Dyslexic students can often read a lot but experience anxiety when required to read aloud, so I decided to practise reading Trivial Pursuit question cards. The difficult bit was not what I expected.

'Which musical did the Daily Express hail: A fine, four-fendered, fabulous night?'

The word that stumped Pete was four, not because he didn’t recognise it but because it had been filed in his memory in the same slot as flour and floor and those three words always tripped him up. Always. four flour floor. We can all see the connection but most of us will see the differences instantly. The main problem was that Pete saw 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 upside-down and we always come up with 'pen'. We might see three that look quite different but are still identifiable as 'pens'.

But words aren’t like that; you have to process them from left to right, through the word or they are easily mixed up. One 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 realized it said, 'Yoga Place'. We all do it.

The difference between Pete's reading experience and my reading experience is that I quickly assess and correct a misread word when whatever I'm reading doesn’t make sense. I refer to this as my 'meaning reflex'. It's always on and kicks in automatically and my instant response is to re-read paying closer attention.

Pete, in the same situation, was thrown into panic mode and simply lost the will to continue. The problem was not that nothing came to mind when he reached an unfamiliar word but that far too much came to mind and he couldn’t sort it all out.

He explained to me that, all in the same instant, he:

• registered a lack of recognition
• tried to guess a word that might work based on shape and a few of the letters
• jumped ahead to see if he could understand the whole sentence anyway.

That was the moment of confusion I was seeing when watching him read, so here's what we worked on. When that confusion arose, he would do three things in the same order every time:

• take a breath
• say each sound (not letter) as it appeared in the word
• and listen for a word he knew

He would later tell me that I sat on his shoulder through all three years of university, repeating those instructions through difficult academic texts until he earned himself a 2:1 degree.

For every learner, regardless of age, decoding is an essential part of creating meaning out of text on a page.