The 4 Main Causes Of
Reading Difficulty

Here are the four issues that account for over 95% of the reading difficulties that we see.

Memorisation And Guessing (reading enemy no 1)

Many children naturally tend to memorise words rather than learn to decode them. If your child is a bright "visual" learner, that will have seemed the easiest way to read at the age of 4 or 5.

Many of the early reader books encourage this by using a very limited vocabulary and an obvious picture. And "sight words" are often taught in school.

For a bright visual learner, any instruction in phonics (decoding the sounds represented by letters in words) will have seemed confusing and much more difficult. So your child probably just ignored it. It doesn't seem to be necessary at first.

However, as the text starts to get more complicated, this strategy of memorisation and guessing becomes harder and harder.

Most of the children we help have reached a reading plateau at the age of 7 or 8. They are then guessing wildly when reading. They also become very resistant to even trying to read, even though they seemed to do OK at first.

So, if your child guesses a lot when reading, this is probably the reason why.

Have you seen that?

Word memorisation is like a tempting shortcut path through the woods. They head off down it thinking it seems much easier than the track around the outside and then find themselves at a dead end.

It is by far the most common cause of difficulty. And the brighter the child the more likely this is to happen and the further they can take it before getting stuck and lost in the woods.

The good news is that it is completely reversible with the right instruction.

Dyspraxia

Dyspraxia sounds much worse than it is.

All the sensory input and motor neurone output of the brain passes through an area called the cerebellum. It has half the neurones in your head.

If the cerebellum is not working efficiently there will be a range of potential symptoms, that are often quite mild and difficult to detect.

One of them is a difficulty dealing with lines of text and paragraphs of text.

A child with mild dyspraxia will find reading a single word easy but a block of text will be much harder.

If you have seen that, you can see more detail here. There are ways you can help the cerebellum sharpen up.

Irlen Syndrome

Do you know how red writing on a blue background tends to shimmer when you look at it? It is very hard to focus on.

Well some children find the same happens with black text on a white background. They are over-sensitive to the contrast between the black and white.

This is called Irlen Syndrome, after Helen Irlen who researched it.

If your child complains of the text "moving around", this is probably the cause.

We recommend going to a good optician to have it tested further and have some tinted reading glasses made.

Low Declarative Memory Capacity

Reading is one of those things that seems more amazing the more you know about what is involved. It makes heavy use of your working memory. That is why it is difficult to read anything if you are being distracted. Libraries insist on silence, whereas bars don't!

If your child has a relatively limited declarative memory capacity (the "thinking" part), that will impact how easy reading development is. In particular, you will see your child decode the words very slowly and then have no understanding of the sentence that has been read, even if it is very simple.

I don't have any magic bullet for this, but I do have two bits of good news.

First, use of the declarative memory does expand it. So the worse your memory, the more you should exercise it. Reading makes intensive use of the declarative memory and so just daily reading practice will help expand it.

Second, as the decoding elements of reading become more automatic they make smaller demands on the declarative memory as the process moves into procedural memory. This then leaves extra capacity for the information in the text to be processed. That makes the meaning of the text easier to follow.

So our treatment for a limited declarative memory capacity is steady and regular supported reading, using our TrainerText system. It takes time, but we do see steady improvement.

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