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Can Dyslexia be Prevented?

Two sources of evidence strongly suggest that the greatest risk for the development of dyslexia (severe difficulty with word decoding and spelling) is for a child to receive their early reading instruction in an English-speaking country, in a school where they use the balanced literacy approach (McGuinness. 2004 ERI p3, Schutz. Jan 2011). Hearing and speech difficulties add to the risk, as do noisy classrooms. Additional ‘keep-up’ teaching for a few slower-to-learn children ”within 3 weeks of starting their phonics instruction” (DfE. Reading Framework) is also necessary to prevent ”instructional dyslexia” (Johnston & Evans. 2023) developing.

The first source of evidence comes from European countries with transparent alphabet codes (Seymour, Aro & Erskine. 2003), where virtually every child is able to decode accurately, and spell nearly as well, within a few weeks of starting formal schooling. In these countries, synthetic phonics is used to teach reading and spelling (Frith. 2001, Torgerson et al. 2018, Mann & Wimmer. 2002). The evidence from continental Europe can be put alongside evidence from a range of primary schools in England* that, post-Rose 2006, stopped using the NLS balanced approach and started teaching early reading and spelling using high-quality phonics programmes** with fidelity and rigor.

*See https://www.dyslexics.org.uk/teaching-all-children-to-read-and-spell/ and scroll down to ‘Beginning Reading Instruction Around Europe’ for evidence from a range of primary schools in England.
**See ‘Is England There Yet?’ https://www.dyslexics.org.uk/are-we-there-yet/ for problems with the DfE’s phonics programme ‘Letters and Sounds’ 2007.

‘Keep-Up’ phonics teaching:

”One key recommendation in the [DfE’s reading] framework relates to procedures to prevent dyslexia developing. The framework states that children who show early evidence of struggling with learning to read should be identified as early as 3 weeks of starting their phonics instruction and immediately started on extra teaching and practice with the same programme in order to keep up with the other children in their class.” (Grant. 2021)
See ‘Primary School Phonics: Keep-Up and Catch-Up’
https://www.dyslexics.org.uk/options-for-intervention/

Hearing difficulties:

Because of the great complexity of the English spelling code, pupils in English-speaking countries require around three years of high-quality phonics teaching, starting early in Reception year, in order to become fluent decoders and accurate spellers. For pupils with hearing difficulties, it is particularly important. Without excellent phonics teaching from the start, they will quickly find themselves needing to depend heavily on the visual aspects of words, texts’ illustrations and other guessing strategies to read. A noisy classroom will further exacerbate their difficulties -see below. Most deafness in the early years due to otitis media (glue ear) eventually disappears, but an embedded guessing habit can be very hard to shift.

All pupils should sit facing the teacher during phonics lessons to ensure that they can easily see their teacher’s mouth and lip movements. Those known to have hearing difficulties should be seated at the front of the class in order to hear their teacher’s voice as clearly as possible during lessons.

Seeing the mouth: the importance of articulatory gestures during phonics training.
Novelli. C. et al. 2023.
”Results provide strong evidence of the importance of students having visual access to their teachers’ articulatory gestures during GPC training.”

”The audiologist who screens reception children’s hearing in school told me that on any day there could be as many as ten children in reception/KS1 suffering from glue ear which wouldn’t necessarily be identified by a hearing check. It’s why facing the teacher is important.”
(Y1 teacher & SENCo)

”My research with a sample group of one thousand young people shows that the number of dyslexic people with a history of ear infections and otitis media (OM) is significantly higher than in other groups of the population.”
(Peer. 2005. Linking glue ear and dyslexia)

Teaching Deaf Children to Read and Spell. Ann Sullivan
https://www.phonicsforpupilswithspecialeducationalneeds.com/post/teaching-deaf-children-to-read-and-spell

Teaching phonics to deaf children: Guidance for teachers
https://www.ndcs.org.uk/documents-and-resources/teaching-phonics-to-deaf-children-guidance-for-teachers/

Studies of the profoundly deaf (see Aaron et al. 1998), who have no phonological sensitivity, have found that they are incapable of learning to spell phonemically complex words because they cannot utilise the alphabet code’s phoneme-grapheme correspondences. Instead, profoundly deaf students rely on the visual matching of spelling probabilities (the statistical repetition of visual spelling patterns in words). This statistical learning is something we all do automatically, below conscious awareness.
(McGuinness 2004. p286) 

Aaron et al. 1998. Spelling without phonology: A study of deaf and hearing children.
Reading and Writing Vol. 10.
”Results showed that deaf students, who were chronologically much older, were not better spellers than hearing children from the fifth grade. Analysis of data revealed little evidence that the deaf students involved in the present study utilize phonology in spelling…Rote visual memory for letter patterns and sequences of letters within words, however, appears to play a role in the spelling by deaf students. It is concluded that sensitivity to the stochastic-dependent probabilities of letter sequences may aid spelling up to certain point but phonology is essential for spelling words whose structure is morphophonemically complex.”

Research by Siegel, Share and Geva (1995) revealed that hearing children who struggle to read as a result of missing or inadequate phonics instruction, behave much like deaf readers, relying mostly on visual information to decode and spell, as they lack knowledge of the phonological information contained in words.
(McGuinness. 2004. p.286)

Classroom Noise:

https://schoolecosystem.org/2020/09/06/the-influence-of-acoustics-on-learning/
Influence of classroom acoustics on learning.

”To understand almost all speech that is intended for us, say the experts, the speech must be at least 15 decibels louder than other interfering sounds. Most classrooms exceed this level by 10 times.”
(Milstone 2005. Classroom acoustics -sometimes the answer to ‘are you listening?’ is ‘I can’t’)

Loudness and Intelligibility of Irrelevant Background Speech Differentially Hinder Children’s Short Story Reading: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mbe.12264
”Students read more slowly and understand less amidst background noise, with the greatest effect on the weakest readers.”

Delayed Speech and other Speech Development Difficulties:

This is a strong predictor of risk for decoding problems, especially if your child is taught using the balanced literacy approach: ”Speech difficulties predict problems learning an alphabetic writing system. Equally predictive are the teaching methods currently used in most classrooms. If your child has a speech problem, he or she is in double jeopardy.” (McGuinness. 1998. p160)

”In fact, studies show that between 75 and 100 percent of children with pre-school language delays have trouble with reading.” (Hall & Moats 2002. p140) This disquieting news needs to be tempered by the fact that, ”(D)yslexia doesn’t exist in several European countries” and, ”If language development really played a causal role in learning to read one would expect to find the same incidence of reading problems everywhere, because human language is a biological trait.” 
(McGuinness. 2005 p206) 

”Overall, a broad range of studies from a variety of disciplines show that no child, short of being deaf, mute, or grossly mentally disabled, is prevented by a language delay or deficit from learning ‘reading mechanics.” (McGuinness. 2005 p12. italics added)

For research on the links between speech development difficulties and learning to decode, see
McGuinness’ Why Children Can’t Read. 1998 pp154->160