Teaching Solutions for the Dyslexic

Seven Basic Learning Solutions

1. To print out answers or exercises, the right brain requires lessons in how to use the space on a page to suit the assignment and how to print the letters correctly.


2. To learn to spell a word, the right brain must receive a drawn or printed image of the whole word, not separate parts nor their phonetic sounds.


3. To understand and remember a lesson, it must be taught at one sitting. If not the brain will not understand what was taught and discard it, so that it is totally forgotten the next day.


4. To read fluently and with comprehension, the brain must have a whole decoded reading vocabulary to match the level of difficulty of the material to be read. Reading with understanding cannot be done if the student must first decode the majority of the words in a passage.


5. To compose sentences that are grammatically correct, the student must be taught the parts of speech and the sequence they follow in the English language. Sequence of words and ideas are key to good style and organization of sentences and paragraphs.


6. To complete an assignment that is to be marked by the teacher a few days or weeks from now requires a complete explanation of how they are to carry out the assignment at every stage from start to handing it in. (See The Five Steps to Learning.)


7. To work with mathematical word problems which are very abstract, drawings of word problems should be provided the students so that they can visualize what the letters and numbers represent and calculators to do the arithmetic that cannot be visualized.

How the Right Brain Learns

Step One:The Turner Hope approach to teaching the dyslexic student begins with accepting that the right brain thinks in whole pictures, images and concepts as described under Seven Major Causes of Dyslexia. It is necessary to understand that letters and numbers on their own are very abstract and represent nothing to the right brain. This is not a disability, but a learning difference. Also, most of the words in our language are abstract.

Step Two: Dyslexic students must be taught the appropriate skills for learning to print, spell, read, write sentence answers and work with arithmetic and mathematical concepts. These enable the right brain to change whole concrete images into the words and numbers the left brain understands. Most dyslexic learning problems arise from the student having the wrong skills to print, spell, read and write. For example, learning to spell words as they hear them (phonetically) they will spell most words incorrectly rather then use their traditional spelling. As a result they lose most of the decoding information that gives meaning and recognition to the words while reading which destroys comprehension.

Step Three: To make the changes from concrete images of information in the right brain into words and numbers the left brain understands, they must be taught their learning skills in complete, structural wholes. A few of these problems and their solutions are listed below. A full coverage of dyslexic learning problems, their causes and solutions can be found in the manual How the Right Brain Learns. Click on Bookstore or on E-lessons for teaching instructions and exercises.

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Assessing and Evaluating Students

1. Things to look for when assessing a right-brained student

• What are the student´s interests? Talents? Hobbies? Learning styles?


• Which is the student´s strongest learning sense? Auditory, visual or kinesthetic?


• What are the main learning problems?


• What academic skills does the student lack among the following? Hand printing, spelling, reading, sentence and composition construction, mathematical concepts and arithmetic factors


• Are the student´s learning problems mild or severe?


• Does the student have many learning problems or just a few?

All learning problems relate to the right-brain´s difficulty turning the abstract into concrete images and not being able to put the parts in sequence because the brain cannot distinguish the parts within the whole image as in spelling words, reading a line of words or a sentence, or organizing ideas and sentences in a progressive order of climax and transition.

The student´s sentences and paragraphs lack a sense of time and order of occurrence.
They cannot sequence items, thoughts, ideas, dates, occurrence of events or order of importance

The student does not have the skills to change abstract words and ideas into the language of the left brain for thinking, learning and analyzing.

2. Which of the following academic problems does the student have?

• Poor hand printing or cursive writing.


• A lack of spelling skills, too many errors.


• Too small of a spelling and reading vocabulary.


• Weak decoding skills.


• Poor reading skills: insufficient decoded and memorized words to grasp meaning and build comprehension, cannot track lines of print.


• Lack of reading comprehension.


• Cannot see the ideas carried by the words, sentences or paragraphs.


• Poor recognition and understanding of the abstract words.


• Is not intuitively able to fill in the blanks of understanding of words and sentences that he/she is not able to read.


• Difficulty sequencing letters in words, numbers in dates, sentences in paragraphs.


• Cannot distinguish the parts from the whole within concrete images, or letters within words, or words within sentences.


• Lacks the skills to change concrete images into the language of the left brain where the information is analyzed and processed.


• Lacks the ability to analyze cause and effect because of a poor understanding of cause and effect.


• Cannot work with this type of assignment because they see the whole concrete image, not the abstract parts or reasons behind the motivations and the actions of the characters in a story.


• Have great difficulty understanding instructions that use abstract words of direction such as explain, describe, tell me about, analyze, compare, illustrate, etc. because none of these words are concrete nor include using any of the three learning senses.


• Cannot focus on ideas about a topic and then organize their presentation.


• Cannot take or make notes.


• Must learn everything by memorizing and mentally photographing the information, while not understanding it.


• Guessing at how to fill in the blanks of understanding if the information is too abstract for the right brain to visualize.


• Learning styles, aptitudes and learning behaviors are wrong for working in a left-brained world.


• Different learning styles and approaches from those of the left-brained student are getting the student into trouble.


• Lacks procedural systems for paragraphs and essays requiring inductive reasoning such as cause and effect.


• Lacks many of the skills for learning that transpose concrete images into words and numbers for the left brain to do the learning, intellectualizing and analyzing needed to succeed in our educational systems.


• Lacks the understanding described under the Five Steps to Learning.


• Has physical coordination problems for hand printing and for seeing geometric designs.


• May lack small muscle control or have disgraphia.


• Lacks spatial conception for academic use.


• Needs extra time to decode words and ideas when answering sentence, paragraph or essay answers.


• Has a number of learning problems and traits that need to be accommodated.


• Has been given the wrong skills and teaching solutions for the right brain.


• Has emotional and social problems fitting in with their peers.

Accommodating the Dyslexic

• Allow your students to work at a pace that is not stressful. Permit them to do fewer assignments or allow more time to complete them all.


• Test them orally if their hand printing is slow and difficult. The student´s strongest sense may be auditory.


• Permit the use of a computer to do written work if your student can type and are comfortable working on a computer. It offers many advantages to the dyslexic student whereas hand printing or writing creates more problems.


• Always design your questions and assignments around a given conclusion or fact. Dyslexic students think in concrete wholes, that is, they work backwards from a conclusion or fact to fill in all the parts. Do not give them open-ended questions that involve abstract instructions and must be worked out in a logical, step-by-step sequence to arrive at the answer unless you have thoroughly prepared them for this.


• Do not base the student´s marks on spelling, punctuation or grammatical errors. Errors in assignments should be corrected. These are very abstract concepts for them that the right brain does not easily process and cannot visualize as concrete images. These are not their fault, it is the fault of the school system that does not teach them the skills they need to learn these things. If these errors must be corrected before a student hands in an assignment or can be be graded and passed on this work, then permit someone else to edit the mistakes in spelling, grammar and punctuation. Parents are often helpful in this. These are all very abstract concepts that do not make sense to the right brain which sees in whole concrete images.


• Look for ideas, not clerical errors. Getting ideas down on paper is much more important than fretting over spelling, grammar and punctuation. teach these skills, remembering that refusing this accommodation slows the students down, frightens them and take away their freedom to think and fulfill their potential.If they do not achieve what they are capable of accomplishing intellectually they soon become depressed and give up.


• Their ability to use the correct grammar, punctuation and spelling forms may or may not improve with age, depending on the understand and teaching methods the students receive while learning these skills.


• Do not expect these student to be able to use a dictionary to correct spelling errors. This is sequencing at its most difficult and may be nearly impossible for many of these students. It is an exhausting, frustrating waste of time. Remember, the right brain needs a complete image to understand and work with it. To use a dictionary the student must have a full image and understanding of the whole dictionary page on which the word will be found. For some, this extends to a full visual image of the entire dictionary. Then the process of picking out that one small part on the page, the word wanted. The brain must be able to see the sequence of letters in every word on the page, then sequence the words in order to pick out the required word. Unless they have had a full training of building words using prefixes, stems, roots and suffixes, finding words in a dictionary is a great waste of time and stress.


• The solution is to print the words correctly for the students. Then have them copy yours and follow this up with using the thesaurus on the computer to teach them how to look up synonyms or the meaning in a dictionary on the Internet which brings up only one word at a time.


• Answer the student´s questions as often as possible, but keep your answers very short, clear and specific. Be precise. Do not repeat your answers unless the student asks you to do so. Then answer only what the student asks. Long explanations, different approaches, wordy definitions, or abstract thinking are all very tiring and difficult for these students who are looking for a concrete image to decode and define the word.


• Try to complete a lesson at one sitting. An incomplete lesson is entirely lost on them. If this is not possible, then provide a written summary, extra time during the same day to answer the student´s questions or find ways to teach the complete lesson in one sitting, or give them the start and ending first and then fill in the middle.


• Do not criticize your students for not paying attention or being lazy. If they look like they are daydreaming, they may be learning by listening or they can no longer understand the lesson and are trying to cope with the situation. They are actually working hard to understand what you are saying. If you talk too much and do not use any concrete pictures, examples of diagrams, you will destroy their ability to concentrate and make sense out of what you are saying.


• Build their self-esteem. Do not punish them for behaviors and learning styles that are normal for the right-brained student when learning.


• Answer their questions, but do not lecture nor criticize them for not understanding the lesson. The problem maybe in the teaching methods you are using. Find another approach. There are many other methods that work. Let them tell you what works best for them, perhaps it is to discuss the information orally or demonstrate it, rather than read about it.


• Instead of long written assignments, turn these tasks into projects that involve all the senses. These should be done on any large piece of colored paper to which they can add real objects, pictures, drawing, sketches, photos, words of explanation and an oral report. The dyslexic student learns best doing projects that involve seeing, listening, discussing and using their hands. All these ways of learning use the auditory, visual and kinesthetic senses.

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