The importance of a good assessment
Many types of errors occur in children with reading and/or writing difficulties. The errors made by an 8-year-old child differ from those made by a 15-year-old teenager. A good neuropsychological assessment will help determine the presence or absence of dyslexia and/or dysorthographia. What's more, error analysis during the assessment will help to specify the type of dyslexia/dysorthographia, and then guide rehabilitation.
There are generally 3 types of dyslexia:
Surface dyslexia
Difficulty reading words photographically, in their entirety, without having to segment them into syllables during reading. Difficulty acquiring rapid reading of "label words". The child must therefore continually go through the assembly process, syllable by syllable, which makes reading very slow and jerky, and often leads to decoding errors on irregular words (for example, "soeur" is read "so-eur", "femme" is read "fè-me" and "tabac" is read "ta-bak").
Phonological dyslexia
This is a difficulty in decoding words when the child has to go syllable by syllable. In this case, there are grapheme-phoneme correspondence errors (what is written is not what is read). This can result in letter substitution errors, inversion of letter sequences, etc. The child often tries to use the addressing route, i.e. the global or photographic reading of the word. He then seems to want to "guess" the word by relying on a few letters rather than reading it in its entirety.
Mixed dyslexia
This is a difficulty in learning to read, affecting both global and syllabic reading. Between 60 and 75% of dyslexics are thought to have a mixed disorder.
Visual-attention dyslexia
A fourth type of dyslexia is discussed in the scientific literature: visuo-attentional dyslexia. In this case, reading difficulties are caused by poor visual scanning of the eyes on the page. These children tend to skip small transitional words (le, la, un, une, dans , des, sur, au, ...) because their eyes are drawn only to longer, more salient words. These children would also have difficulty with line breaks when reading text.
After assessment, intervention!
Following the assessment and diagnosis of a learning disability such as dyslexia and/or dysorthographia, the best intervention is individual, specialized and specific orthopedagogical follow-up. At CERC, our orthopedagogues work in close collaboration with neuropsychologists to take the lead following the assessment, and to rapidly initiate remedial intervention. The remedial sessions we set up for your child will then be highly effective, as they target the difficulties uncovered during the neuropsychological evaluation, building on the child's strengths (also revealed by this evaluation).