James dreamed of being able to read

When we met James he was clearly bright and he had been working hard at his reading for years. His parents were very keen to see him reading and he attended a good school.

But James was now 8 years old and his reading ability had reached a low plateau. The only thing that was going up was his frustration and his sense of despair.

So, with each month that passed, his peers were getting a month further ahead. And James knew it. He could see friends reading books that he could only dream of reading. They were reading things like the Harry Potter series and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. James really wanted to read, but despite all his efforts, it was just not happening for him.

He constantly guessed words

He could read a bit, of course. In fact, in the early stages he seemed to be doing well and everyone was pleased. But now reading had become a guessing game for him. He knew some of the words, but had to use the picture and the rest of the sentence to work out the others. He was getting it wrong a lot.

Sometimes he would even look at a word that he had read on the page before and would be struggling with it again, moments later. So he would try a guess, with a word that started with the same first letter and that might fit. The short words were the hardest for him to get right, because there were so many options.

His confidence and self-belief collapsed

By then James was feeling like he was at the end of his tether with it all. He was beginning to think that maybe he was just stupid and he should just give up. That was why his mother had come to us. She felt it was beginning to change him. Her bright, happy little boy was starting to disappear, in a frightening way. It was like he was drowning in the stress of it all. He would sometimes bob to the surface again, but for how much longer?

James’ teacher just suggested doing more reading together, but frankly his mother didn’t feel that was really helping him progress.

So she made contact with us.

An Easyread consultation helped pinpoint the issue

We spent some time talking to her about what she had seen. He was so typical of so many of the children we have seen, that we could start describing James to her without her telling us further detail.

James was a very visual child. He loved Lego and building stuff. He was pretty good at it too.

He was very chatty, but he had had a few hours of speech training when he was younger, because some of his words were not that clear at that stage. His speech was fine now.

His reading was full of guesses, particularly with the short words. And sometimes he didn’t seem to quite understand what he had read, even when he got it right. And his spelling was horrendous.

We hear that again and again and again.

Of course we are always happy to hear it because we know exactly how to fix the situation.

“Optilexia” or sight-reading was the underlying cause

James fitted what we call an Optilexic pattern. We coined the word because we were referring to this pattern so much that we needed a word for it.

What this means is that he had been memorizing the shape of whole words, rather than trying to decode them letter by letter. This had seemed quick and easy for him at first, when the books only contained 10-15 words. But now it was getting much harder, because the text was more complex. Memorizing ten words is fine and maybe a hundred. But a thousand words? Or ten thousand words? That is beyond most of us.

The problem is that that was how James was trying to read. He didn’t have a decoding system to fall back on. And all European-style languages are designed to be decoded, not sight-read visually.

He could pass a spelling test by memorizing the whole list, using his visual memory. But that photographic memory was only good for the test. A week later it had faded and he had no idea how to spell the words in any other way. So he would use letter names and a basic phonetic alphabet, but knew he was writing gibberish because English spelling is so irregular.