Süddeutsche Zeitung No. 39 Friday, 15 February 2002
Around four per cent of all German schoolchildren find it so difficult to learn to read and write, even though they are normally intelligent and resilient, that they are classed as dyslexic. Encouragement and training usually have little success – until now. But now there is a new method with which practitioners such as Bettina Kinn, head of the Dyslexia Forum at the Sabel School Centre, have had “extremely positive experiences”. The patented computer-aided diagnosis and exercise programme for teachers, therapists and parents is based on the research of Munich neuropsychologist Reinhard Werth from the LMU Institute of Social Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Werth has also been treating children who have gone blind following accidents or strokes for a long time. He has further developed the methods of visual field determination and finally had a visual training device built for older children with partial blindness. Word got around among paediatricians, and soon they were also sending him young patients with reading disorders to be examined for possible neurological causes. “This showed that the diagnosis of dyslexia is far too crude,” says Werth. In reality, there are a number of different performance disorders. “Reading” apparently takes place in three phases: the brain reacts to simply seeing a word or part of a word by “focussing attention”. This is followed by “recognition” – the memory associates the letters with sounds and then with a meaning. Only then does it move on to the next word (part of a word) with a “visual jump”. According to Werth, there can be defects in each of these phases. Visual disturbances caused by “inappropriate eye movements” are particularly common. Or unconscious attention deficits that lead to a child only recognising two or three letters of a word. Or the eye jump is too large due to a malfunction of the brain, “which is not brain damage”, and the child skips whole parts of a word. Some children also unconsciously try to recognise the words as a whole. This works with short words such as “I”, but not with words with five or more letters. All of these disorders can be “very well regulated” if they are diagnosed accurately enough, explains Werth, who recently published a book on the subject (“Legasthenie und andere Lesestörungen. How to recognise and treat them”, Beck series). All it takes is “between two weeks and three months with five to ten minutes of practice a day”. Together with electrical engineer Tobias Barner, Werth has developed special software for this purpose and founded the sales company “celeco GmbH” with the support of the Bavarian Ministry of Science. The principle is difficult to explain, but very simple for the child to use: depending on what is to be practised in detail, the cursor on the screen moves slowly or quickly over the words of the exercise text. Some dyslexic children have to practise “looking properly at all”, says Werth. Others see correctly, but struggle to recognise the meaning. There are also special programmes for this, which are reminiscent of a guessing game. Werth speaks of astonishing successes: “Some children figured it out in my lab after half an hour.” In very stubborn cases, it can also take six months. Failures? “They’re very rare”. He is now trying to convince experts up and down the country with lectures at the teacher academy in Dillingen, in schools and at speech therapists. Incidentally, unlike textbooks, the screen training takes into account the fact that many boys are red-green-blind, i.e. they confuse red and green. “This is important because there are hardly any girls among dyslexics.” Werth, who has also made a name for himself as a brain researcher with studies on the neurobiological foundations of consciousness, cannot yet say why this is the case.
Elisabeth Höfl-Hielscher
Translated by celeco