In dyslexia, only one method really helps

Study: Only one method of dyslexia successful

09/03/2014

Parents and teachers often learn during school that children suffer from dyslexia. The little ones are reading and writing big problems. As a new study shows, only one method of numerous funding approaches help to cope with the problems really.

"Lurs "the reading and spelling monster
The Internet project www.legakids.net around the topic of reading-spelling weakness invented Lurs, the reading and spelling monster. The fat green monster does not want to share his knowledge of reading and writing that he has learned for himself, so he tries to make it as difficult for children as possible. Lurs is representative of all problems around reading and writing. In the project, which is supported by the AOK and the Mildenberger Verlag, a textbook publisher, a team of learning therapists and psychologists there to comprehensively inform about the dyslexia and provide everyday help for children, parents and teachers.

Every year, 35,000 children with dyslexia are enrolled
The need for this is great in this country. In Germany, around five percent of children and adolescents have great difficulty in correctly distinguishing and putting together letters, even though they are not stupider or smarter than others. Every year around 35,000 children are enrolled in reading and writing difficulties. Those affected often read very slowly, often losing the line in the text, omitting words, twisting or adding new ones, and even copying from the blackboard or book is difficult for them. In addition, they have problems reproducing what they have read. In the first two years of school that may still be to cope with, but then follow difficulties in the other school subjects, especially in foreign languages.

Reading and writing is the basis for knowledge acquisition
Since reading and writing is a basis for acquiring knowledge at school, dyslexia becomes a handicap for the entire life for those affected. According to study results, children with a reading-spelling weakness in their life often lagged behind their cognitive abilities. Those who have difficulty reading in the first years of school, would later also provide below average school performance. Dyslexic teens attend secondary school more often and some of them even end up at the special school. In addition, their vocational training levels are lower than their peers, they rarely achieve an academic degree, and the unemployment rate of affected adults is higher.

But what helps the youngest best
All this shows that support is urgently needed as early as possible and as intense as necessary. Over the years, scientists have developed numerous methods that are designed to improve literacy in a variety of ways. But for parents there is the problem of finding out which program can really help their offspring. According to the newspaper „The world“ said Gerd Schulte-Körne: „There are quite a few individual studies on eligibility for reading-spelling weakness - but no scientific advice on what follows from all these studies.“ The doctor manages the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and is on the scientific advisory board of the German Association of Dyslexia and Dyscalculia.

Findings from 40 years of research
Since not only parents, but often experts, so far often remained at a loss when it came to the choice of funding, Schulte-Körne and his Munich colleagues wanted to change this circumstance. „Even those who should advise those affected, had so far no solid basis for what really works and what does not“, so the child and adolescent psychiatrist. „They looked up what was in the textbooks, and there was something different in each one so far. That's why it was so important to see exactly what insights we really have after 40 years of research.“ The researchers therefore collected information about dyslexic methods, such as scouring specialist journals around the world, or asking fellow researchers for information on methods that had proved ineffective in experiments. They included all studies that met relatively high scientific standards in their meta-analysis, which has just been published in the journal „PLOS ONE“ appeared.

Some trainings focus on visual perception
The scientists were able to find a total of 20 methodological approaches. Some trainings focus on visual perception and children should read with colored glasses, for example. The color contrast is to filter out disturbing frequencies that may distract the children while reading. In part, glasses with prisms are also used, as this changes the eye movements when reading, especially when the children squint. The basis for these methods are scientific findings that could reveal abnormalities in the visual perception and processing of dyslexic children. Thus, word and letter information is perceived as being delayed and ineffectively processed. Thus, the areas responsible for speech processing in the brain are activated much less than other children.

Other methods rely on the promotion of hearing
Other methods, on the other hand, tend to focus on promoting the hearing or training the relationship between letters and certain sounds. This is because in children with dyslexia this ability to distinguish between sound segments and to reliably store them in memory is measurably limited. Studies have shown that the brain areas are less activated for the distinction of sounds in those affected than other children. In methods that focus solely on listening training, therapists play sounds to children and gradually reduce the distances between them. The idea behind it is that listening to the differences between two tones is refined. In other methods, emphasis is placed on the assignment of sounds and letters, and another, but rather smaller, class of training uses medication to make reading and writing easier for children.

Only one method has proven successes
Schulte-Körne summed up the result of the study: „Overall, it was frightening to see that all the effective methods available to us are only effective to a degree.“ Only one method, which combines several elements, could show clearly proven successes: the so-called „phonics instruction“. It is all about the intensive practice of the phonetic letter assignment, together with a continuous training of the reading fluency. The decomposition of words into syllables and their individual sounds as well as the constriction of several sounds into words is part of this method. In all other programs, either the transfer to reading and writing was not successful, or the technique was unsuitable for such a transfer, such as during auditory training. In dyslexia, the pure sound distinction is not the problem, Schulte-Körne. Such a training could therefore not help. Helpful are all approaches that train the sound-letter assignment. Patience is still needed, because the study also showed that longer funding periods are more sustainable than shorter trainings.

Dyslexia is not recognized as a disease in Germany
The World Health Organization (WHO) has long listed dyslexia as a disease in its catalog. In Germany, however, health insurance companies refuse to recognize the reading-spelling weakness as a disease, as this the cash, not „impaired participation in life in society.“ You think it is a matter of school problems and therefore the takeover for therapy costs is granted only in exceptional cases. However, the graduate pedagogue Sebastian Bertram from Hannover sees such therapies as meaningful. He told "heilpraxisnet.de" last year: „Specific therapies and training are important for dyslexics to have the same opportunities in the job but also in the private sector. Lack of self-esteem, which afflicts sufferers often, has a massive impact on mental health. Dyslexia is not a sign of lack of intelligence. It is just a reading and writing weakness that can be treated well if started in time.“ (Ad)