The Emotional Toll of Dyslexia

If you’ve been following the posts in this month-long series on dyslexia, you know by now that people with dyslexia are bright and creative, that they can achieve excellent outcomes with the right instruction, and that there are plenty of great tools to help readers and writers with dyslexia navigate the challenges of literacy. All of this sounds optimistic - and it should. But parents and educators should be aware that students with dyslexia may suffer from low self-esteem and feelings of anxiety, sadness, anger, and frustration related to their academic challenges.

Feedback from their teachers, even the most well-meaning, can be discouraging for children with dyslexia. Because of the types of errors they tend to make, particularly in spelling, dyslexic children are often told to try harder or pay more attention. Their errors may be labeled as “careless” or “lazy.”  Some teachers, confronted with an obviously intelligent student who is making the simplest of errors, assume she just isn’t trying. In fact, many children with dyslexia are some of the hardest workers in their classes, so being misunderstood as careless can be especially frustrating.

It may also be emotionally trying for students with dyslexia to see their classmates learning to read and spell with an ease that is difficult to understand. As children develop proficiency with reading, they are often asked to read aloud in front of the class, placed in leveled reading groups, or sent to the library with their classmates to check out books. All of these scenarios could be uncomfortable for a  child with dyslexia, especially one who has not received a diagnosis. All she knows is that she is in the lowest reading group and that she struggles with the easiest books while her classmates are graduating to chapter books.

Social struggles can continue outside academics, too. Some individuals with dyslexia struggle with language-even oral language-and may not understand complex social scripts. Some also have difficulty understanding sequencing, making blindingly fast social interactions governed by cause-and-effect relationships seem bewildering. Finding the right words is another language-based challenge that impacts people with dyslexia, so even if a child understands what is being discussed, the process of adding his insight can be frustrating. An additional hurdle, more relevant now than in the past, is the constant presence of text in young people’s social worlds. Rather than chatting on the phone, a majority of kids socialize via text messages and social media platforms, which can make it tough for  kids with dyslexia to follow what’s going on with their friends and add their own contributions.

One of the best things that can happen to a child (or adult!) with dyslexia is a diagnosis of dyslexia from someone who can help him understand what this disability really is. He must be shown, over and over again, the difference between the kind of rote learning that his brain doesn’t master as easily and the kind of high-level thinking at which he excels.

Children with dyslexia need opportunities to feel successful, whether or not these occur in the classroom. Sports and the arts have been critical confidence-boosters for innumerable students with learning challenges. Volunteer opportunities, particularly those in which they can play a leadership role, are also excellent places for young people with dyslexia to build feelings of success and self-efficacy.

Finally, kids have trouble appreciating that things tend to get markedly easier for people with dyslexia once they finish school. School has made up an enormous part of their life experience for about as long as they can remember, and it’s hard to imagine that there’s any other system. Luckily, there is. The real world is kinder and more accommodating than school often is, and there are a variety of ways to build and measure success rather than a single report card.

photo credit: Redd Angelo

Assistive Technology for Managing Dyslexia

Having dyslexia can be tough, but the breadth of innovative tools available to help with literacy tasks makes dyslexia a lot easier to manage than it used to be.

Below is a limited list of high-tech assistive technology (AT) to help dyslexics with literacy tasks. But first, an important consideration: Be aware that simply choosing a great tool and giving a student access is not going to solve any problems. Adults must carefully consider the parameters of the task the student struggles with as well as the setting. Speech-to-text software is great, but if the student doesn't have a quiet place to go when it’s time to dictate his ideas, it’s not going to be a successful tool. Similarly, an app that reads text to a student won’t help if she’s too embarrassed to be the only one in the class using headphones.

After selecting the right AT, parents and educators must realize that even today’s tech-savvy youth need lots of training. Would-be users have to understand all the ins and outs of the tool they’re given, including what its capabilities are (and aren’t) and when and how to use it. Plenty of kids have given up on technology that would have been extraordinarily helpful because they couldn’t understand how it could work within their specific academic requirements.

The AT suggestions we’re sharing below are great for students, but even individuals with dyslexia in the professional world may benefit from them.

Tools for Reading

Snap&Read

Snap&Read is an excellent text-to-speech program. A small sampling of the many sites it reads aloud include Google docs, Moodle, Bookshare, Evernote, The New York Times, and even social media sites like Facebook and Instagram (which is a great way to get reticent kids to start experimenting). Snap&Read also reads screenshots and PDFs. This software has some other capabilities beyond its reading services. For example, the Simplify tool provides definitions for difficult words. With the Capture tool, users can enter notes on what they read (either by typing them or copying and pasting from the text), which is useful for writing papers. Snap&Read also words in other languages.

Cost: $3.99/month

Learning Ally and Bookshare

With a letter certifying that a person needs their services, both Learning Ally and Bookshare provide users with audio versions of texts. Their libraries include more basic selections, like audio versions of novels, and hard-to-find texts, like periodicals and textbooks that students can listen to. Though on the surface Learning Ally and Bookshare are similar, there are some important differences. There is a yearly fee associated with Learning Ally, for example, while Bookshare is free. Texts on Learning Ally are read by people, whereas Bookshare uses computerized voices; this sounds like a negative aspect, but some learners find that they like the computerized voices better because it is easier to modulate their speed and pitch.

Cost: Bookshare is free, and Learning Ally costs $119 a year.

C-Pen - The Reader Pen

C-Pen is a small device about the size of a highlighter that users can use to scan text, either a single word or whole sentences. The pen will read the scanned section aloud (it has a headphone jack for use in classrooms) in a computerized voice that users describe as natural. The pen can also provide definitions of words. Importantly, the pen accommodates both left- and right-handed users. Scanning takes a bit of practice, and the pen is best suited for reading a word here and there rather than large blocks of text.

Cost: $250

Prizmo

This app, which works only on iPhones, is a combination scanner and reader (unlike other apps that only scan but require a separate app for reading). It can read almost anything, and its portability is a huge boon. Users can scan passages they need for school, like worksheets and sections of books, but it’s a handy tool for reading tasks in the “real world,” too, and can be used for menus, maps, signs, time tables….

Cost: Free


Tools for Writing

Grammarly

The spell checkers built into word processing programs are better than nothing, but they’re famously inaccurate. Enter the amazingly accurate Grammarly, which catches spelling errors and finds usage mistakes, too. It’s good at using context to determine whether a word or phrase is correct, and it can even give users feedback about style. Grammarly works with Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and nearly anywhere one would want to write on the web. It is compatible with MS Word, too, but for now it works with Windows machines only. (Never fear, Apple fans: It’s easy to get around this by composing in the body of a Google Doc and then pasting into a Word document, if that’s the format one needs.)

What really sets Grammarly, apart, though, is the detailed explanations it provides about mistakes, so users can learn as they’re editing. It can also generate weekly progress reports, which can be motivating for students. Other neat features are genre-specific style monitors and a plagiarism detector.

Cost: Grammarly offers a basic version, which includes only basic checking and does not give access to explanations, for free. The premium version, with all the bells and whistles, costs $139.95 a year.


Text-to-Speech

Whether students use Dragon software, Google Read&Write, or simply dictate into their phones, there’s more to text-to-speech than you may think. Here is a useful guide to training students to use speech-to-text software successfully; it takes some time to get it right, but the results are worth it!



Reading and Writing

Google Read&Write

Probably the biggest advantage to using Google Read&Write is that users don’t need to use multiple forms of AT. GRW is the total package, offering both text-to-speech and speech-to-text. It works with documents, web pages and common file types in Google Drive (including: Google Docs, PDF, ePub & Kes). Like many good text-to-speech programs, GRW highlights each word as it’s read, making both following along and editing much easier. The dictionary is quite handy. For typists, the word prediction feature takes some of the heavy work out of spelling. And distractible users will be grateful that GRW simplifies and summarizes text on web pages to remove ads and other copy.

Cost: For an individual license, GRW is $145 a year, though many school districts provide it as a free accommodation to students with IEPs.



For Even More Information

QIAT, an Online Forum

This listserv for people who are interested in AT in education is free to join (and we recommend that you do!). Contributors include assistive technology specialists, students in higher education, educators, vendors, and parents. Send out any questions you have to the group —none are “silly!”—and brace yourself for a flood of knowledgeable responses. (You can adjust your email preferences at any time if it gets to be too much.) The group requests that users be mindful that every email sent goes to 4,000+ users, so it’s a good idea to respond with private messages when appropriate. There are lots of good resources on their website, too.



Look for one more Dyslexia Awareness Month post next week! We’ll explore the emotional toll dyslexia can take and offer suggestions to parents and educators.

The Big Picture: An Excellent Documentary About Dyslexia

Misconceptions about dyslexia abound. To name a few: many people mistakenly think that dyslexia is a problem with visual perception (it isn't), that dyslexia is characterized by letter reversals (it isn't), or that dyslexics either can't perform well in school (they can) or must not be very capable (they are). For anyone curious about dyslexia, we highly recommend the film The Big Picture: Rethinking Dyslexia.

The Big Picture is a documentary that debuted at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Both critics and viewers have applauded the film for what it teaches about dyslexia, but its director James Redford (son of Robert Redford) was after more than just good reviews. For him, and for his family, the topic of the film is a deeply personal one. Redford's son Dylan is dyslexic, and Dylan's journey through high school and into college is one of the story lines the film explores.

Redford weaves together interviews with a variety of experts on dyslexia. Some, like several young people and their parents, know a lot about dyslexia because they live with it. Others study dyslexia, with the esteemed dyslexia authorities Drs. Sally and Bennett Shaywitz, co-directors of the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity, featured prominently among them. And interviews with staggeringly successful dyslexics, from Sir Richard Branson to Charles Schwab, lend credence to the Shaywitz's insistence that dyslexia does not indicate lack of intelligence or potential.

In fact, acclaimed attorney David Boies believes he wouldn't have achieved such success in his career if not for his dyslexia. He is able to speak extemporaneously with ease because he's been forced to practice for most of his life; he can't rely on written notes. And he trained himself to be an exceptionally focused listener. Most skilled readers know they can always review handouts later if they miss important information when a lecturer is speaking, but Boies's difficulty with reading made this nearly impossible. Both of these skills were critical in making him one of the most successful attorneys in the country.

The Big Picture is a must-see for both kids and adults who live with dyslexia, whether they struggle with it themselves or are part of the support network. It is informative, insightful, and inspirational and, at just under an hour's running time, it's digestible even for younger viewers. Visit the film's website to download the film or to purchase the DVD.

Hi-Lo Books Are Great Choices for Struggling Older Readers

Older kids with weak reading skills face a real conundrum. Studies indicate that the best way to become a better reader is to read more. But books that are written on a level that older struggling readers can manage independently often have too-simple plot-lines, much younger characters, and center on themes adolescents find uninteresting. Books about topics and characters they like, on the other hand, are too hard.

Kenny Louie

For this tricky group of students, hi-lo books can be a magic bullet. Hi-lo is an abbreviation for “high interest-low readability.” Books that fall into this category have fast-paced plots. The characters are older, and the topics are much more interesting to readers in upper elementary, middle, and high school. Students will find that the content is not all that different from what their peers are reading, but the stories are told with more basic words and shorter sentences that make them easier to get through. Hi-lo books are available through a variety of publishers, including HIP Books, Stoke Books, and Lorimer .

Tips for Selecting the Right Hi-Lo Book

• The right hi-lo book must fit the reader on not just one but two counts: reading level and interest level. A perfect match will ensure that your high school student is reading a book he will both appreciate and be able to decode on his own. Good retailers will make both of these numbers readily available. 

• This is one case where it’s okay to judge a book by its cover. Weak readers don’t want to feel stigmatized or embarrassed because their peers see them carrying around “special” books, so look for books whose covers look just like those of standard, grade-level books. 

• Let the student in question make the final choice. It might help to select several possible titles that would all fit the bill, then ask the student to pick one. Buying the book online? No problem. Good retailers’ pages will display the cover image along with a description of the book. Some even allow users to rate the books they've read, so kids can make a fully informed choice.

Recommended Reads: A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

We pick up our Recommended Reads series, which reviews books or series written for children or young adults, with Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light, a mystery based upon real-life events. 

Grades: 7 – 10; may be of more interest to young women

Awards: Carnegie Medal (United Kingdom), Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Borders Original Voices Award, Printz Award Runner Up

Adult Themes: A few references to sexuality and some intermittent cursing, all relatively mild – our heroine is a good Victorian-era girl.

Plot: The summer of 1906 presents Mattie Gokey with a great deal of uncertainty. On one hand, she wants nothing more than to attend Barnard College and use her considerable talents to write stories and books. On the other hand, she’s tied to her father’s farm in upstate New York, where she must help him with the work and care for her younger sisters after her mother’s death. To complicate matters, handsome Royal Loomis has started courting her, and though he seems wrong for her in many ways, she’s tickled by his attention. Marrying him is an attractive prospect, but it would mean forgoing Barnard. And Mattie is horrified by the grinding responsibilities her friend Minnie endures as the young mother of infant twins who must also cook and clean for her husband and his hired workers. The prospect of domestic life is bleak. On the other hand, her reading, coupled with her relationship with her subversive teacher, lead her to wonder whether being a female author is much more attractive than the being a housewife on a farm. When Mattie takes a job at a nearby summer resort to help her father buy a mule, a guest named Grace hands Mattie a packet of letters and tells her to burn them. Hours later, Grace’s lifeless body is retrieved from the lake. In combing through Grace’s letters, Mattie strives to discover whether Grace’s death was an accident or something more sinister, and draws some important conclusions about her own life in the process.

Our Take: (Warning: Includes spoilers!) One of the most fascinating facts about this book is that the murder around which its plot revolves actually took place. Grace’s letters were found in her murderer’s room, not placed into the hands of a sixteen-year-old hotel employee, but Donnelly has lifted the case’s facts and names from the same historical events that inspired Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. This book is a gem even without that background knowledge, however (we confess that we did not know it until reaching the Epilogue). Mattie is a thoroughly admirable heroine: intelligent, motivated, talented, and loving, but still flawed enough to be relatable. Donnelly’s picture of 1906 upstate New York vividly presents the struggles of everyday life in the country: racism, sexism, poverty, back-breaking farm work, primitive medicine, and limited access to education. Reading this book is far from an onerous chore, however; there is plenty of levity, courtesy of Mattie’s little sisters and her best friend Weaver, and readers will delight in the prank Mattie and her friends play on a thoroughly despicable hotel guest. Donnelly shapes each chapter around Mattie’s word of the day, ensuring that readers will walk away from this book with an enriched vocabulary and perhaps a hint of Mattie’s love of words. And Mattie’s courageous decision at the end of the book will leave readers cheering for her, even if they are selfishly a little sad that the book has come to an end.

Highlighting Audiobooks Makes It Easy to Follow Along

We often recommend that struggling readers make use of audiobooks. Listening to books does more than simply allow weak readers to access information. The benefits of audiobooks are many and varied: they expose listeners to literary language, improve decoding skills and word recognition, increase vocabulary, and model fluent oral reading. We have an extensive list of audiobook resources on our website - and recently collaborated with Learning Ally, a nonprofit which is among the leading producers of audiobooks for students with learning challenges (as well as visual impairment).

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Of course, decoding skills and word recognition are best improved when a listener follows along with a written text. Seeing the word while hearing it can enforce a student’s letter-sound associations and sight word recognition. But following along can be difficult for struggling or emerging readers.

Fortunately, there are several services that highlight each word of a digital book as it is read by the device. In this format, the reader listens while looking at an electronic version of the text on a mobile phone, tablet, or computer. The audio track is synced with the words on the page so that each word is highlighted as it is read, allowing readers to follow along easily. Here are a few of our favorite options:

For Beginning Readers

• A subscription to the One More Story website allows readers to choose from a large library of quality picture books. Little readers can listen to and read along with a book of their choosing; favorites like The Snowy Day, Stellaluna, The Poky Little Puppy, How I Became a Pirate, and many more are displayed on digital pages with the original illustrations. For kids who are ready, echo reading mode is available, and kids can choose to hear tough words read aloud for them with a click of the mouse.

• Also subscription-based, Lerner Publishing offers a collection of 237 interactive, highlighting books for readers from pre-kindergarten to fifth grade. Lerner’s digital library  lacks the beloved picture books you’ll find at your local bookstore; instead, their offerings are illustrated, cross-curricular books with titles like Do You Know About Amphibians? and A Mink, a Fink, and a Skating Rink: What is a Noun? Still, most of the text is entertaining and the pictures are both appealing and instructive. Quizzes in the form of games or interactive activities are available at the end of each book.

For Everyone

• Amazon’s partnership with Audible.com has yielded Immersion Reading for Kindle Fire users. After purchasing the Kindle and Audible versions of a book, readers can simply tap the Play icon to begin the professional narration, and words on the screen will be highlighted for them in real time as they listen. All Kindle Fire devices come with this capability. Visit Audible’s FAQ page  for more information.

• Users of the accessible media distributor Bookshare can purchase an app called Read2Go to enable real-time highlighting of any book in Bookshare’s library as they listen. The app can be used on any iDevice.

Watch Now: Dr. Yellin Dyslexia Webinar from Learning Ally

A recording of Dr. Yellin’s webinar from earlier this week for national nonprofit Learning Ally, Dyslexia: Diagnosis, Planning and Support for Struggling Readers, is now available for viewing online. The one-hour program was seen live coast-to-coast by hundreds of parents, students, and educators, and is featured on the Learning Ally website, where it will remain available for future viewing. Learning Ally provides accessible media such as audiobooks to students with learning disabilities and visual impairments. 

In the program, Dr. Yellin provides a detailed explanation of what is meant when we talk about "dyslexia"; an in-depth look at the many types of subtle learning variations that may be at play when a student is struggling with reading, spelling, or other challenges; and insight into why understanding each learner's individual strengths as well as weaknesses should be an essential component of educational planning. He also answers many questions from viewers.

“When parents, teachers and practitioners understand how developing appropriate strategies and interventions can improve children's reading skills and boost self-esteem, and when they have a deeper understanding of the root causes of a student's reading symptoms,” notes Dr. Yellin, “they can help to grow resilient, improved learners with a rekindled love of reading.”

Watch the video below:


Dyslexia: Diagnosis, Planning & Support for Struggling Readers from Learning Ally on Vimeo.

Thanks to all of the great people at Learning Ally for making this webinar possible.

Free Professional Development Event for Educators March 6 in NYC

The Yellin Center's acclaimed (and complimentary) Professional Development Series for Educators continues Wednesday, March 6 at 4:30 p.m. at our offices in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. Dr. Yellin will discuss Struggling Readers. Some seats remain available as of press time!

Who should attend?

• Teachers
• School Administrators
• School Learning Specialists
• School Psychologists
• Other Related Professionals

The event is free - however, advance registration is required and restricted to professional educators and related professionals only (Parents, fret not! New parent-focused presentations will be announced in the coming days!).

You may register for the presentation online here, or by calling The Yellin Center at (646) 775-6646. Don't miss out!

Visit our Events Calendar for more information on upcoming events at The Yellin Center and beyond.

Interested in having Dr. Yellin speak at your school or organization? Contact us to learn more.

Photo: CC by Karin Dalziel

Games to Build Visual Skills

Visual perception is critical to academic success in many areas. Reading, geography, math, art and art history, foreign language literacy, and the sciences are just some of the subjects that rely heavily on visual discernment. Below, we've described some games that are so much fun, kids will have no idea they’re actually building their visual skills!

On the Dot

When reading aloud, it is common for students to substitute a visually similar word (for example, “from” instead of “form”). This can happen to inattentive readers or to readers with poor sequencing skills. Another possibility is that the student needs to build his/her visual acuity.

Visual perception is clearly an important skill in reading, and it is not necessarily related to the quality of a student’s eyesight. A child with 20/20 vision may still have difficulty perceiving clusters of letters accurately, which suggests that s/he needs to strengthen cognitive skills like visual acuity and spatial reasoning. Luckily, a simple board game can help.

On the Dot is recommended by expert reading instructor Al Moore to help students strengthen both visual acuity and spatial reasoning in a fun way. Play is simple: After looking at a card with a configuration of dots on it, players stack a series of transparent cards, each printed with their own dots, to recreate what they see on the card. The first to accurately copy the pattern on the card is the winner. Single players may time themselves to determine how many patterns they can replicate in five or ten minutes.

Guess Who?

Fluent readers rely on their visual memories to read words, and most of us use the same memory function to check our spelling. To improve this cognitive skill, as well as to give any student, regardless of learning style, a serious higher-order thinking workout, try playing Guess Who?.

This old favorite seems to have fallen by the wayside, but it deserves a resurgence. In this two-player game, each player privately selects one of 20 characters. Then players take turns trying to guess the identity of their partner’s character through a series of yes/no questions designed to eliminate possibilities. Though most people would hardly call this game educational, in fact it is great for developing important cognitive skills used in reading. To play, one must look at a variety of visual stimuli and determine what is similar about them and how they differ, the same way a proficient reader can identify a word at a glance because of its visual characteristics. It also reinforces listening comprehension, particularly at the sentence level, and short-term and active working memory.

Guess Who? provides both the medicine - a hefty dose of cognitive strengthening - and the spoonful of sugar to help it go down.

Seeing Stars

Seeing Stars – not your average board game – is designed specifically for reading instruction. Its price tag is considerable, and your family is unlikely to play this game around the kitchen table on a Saturday night. Still, it is enjoyable for children and has been demonstrated to be effective in helping them improve the cognitive areas critical to reading.

Seeing Stars, a game developed by the famous reading program Lindamood-Bell, encourages children to latch on to the reading process in a non-traditional way. The programs at Lindamood-Bell are heavily visual, guiding children to learn the shapes of words and the letters within them rather than processing words letter by letter. This is an effective approach for children who struggle with phonemic awareness and phonology. Consequently, Seeing Stars is all about mental imagery. In this game, a student is asked to visualize a real or nonsense word, then alter it by transposing, removing, adding, or substituting letters to form new words. For students who must memorize orthographic patterns in order to spell - in other words, students who cannot “sound out” words in order to spell them - this process helps students form a strong, mental image of words that can easily be recalled later during reading and writing tasks.

Seeing Stars may not replace Monopoly as a family favorite, but its value goes far beyond entertainment.

Comparing Text-to-Speech Programs

Audiobooks are a great tool for students and adults with reading difficulties because they allow poor readers to access content aurally instead of through print. Almost every book is available in audiobook format if you know where to look. Unfortunately, more and more reading takes place on screens instead of on pages. Students and professionals must read electronic documents and webpages with as much, or more, frequency than books, and these texts aren't available on CD or mp3. Luckily, there is an alternative: text-to-speech programs can read electronic text to weak readers, thus by-stepping the decoding process that can be so taxing.

To help you compare some of the available text-to-speech programs side-by-side, we've compiled a handy chart. Our chart includes both very high quality, expensive programs, and also more basic, less expensive (or even free!) options. Some may find that a very basic program meets their needs, while others will be impressed by the versatility and wide number of features available in some of the more sophisticated packages.

Click-through the chart image to view in large scale, or download the PDF.

Did we miss a good option? Please share your recommendations (or your experiences with any of the programs mentioned above) in the comments.