What is Dyslexia?

Introduction

Dyslexia is a developmental disorder that was not clear to scientists until the 20th century. In 1887, physicians called this developmental disorder dyslexia after observation of an adolescent male who experienced significant difficulties in learning to read and write. Dyslexia is widely accepted to be a specific learning disability and has biological traits that differentiate it from other learning disabilities. It is the most widely known and most carefully studied of the learning disabilities, affecting 80% of all those designated as having learning disability (Lyon et al, 2003). Dyslexia became categorized as a learning disability in the 1896 and has been debated for many years (Snowing et al, 2003). It has been defined according to many in different forms and ways. These are some of the definitions that were found of Dyslexia: according to the US National Institutes of Health, Dyslexia is a learning disability that can hinder a person’s ability to read, write, spell and sometimes speak. In the 1980’s, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) came about with an exclusionary definition of Dyslexia: If a child’s difficulty with reading could not be explained by low intelligence, poor eye sight, poor hearing, inadequate educational opportunities, and then the child must be Dyslexic. Despite this advancement in identification, the condition was first described in the medical literature by many physicians who studied several classes of individuals with obvious normal intelligence but could not learn to read (Siegel, 2006).

These cases were termed word blindness (i.e. inability by to read words). Dyslexia or learning disability is behaviorally seen as a discrepancy between reading abilit...

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...roblem. Learners with dyslexia will benefit from early identification, appropriate intervention and targeted effective teaching, enabling them to become successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens.

A means of updating health workers wit the tools and education should also be available. Encourage professionals to confidently identify the conditon and give appropriate remedy. Applications of these procedures will help eliminate this developmental disorder. Recently, a model to identify dyslexic individual is been proposed. It is called response to instruction and involves providing a classroom based-intervention and then providing more individualised academic intervention for children (Siegel, 2006). Government should provide the means for other stakeholders to participate in the use of these models to treat dyslexia.