(Comment on this article)Narrow Columns for Dyslexic ReadersArticle Topics: Dyslexia, Reading,
Article types: Personal Experience, General Information,
Submitted By: Ann Thompson View Submitter's Profile (annja) Narrow Columns for Dyslexic Readers.
Working now with a group of disaffected, hostile teenage boys, all of whom can decode print for short periods of time, I have devised a "new" approach to printed material.
Using our Kurzweil program, we save material into a Word Document, then have it translated into four columns. The print is bold, double-spaced, "verdana", font size 14.
This is new to the young men. After two days, the feedback from two (of seven), is "it's definitely easier, but still hurts".
Hurts?
One fifteen-year old finds that the pain begins at back of eyeballs, then tranfers to back of his head; another reports his pain is right above the eyes at both temples. In spite of 20-20 vision. (Only one parent, so far has actually made an appointment with the recommended Visual Development specialist.)
I noticed Barry tracing imaginary narrow columns with his pen later in the period, snaking it back and forth and back and forth, as if to test his visual ability to follow the thinner trail. Perhaps that's the reason there is still pain. Perhaps its forcing that binocular focus, still focusing on one word at a time and insisting on the left-to-right movement. My ultimate aim is to allow them to grasp the two or three words - as if in brackets - simultaneously, reading in phrases DOWN the page, much the way "speed-readers" do.
(Back in the 60's we used "flash phrase drills"... useful then, probably useful still now, but ignored.)
From two/three-word phrases we could try to graduate to a slightly wider column until, with great good luck, we could eventually read newspaper columns without difficulty.
It's much too early to draw any valid academic conclusions, but the emotional impact on these fellows is undeniable.
They are taking me seriously now. My attempt to accommodate their visual anomalies seems to have validated my belief in their inherent intelligence. My actions, not my many, many words.
"Until now," Steve quips, "teachers have always told me that I'm dumb..."
Not in words, exactly, but by our many, many actions.
Until now. Until they have begun to realize that the problem MIGHT be in the nature of the visual task, not in the nature of their "intelligence".
I can only hope this kind of self-realization stops just a few from the anti-social, self-destructive paths they have already chosen. |
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