Children with a reading disability need to use an inordinate amount of energy practising these skills. And when children struggle to read fluidly, reading isn't fun for them and they avoid it.
A typical avoidance strategy is asking to be read to - and just looking at the pictures in the book, says Annette Höinghaus, spokesperson for the German Dyslexia and Dyscalculia Association (BVL).
Around one in ten children have some form of reading and/or spelling disability, Höinghaus says, although these often remain long unrecognized, which exacerbates the problem.
Here, Höinghaus offers some tips on ways that parents can help children with a reading and/or spelling disability.
Six ways to help with a reading disability:
1. Books should be in large print, with at least a 14-point font and no serif typefaces with horizontal tapers on letters, such as are found in Times New Roman or Garamond, for example. Line spacing should be at least 1.5 times the font size, "otherwise dyslexics often slip down to the line below."
2. Parents should ask teachers if they could format texts accordingly. Worksheets shouldn't be crowded with text or have different things copied onto a single page.
"Merely seeing this is stressful for dyslexic children," warns Höinghaus, adding that a closely written A4 page doesn't motivate them. "Quite the contrary, if a page is overloaded, they think there's no way they'll be able to read it."
3. Teachers shouldn't require that everything be copied from the blackboard. Otherwise dyslexic children might be unable to follow the lesson, being "blocked" by trying to copy it all down.
They may also have difficulty copying homework assignments from the blackboard. If so, they should be allowed to photograph the blackboard with a smartphone or have the teacher send them the assignments by email.
4. In the digital age, worksheets should be sent to pupils' tablet computers - on which fonts can be changed as desired. "If all of the pupils get them this way, a dyslexic child won't stand out from the others," Höinghaus says.
5. To make reading fun for dyslexic children, parents can make use of their hobbies. If the child likes, say, horses, detective games or football, they should read books on the subject together - "ideally by taking turns, the parent reading a larger part, the child a smaller one," suggests Höinghaus. This will help the child to understand the book's content.
6. If the child goes on to a secondary school, text-to-speech software can be used.
Three ways to mitigate a spelling disability:
1. Go over spelling rules, eg i before e except after c or when sounded like "a" as in "neighbour" and "weigh" (among other exceptions), or q is (almost) always followed by u. Learn word prefixes and suffixes, eg trans- and -ness, in chunks. Find smaller words in bigger ones, eg "hen" in "when" or "key" in "monkey."
2. Practice reading aloud, starting with shorter and simpler passages.
3. Learning a foreign language presents special challenges, needless to say. Since words' spelling often deviates greatly from their pronunciation - English is notorious in this regard - you can ask the teacher to examine the dyslexic child orally.
"This tells the teacher whether the child has indeed learned the vocabulary words, committing them to memory phonetically," Höinghaus says. Rejecting this examination approach, she argues, unfairly penalizes the child.
