The Wall_Spring 2023_Issue 9

Hannah Lee, (she/her), S11, explores how dyslexia varies in different countries

The British Dyslexia Association defines dyslexia as: a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent reading and spelling. Some features are a lack of phonological awareness, verbal memory, and verbal processing speed.This can affect children from the young age of 7 and can have a large impact on them and their families. Around 6.3 million people in the UK have dyslexia, and 780 million in the world, which means 10% of the world’s population has been diagnosed with different degrees of dyslexia.This is clearly a well-known learning difficulty, and yet, what many do not know is that dyslexia varies in different countries. MRI scans that showed how different regions of the brain were involved with the dyslexia of Chinese speakers versus English speakers.This can be explained with the extremely different writing systems in the two countries, as Chinese characters represent whole syllables, In China, a study was carried out at the University of Hong Kong using whereasWestern languages use letters to represent phonemes. In China there are two different disorders for dyslexia which are visuospatial deficit and a phonological disorder. However, there is minimal re search and understanding of dyslexia on the Chinese mainland even though 10 million children have it. Dyslexic children who write and read Chinese may find it very difficult to

remember the slight differences between the Chinese characters.This is because radicals occur in different sizes and at different locations in different words, which makes the task of remembering characters much more complex. English is also a very difficult language as there are 1,120 ways to represent the 44 basic sounds of English using different combinations of letters. SusanY. Bookheimer, a UCLA neuropsychologist, said, ‘English is a nightmare for dyslexics’ as the only way to remember individual pronunciations is to learn and remember each exception which results in English being an ‘opaque’ language. French and Italian are much easier languages to deal with as a person with dyslexia, as most of the combinations of letters are always pronounced the same. Studies show that Italian speakers are only half as likely to show signs of dyslexia than English speakers. recorded in countries with symbol-based writing systems.This includes Japan, as children learn to write the characters repetitively and consistently while speaking aloud the word.This allows the children to memorise the combination of small movements. ProfessorWydell told the BBC radio What is interesting, is the significantly low levels of dyslexia

documentary, ‘when the child is asked to write later on, the child’s hands almost automatically write down the character from memory.’ Therefore, it’s difficult for a people who read or write Japanese to recognise that they have dyslexia until they begin to learn English. Due to this, in Japanese primary schools, the levels of dyslexia were 1.4% but thankfully, standardised and systematic screening tests that ProfessorWydell set up in 2013, have allowed experts to agree that around 25% of school students in Japan have some form of dyslexia. Japan is still significantly behind other developed nations with their management and diagnosing of dyslexia, yet progress is being made. one language.They face challenges encountered by all second language learners – limited vocabulary and less familiarity with the cultural or social context of the text.Therefore, their challenges are different from children learning one language with dyslexia. However, a bilingual child having dyslexia is quite hard to recognise, as it is not always easy to tell if a second language learner simply needs more time to process the writing like other students, or has a reading impairment that hasn’t been uncovered yet. It has been proven that children who learn a second language may experience more difficulties when learning to read, than children learning

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