Children entering school often have some early reading skills, such as the ability to recognize letters and some basic words. This ability is very dependent on their home background or prep schools. When children first start school, it is estimated that on average they learn to read approximately one new word a week, and that in the early junior years their rate of learning progressively increases to many new words a day.

Why is it then that at even secondary level we still come across learners who are unable to read? Very often these children are simply tagged as dull or stupid since teachers don?t know how to help them to get out of such learning difficulties! Is there anything that we can do about it?

Firstly, there is a need to identify what could have gone wrong with our learners in the process of developing their reading and even writing skills. The most common result of these problems is what is known as a reading delay. By definition, half of all children have literacy skills below the average for their age. However, some learners do have levels of literacy which prevent them from being able to benefit from the normal range of schoolwork or from general literacy within society. This might be due to a more serious reading difficulty, for example, dyslexia.

Dyslexia is a particular category of reading difficulty, which has been used to refer to learners with otherwise normal general cognitive abilities . Another term for it, which is used more or less interchangeably, is specific learning disability (SpLD), although this can refer to any particular learning problem. Dyslexia is regarded by some as being different from the normal type of reading difficulty, in which learners? general cognitive abilities are also displayed.

The term dyslexia is derived in a similar way to medical terminology from two terms ?dis?, meaning ?problems with?, and ?lexia?, meaning ?words?. The implication has often been that there is some form of medical problem underlying the inability to perceive and to make sense of written information. In particular, the classic ?dyslexic? difficulty of reversing or confusing letters or the order of letters in words has often been linked to a basic difficulty in directionality such as distinguishing left from right, or so-called ?cross-laterality?, where right-handed learners may have a dominant left eye. Specific reading problems that happen as children get older are often termed developmental dyslexia, to distinguish the condition from acquired dyslexia, which can happen to previously literate people following brain injury.

After this identification process, certain specific remedial actions or techniques should be used to help these learners. For example, Hornsby and Miles, ?British Journal of Educational Psychology? (1980) argue that children with dyslexia need a particular teaching technique with integrates auditory, visual, and physical work: the ?multi- sensory approach?. Although Hornsby and Miles found that this approach was effective in helping children it does not in fact differ very greatly from other remedial programmes. The highly effective ?Reading Recovery? approach also uses a range of techniques which involve all the senses.

Most recent developments in the concept of dyslexia see it as a specific difficulty with literacy, one which is unrelated to general cognitive abilities and which can have a number of different causes. The Division of Educational and Child Psychology of the British Psychological Society (DECP, 1999) has therefore arrived at the following definition: Dyslexia is evident when accurate and fluent word reading and / or spelling develops very incompletely or with great difficulty. This focuses on literacy learning at the ? word level? and implies that the problem is severe and persistent despite appropriate learning opportunities.

This definition emphasises that the primary difficulty lies with processing words, and that dyslexia can be said to exist only when there are literacy difficulties despite normal opportunities of learning. At present, the most promising techniques to help children with such problems appear to lie with intensive and structured phonemic approaches such as ?Reading Reflex? (McGuinness, 1998), irrespective of children?s knowledge and understanding in other domains.

Therefore, to enable teachers to deal with such reading difficulties more effectively, it would be much appreciated if teacher training bodies, such as the MIE could include these approaches to teaching in their teacher training modules as it seems likely that if appropriate early educational support of this kind were more common, the need for the concept of dyslexia would be greatly reduced.

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