How to Help Children with Dyslexia to Overcome the Barriers to Reading - Term Paper Example

Despite the physical, neurological and thus emotional setbacks suffered by those afflicted with dyslexia, dyslexic children can typically achieve reading levels at the level of those that are not.  They must, though, be diagnosed early and begin receiving specialized tutoring from home and school.  “Children suspected of suffering from dyslexia should undergo a series of reading, spelling, drawing, math and intelligence tests, as well as visual tests, laterality tests, visual scanning tests, sequencing and other tests to examine which brain functions are interfering with their acquisition of normal school learning” (Chakravarthula, 2003).

According to a sophisticated brain imaging study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHHD), dyslexic children experience an interruption in that part of their brain involved in reading phonetically.  More importantly, the study established that dyslexic children who read inadequately when they enter school and then receive little or no supplemental tutoring begin to compensate for their disability by using other parts of the brain as backup systems for the impaired regions.

  “Although most of these children eventually do learn to read, they never do so with the same fluency as do good readers.  This is probably because the ‘backup’ brain systems they use when reading apparently cannot process printed information as easily as can the brain systems primarily involved in reading” (NICHHD, 2002).  In the study, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which produced computer-generated images of the brain while the children were reading.

  With fMRI technology, the researchers confirmed differences in brain images between children with dyslexia and non-reading impaired children of similar age.  The disruption in the brain systems for reading was unmistakable when the children performed phonologic duties, which requires the knowledge of the sound structure of words.