Guest Author - Jeanne Rutgers

Overcoming Dyslexia


Sally Shaywitz’s book Overcoming Dyslexia is one of the most comprehensive and easiest to read books on the subject.

The book is peppered with vignettes about children who struggle with reading. These real life examples bring the diagnosis to life. It is no longer a confusing scientific word, but something to describe many students that we know. For example she discusses a child who sees a picture of a volcano and says it’s a tornado. This illustrates the difficulty dyslexics have with word retrieval. There is also a chart that shows how dyslexics will move phonemes around in words. They will read or pronounce "specific" as "pacific" or "statistics" as the nonsense word "satislicks".

She illustrates how dyslexics can comprehend stories or passages that are read to them, but lose understanding when they read to themselves. This book does an excellent job explaining that dyslexia is a phonological problem and not a result of lack of intelligence.

While the first part of the book describes what a dyslexic student looks like, the second half focuses on remediation. Not only does she give lists of books for young readers, she explains the fundamentals of phonics instruction and how to pull longer words into syllables. There are also charts with reading benchmarks for children in kindergarten through fourth grade.

She advocates for early testing and remediation. This is a very critical factor in the education of a dyslexic child. The later the problem is identified, the further behind the child has fallen, and the longer the remediation will take. In my personal experience this is very true. If I see a student who is in 1st or 2nd grade, the tutoring process is usually quick. The child hasn’t fallen so far behind that he has already labeled himself as “the dumb kid.” But when I see a 4th grader, she may already be two years behind. Now the resistance to reading is strong. Her self confidence is weak, and she has experienced much failure.

I know the size of this book can be intimidating. It can be a little scary to look at something over 400 pages long. Despite its size, it reads very easily because it is broken up into short chapters, and is filled with illustrations and real life stories of dyslexics of all ages. While it does have some medical terms, it is clearly written for parents and not researchers or academics.

For more information on Dyslexia click here