Reading, Writing & Frustration
Her bright but dyslexic daughter seemed destined for a future as an underachiever. Then new technologies provided help.

By Jacqueline L. Salmon
Sunday, April 15, 2007

THE TURNING POINT IN THE STRUGGLE WITH OUR DAUGHTER'S DYSLEXIA came during Sarah's sophomore year in high school. She and I were in her bedroom, and, as usual, I was reading her lessons aloud to her. We'd started with chemistry, where I had barely navigated through the thicket of the periodic table. (Molybdenum? Yttrium?) Now we were deep into our third hour of Advanced Placement world history and reviewing a chapter on Chinese history.

Sarah paced the room, repeating back key phrases about 3rd century B.C. China and orally summarizing the material, paragraph by paragraph. I made a wild stab at pronouncing the name of the emperor who united the warring provinces of China and built the Great Wall: Qin Shihuangdi. It came out like "Quincy Honky."

Sarah grabbed the book back. "That's not how my teacher pronounces it."

"Then you do it," I snapped.

Sarah burst into tears.

It's painful to recall, but the episode pushed us to discover and take advantage of powerful new technologies that eventually helped our oldest child achieve her full potential -- that of a girl capable of plowing through difficult coursework and pulling down a 4.1 grade-point average.

If only we could have foreseen the future in first grade, when we had our first inkling of a problem.

Back then, Sarah had a fondness for the book Put Me in the Zoo, not great literature but great fun to read when you're starting out on that voyage to literacy. She'd read the tale, about a funny, spotted leopard desperate for a home in the zoo, seemingly effortlessly, over and over again: "I would like to live this way. This is where I want to stay." At least, we thought she was reading it.

We soon discovered, when Sarah turned to other books, that she had been memorizing the words. Basic words such as "ball," "the" and "dog" baffled her. Sometimes she recognized words on one page but had no recall when she saw the words again a page later. At times, she reversed the order of words in sentences or skipped them entirely.

We brought up our concerns with her first-grade teacher. "You need to read to her more" was her response. But we were already reading heavily to Sarah. My husband and I are writers, and reading is a passion. We redoubled our efforts, recording the number of books on a log we kept on the kitchen table. Once a week, she took it to school, where the teacher put congratulatory stickers on it. By the end of the year, she'd hit 460 books.

Surely Sarah would pick up the ball and run with it, we thought. But while the other second-graders in her public school were sailing through The Magic School Bus and Amber Brown-- books with chapters, plots and complex thoughts -- Sarah was stuck with basic readers such as The Snowball.

"I saw a snowball on a hill," it read. "It rolled along and picked up Bill!"

She read haltingly, stumbling over the simplest words. She surprised and baffled us by doing well on spelling tests, until we realized she was once again memorizing. Gradually, it dawned on Sarah, too, that there was a problem.

"Why can the other kids read better than me?" she asked us. We didn't know what to say. How do you reassure a child that her brain works fine -- especially when you yourself don't know what the problem is? When Sarah was again placed in the lowest-level reading group in third grade, we decided to follow a friend's recommendation and, swallowing hard, shelled out $1,500 for a full battery of tests from an educational testing service.

SARAH TURNED OUT TO BE A CLASSIC DYSLEXIC -- among the 5 to 15 percent of schoolchildren with normal or above-average intelligence who perform significantly below their potential when handed a book or a pencil. One measure of dyslexia is a 15-point difference between IQ and reading achievement. Sarah had a 23-point gap.

To most people, a dyslexic is someone who reverses letters when he reads or writes. But dyslexia is not a deficit in the visual system. Dyslexics see words correctly. It is a deficit in the brain's language system -- in the neurons that are used to process the distinctive sound elements that constitute language.

Dyslexics have a flawed ability to develop phonemic awareness -- that is, the ability to divide the written word into its underlying segments, called phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest discernible segment of speech (for example, the word "cat" consists of three phonemes: kuh, aah, tuh) and the bedrock of reading. When learning to read, children naturally break apart each word into its phonemes and then rapidly reassemble it into a coherent word. Eventually, they learn to pay attention to the word's meaning rather than its sounds, and they read text rapidly, smoothly and effortlessly.

By contrast, dyslexics struggle to blend letter sounds to create whole words. For them, reading and spelling is like trying to crack an impossible code, and the effort can take a toll. Studies have shown that dyslexic students have significantly more academic and behavioral problems than children without learning disabilities. One 1996 study found that 2 percent of those with learning disabilities go on to a four-year college. Studies have also found that adult dyslexics have a lower satisfaction with health and friends, and exhibit more psychiatric problems than non-dyslexics. Fewer are employed and, even if employed, hold jobs that are part-time, minimum wage and unskilled. We spent Sarah's childhood in almost constant anxiety that our daughter, too, would spend her life as a frustrated underachiever.

But with the advent in the 1990s of functional brain imaging, technology began providing answers. To find the physical basis of "word blindness," researchers at four learning disability centers nationwide, among them the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University, are using magnetic resonance imaging to map the neural pathways used in reading. By watching the brain as subjects read, researchers can track words and symbols as they bounce from the eyes to the visual cortex and through the circuitry of the brain.

In just the past few years, scans have revealed stunning details of what goes right -- and wrong -- when humans read. Scans have found that normal readers activate three interconnected neural systems in the brain's left hemisphere. Commonly seen words are directly processed in an area behind the left ear (the occipitotemporal cortex). The more complex work of picking apart words appears to be rooted in another area, above and slightly forward from there (the inferior parietal area).

A third area, just behind the left temple (called the inferior frontal gyrus), is responsible for analyzing word meaning and for the articulation of a word.

In dyslexics, the areas in the back, where words are formed and analyzed, aren't as engaged, while other areas, such as the front and the right side of the brain (used mostly for visual processing), become more active, perhaps as dyslexics struggle to compensate for the failure of their rear brain neural systems.

By taking thousands of images as dyslexic and normal readers identify letters flashing above them inside the glowing tunnel of the MRI, the Georgetown center and the other labs expect to soon determine whether intensive reading therapy can "rewire" the dyslexic brain. Eventually, they expect the research to lead to better diagnoses and treatment of dyslexia, perhaps before a child shows any signs of problems. In the meantime, there have been dramatic advancements in technologies that assist dyslexics in bridging the gap between their potential and their performance.

During Sarah's elementary school years, such tools were helpful but rudimentary. After her diagnosis, she started using an electronic speller and a portable word-processing device so she could type her in-class assignments rather than handwrite them.

By seventh grade, she used a regular laptop, where spell-checker became a lifesaver.

By then, she had grasped the hard lessons of life as a dyslexic -- that any task involving reading and writing would take her twice or three times as long as it took other kids. She went into victim mode, complaining that other kids had it too easy and that she was the only one who had to work so hard.

One day, she locked herself in the bathroom.

"I'm dumb! I'm stupid!" she screamed through the door. "Those tests that said I was smart -- they were wrong!"

In high school, concerned that she was sinking into a morass of self pity and anger, we had her retested by a private educational consultant, mostly to help her understand that her dyslexia was real. The results were the same. Her ability to blend sounds while reading, her reading fluency, her "word attack" (that is, her ability to process and sequence sounds) were far below average.

As we had requested, the consultant was blunt as she went through the results with my husband, me and Sarah. She ticked off Sarah's many strengths and then turned to her prospects for academic success.

"You are never going to get a lot of A's," she told Sarah. "It wouldn't be fair to expect that of yourself. B's and C's are more realistic, and there's nothing wrong with that."

My husband and I were relieved. Maybe this would take the pressure off Sarah and reassure her that there was no shame in an average performance in school.

Sarah's face darkened. She nodded stiffly, and as soon as we were out the door, she turned on us furiously.

"She's wrong," Sarah hissed at us. "I can so get A's. I'm going to get a 4.0."

SARAH SIGNED UP FOR HONORS-LEVEL AND ADVANCED PLACEMENT CLASSES at our public high school. She plunged into dense college-level textbooks and demanding writing assignments. But her laptop and Franklin speller couldn't keep up with the growing demands of her schoolwork. We ended up reading many of her assignments to her: a process that could take four hours or longer each night. Then came the outburst over the Chinese history lesson.

The next day, I found the Web site for Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic -- a nonprofit organization that produces recordings of books and textbooks for people with visual impairments and learning disabilities -- and signed her up. The educational consultant we'd seen in third grade had suggested it, but I had always thought that Sarah could get by without it.

For decades, RFB&D issued its recordings on cassette tapes, a cumbersome process and bulky procedure that involved listening to as many as 10 cassettes for one book. But in 2002, the organization took a giant leap forward by introducing digitally recorded textbooks stored on CDs. With a special CD, Sarah could listen to her textbooks and skip around with a press of a button. To our surprise, RFB&D had a massive array of textbooks in stock -- even science and French texts. The organization receives school curriculum lists from around the country, and volunteers record most books. The organization will also take requests. We either ordered her books online or called the Washington office. The CDs, in a slim cardboard sleeve, showed up about a week later.

With the textbook recordings, Sarah could now do what most students do. She could move around a chapter or section, skipping or fast-forwarding through sections that she knew weren't relevant. She would curl up on her bed, earphones on, thumb on the buttons, looking at charts, maps and graphs as she read along, the words pouring into her ears. She also got Write: Outloud, speech synthesizer software that read aloud what she wrote, reducing her endless hours of proofreading or relying on us to do it.

The CDs sliced an hour or so off her homework each night. The speech synthesizer improved her writing by letting her hear what she couldn't see. She could listen for missed words (she often left out conjunctions such as "or" and prepositions such as "on" or "by") and misused words (frequently typing "their" instead of "the," and "you" instead of "your"). She was able to express more complete sentences and more complex thoughts.

But, far more important, the technology freed her from a dependence on others. She could now close the door of her room and do her homework on her own. It was still slow and painful. But it was her homework time, not our homework time.

Her math and English grades climbed from B's to A's. French moved from a B to a B+. History went from an occasional A to consistent A's. An English teacher who had noted early in the year that Sarah's sharp observations in class weren't reflected in her papers told us at the end of the year that Sarah's writing was much more fluid and, at times, even eloquent.

Best of all, Sarah stopped referring to herself as "dumb" or "not as smart as the other kids in my class." Instead, she matter-of-factly told teachers and classmates that she had dyslexia. Now, it was a disorder she could name and see -- and, with the technology, control. She made jokes about her chronic misspellings on e-mails and IMs. "What do you expect?" she said with a shrug to a friend after mangling the spelling in one. "I'm dyslexic."

In her junior year, she came up with a nickname for her sports jerseys, "Cixelsyd," ("dyslexic" spelled backward). A friend bought her a T-shirt with the slogan "Who put the sexy in dyslexic?"

Sarah's grades kept climbing. In her junior year, she reached her Holy Grail -- a grade-point average for the year of 4.1.

As Sarah heads for college next year, assistive technology continues to develop. Among other tools, there are now $150 "reading pens," the size of a large felt-tip marker -- hand-held text scanners that read aloud words or lines of text. Screen readers are now built into word-processing software to read information on the screen using synthesized speech. More advanced versions will read aloud the text on Web pages. And that's just the beginning.

Studies have shown that assistive technology improves the reading rate and comprehension of students with reading disabilities, improves their spelling and helps them find significantly more errors in their written compositions. One study found that college students with learning disabilities get higher writing scores when using speech recognition software than those who use a human transcriber or write without assistance. Just as important, it frees dyslexics such as Sarah from relying on someone else to learn, giving a boost to their self-confidence.

Will Sarah continue availing herself of all this new technology in college? She's still a stubborn teenager, so probably not at first.

But as her mother, I feel good knowing it's there whenever she needs it.

Jacqueline L. Salmon writes for The Post's Metro section. She can be reached at salmonj@washpost.com.

New Help for Dyslexics

A burgeoning number of "assistive learning" devices -- which bypass or compensate for a learning deficit -- have revolutionized the reading and writing processes for many people with learning disabilities. Some devices are already included in computer hardware and software. Others must be purchased separately. Prices are usually from $75 to $300.

· Audio books are available in a variety of formats, such as cassette tapes, CDs and MP3 downloads. Resources include Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (which requires proof of diagnosed learning disability) and Web sites such as Audio.com. A growing number of libraries also offer downloadable books through a service called NetLibrary.

· Speech recognition software translates speech into text. Programs include Dragon Naturally Speaking and Simply Speaking.

· Word prediction programs anticipate a word that a user intends to type. WordQ, for example, suggests words and provides spoken feedback to help users find mistakes.

· Screen readers read aloud typed words. Some also read aloud from books and other printed material once they have been scanned into a computer. Computerized, portable "pens" can help dyslexics with certain words or phrases. Users run the "pen" over a word or phrase, and the device reads it out loud.

· Talking electronic spell-checkers allow users to enter words by how they sound and then read the correct spelling out loud.

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An increasing number of programs combine assistive technologies. I've found two Web sites especially valuable: SchwabLearning.org, for parents of children with learning disabilities, has an exhaustive list of assistive technologies. The International Dyslexia Association's Web site, www.interdys.org, also provides information.