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Confusion is one of the major triggers for a dyslexic mind, trying to make sense of symbols that don’t seem to mean anything.
Imagine you had a text in English that was littered with Chinese symbols that made up more than half of the text you are trying to read. Every time you stumble over one of these symbols and somebody points out the word (in Chinese), they expect you to know it when that same symbol shows up a few lines or a page later. Would you?
I would not. However, some of these symbols would be coming up so often, that eventually I’d be able to read them, to the great delight of my teachers, mum and everyone else who has tried so hard to get me to decipher them.
A young dyslexic child is not expected to get a Chinese word, but looking at words that have no apparent picture, they get a very similar feeling. Words like ‘the’ and ‘a’ are repeated so often and are quite simple to say, they are going to be reading those quite early and seemingly effortlessly. However, do they have the right meaning for those words? Do they REALLY know what they are reading? Has anybody explained that ‘the’ means: a particular person or thing that is here or is being talked about, or more than one person or thing? Have they understood that there is a difference between ‘Please bring me the blue vase’ and ‘Please bring me a vase’?
I have seen too many children who are in their teens and had no idea what ‘the’, a, an, for, by, from or nor mean; let alone whether, whom, which or sure. In the context of a sentence they are guessing what it could mean, but in another sentence that meaning would easily go out the window and then be replaced by something else they are guessing at.
Never having certainty or mastery is a very confusing and frustrating state of being. Teachers may help and succeed in getting them to read by sounding out (a very frustrating and slow process, not one I would encourage), but does it add meaning? They may be using coloured overlay or glasses, which gives them more focus to read, but not the meaning either.
The best way we have found to create meaning is by mastering it. The child has to create a model in clay/plasticine, that depicts the meaning with certainty and clarity.
The process of creativity is the process to mastery.