix.

Last example from our lessons. We’re talking about syllables and Pete says, “spelling<em> remember</em> is a nightmare.” OK, how many syllables? “3” What’s the first one? “re” Can you write it? Next syllable? “mem” and last? “ber”
He writes it perfectly and laughs. We’re still working on getting him to use his ears to assist his eyes, but that “nightmare” is over.

Adult Visual Learner 2

Pete and I had another session last week. I spent the hour trying to “see” what was going on inside his head while he was reading. I picked out Trivial Pursuit questions with unusual words which might stump him or just with difficult syntax that he’d have to read carefully to understand. He can read just about anything from sight but can’t read anything he doesn’t recognise. When he does slow down and decode, he’s used so much of his memory just recognising the shape of words and some haphazard letter components that he makes no associations to help him figure out what a new word might mean.

Here’s an example: “What’s the English translation if the TV ident caption which reads: Sianel Pedwar Cymru?”

You might expect the Welsh to have thrown him but it was the word ident . Neither of us had heard of a “TV ident caption” but I could instantly associate it with identity or identify. Pete, however, was too busy trying to find a word in his memory bank that looked like ident and couldn’t come up with anything that was familiar.

Another example: “Which musical did the Daily Express hail: A fine, four-fendered, fabulous night?”

The word that stumped him here was four, not because he didn’t recognise it but because it’s been filed in his memory in the same slot as flour and floor and those 3 words always trip him up. Always. four flour floor We can all see the connection but most of us will see the differences instantly. The main problem is that Pete sees each word as a whole, identifiable by its beginning and end.

I held up my pen and showed him how we identify it correctly as a pen no matter how we visually process it. We can look from the tip to the end or the end to the tip, right-side-up or up-side-down and we always come up with “pen”. We might see three that look quite different but are still be identifiable as “pen”. But words aren’t like that; you have to process them from left to right, through the word or they are easily mixed up. In fact, the other day I was walking down an unfamiliar street and saw a sign that said, “Yoga Police”. How odd….why would anyone spend money going to a place called anything-police? Then I glanced again and realised it said, “Yoga Place”. We all do it.

The difference between me and Pete is that I can quickly assess and correct a misread word when whatever I’m reading doesn’t make sense. Pete, in the same situation, is thrown into panic mode and simply loses the will to continue. The problem is not that nothing comes to mind when he reaches an unfamiliar word but that far too much comes to mind and he can’t sort it all out. In an instant he registers a lack of recognition, tries to guess a word that might work based on shape and a few of the letters and jumps ahead to see if he can understand the whole sentence anyway. It’s that moment of confusion that I’ve been “seeing” when I watch him read.

We spent much of the lesson talking about how to undo some of the bad but comfortable habits of a lifetime. It’s hard to do but it can happen over time. So this week he’s working on recognising what he does when he hits a word he doesn’t know. Instead of panicking and letting his mind jump all over the place, he’s going to try to read through it and hear the sounds as he goes. He needs to get comfortable with trying a couple of possibilities before he hits the right one.

Some might say that sounds laborious but, as he develops it as an automatic response, it will be much faster and much less demoralising than what he’s doing now.

I’ll let you know how he gets on.

And in case you’re curious, the answers are: Channel Four Wales and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.