Slow labored reading is a bigger barrier to learning to write than poor spelling is.
I used to notice that the teachers taking notes in individual education program (IEP) meetings would intermittently stop writing. I first noticed this when I was dictating to them and found it curious. Why did they stop writing? Sometimes, people stop writing so they can plan what to say next, but when I was dictating, they didn’t have to do that. All they needed to do was write what I said. Observing that behavior at other times during meetings, I came to realize that they were alternating between writing and reading what they had written. It was a process. It was not just spelling words one after another.
I talked with some of these writers and found that getting their writing to make sense, be accurate, and be organized, required them to do much more reading than spelling. They often read important writing seven or eight times before it’s finished. I find this to be similar to the earlier observations I had made when asking someone how to spell a word. They would say, “give me a pencil.” That was puzzling to me; I didn’t ask them to write a word. I asked them to tell me how to spell a word. However, I realize that for them, spelling was not done by sequencing letters verbally. They were using motor memory. But the important point here is that after writing the word, they had to look at the word and confirm that they had spelled it correctly. They had to read the word. They could not spell without reading. And, the teachers writing from my dictation could not write without reading.
What can people with dyslexia, like me, learn from this observation? It tells us that reading sentences back immediately after writing them is imperative, and there’s much more reading going on in the writing process than there is spelling.
Despite their excellent expressive and receptive language, students with dyslexia typically produce written work far below their language levels. Their slow and labored visual reading is not adequate for quickly rereading what they have written. Together with their struggles to spell, this reading barrier often bogs them down when they attempt to write. To cope, they typically resort to using simple sentences and short passages that do not reflect the skill they demonstrate in their spoken language. For years they miss out on the practice that leads to becoming a good writer. Without automatic reading and spelling, students will not have an opportunity to learn how to become good writers. But, it doesn’t have to be this way.
The solution for students with dyslexia is writing by speaking and reading by listening and an important combination feature called “dictation with typing echo.” This feature lets us do the same thing that those teachers were doing when they were writing in the IEP meetings — write a sentence and then instantly hear the sentence read back. And that quick, effortless rereading makes it possible for us to do proofreading, editing, and good composition, like our non-dyslexic peers do.
When you see this, you’ll say, “I’ve got to do this for my students.” Your students with dyslexia will become fluent automatic writers just like their classmates.
Here’s a video showing “dictation with typing echo” in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOyGnxFvpmI&t=6s
To accompany this blog post, we have a Facebook post for talking about dyslexia, please join in the conversation at https://fb.watch/9QJOQLna9y/
