Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a severe mental disorder which deals with a person having difficulties learning. This medical syndrome occurs in all ethnicities and age groups. Dyslexia is not all about low intelligence, and a lot of people with dyslexia are very creative and gifted like prodigies. Around 15% of United States population is affected by learning disorders and the numbers are drastically increasing. One of the main causes of Dyslexia has to do with Genetics and two popular symptoms are incapability of relating symbols with sounds and repeated word guessing. Two treatments for dyslexia are Allopathic treatment and an organized language program which deals with letter sound system. I will demonstrate and describe Dyslexia’s medical aspects as well as it’ psychological and sociological features.
According to the academic article “Dyslexia” written by Patricia G. Mathes and Jack M. Fletcher on page 289 “Dyslexia was first described more than 100 years ago.” At that time the cause of Dyslexia was by complexity in stocking up imagery impersonation of words. The first theory of dyslexia was called the strephosymbolia which was introduced by Samuel Orton and it acclaimed that children were having a hard time building control in the brain which lead to failure of suppressing mirror visual counterparts. However, Samuel Orton’s theory is not proven accurate but it persuaded other theories to come about as well as new treatments. (Mathes and Fletcher 289) “The underlying assumption being that by activating the auditory, tactile, and Kinesthetic modalities of learning, students are able to compensate for inherent weaknesses in the visual domain.” Even nowadays the Orton-Gillingham process of teaching reading is still used. These programs mainly focus on educating alphabetical interpretation and this also explains any success achieved by the patients. Treatments that do not involve multisensory methods but teach alphabetical decoding have also been successful.