About Reading and Dynaread's Dyslexia Test

For a more in-depth scientific review, see Reading: What is it, and where does it go wrong in Dyslexia.

Reading is a learned behavior, just like tennis or piano. Our brain is wired for language and communication, but not for reading. The reading sciences have identified two routes we use in reading: Both these routes need to be developed over time. Dr. Coltheart PhD published his research in 2001 reporting on these two routes, entitled DRC: A Dual Route Cascaded Model of Visual Word Recognition and Reading Aloud.

Experience the reality of the Dual Route system

To evidence to you that this is not about dry theory, but something you can actually experience right here and now.

Experience your Slow Route reading system

The Slow Route system, also called the Grapheme to Phoneme route or the Phonological Decoding route, is the route we use in reading new words. Try read this word:

deos

Your Slow Route will kick in and phonologically decode it as 'dee - os'

And now, experience your Fast Route reading system

The Fast Route system, also known as the Lexical Route or Dictionary Route, is the route fluent readers use in routine fluent reading. To demonstrate this, let's access this self same word "deos" through our Fast Route reading system. This time, the word is no longer isolated, but placed in contextual and syntactical accurate context. Don't be startled by the spelling. Just start reading.

In the above text you just read, look for the word 'deos' directly following the phrase "the human mind." You will notice that this time around you read "does" instead of the spelled "deos." This is, because this time around you read the selfsame word using your Fast Route reading system.

To evidence the Fast Route's need for proper grammatical, semantical and syntactical usage of words, try to read the following...

Taotl aocdcrnig tghhuot ltteer fdreins, lterets oderr taotl.

You will have noticed that reading this little sentence did not go as smooth as reading the previous example paragraph. The words in this sentence do come from the previous example paragraph. However, in this second example the words are used syntactically and semantically incorrect.

Fluent reading, with high levels of automaticity, requires accurate knowledge of a word's orthography, pronunciation, semantics, contextual role, and syntactical usage.

Struggles with the Slow Route

The majority of struggling readers struggle with decoding or sounding out new words. To be precise: Four out of five subtypes of all reading struggles show issues with the Slow Route reading system. These children show a relative weakness in phonological awareness.

What does this mean in day to day life? This broken Slow Route results in your child having a hard time sounding out or phonologically decoding unfamiliar words. This – in turn – means that unfamiliar words take a long time before they have been mastered enough to become familiar words, properly stored in your child's Fast Route reading system (see diagram below). Although it makes a lot of sense to deal with this issue directly, with good phonics training (Orton Gillingham based approaches), for older children this is not always a realistic solution. If your child is older, has shown little progress in reading, and is getting frustrated then such a direct phonics approach is unlikely to reap results. Why? Any remediation is as effective as its application. Even the best of approaches is useless, if your child no longer believes in them.

What these older children need is something that shows them - very early on - that the program they are asked to work with actually works, and gets them reading. For only this stands a chance to recover their intrinsic motivation and inner drive to learn to read. Failure is very risky in the longer term. Reading is central to success in school. This is why we at Dynaread focus on helping these older children succeed in reading.

Dynaread's approach

Dynaread's learn to read approach works consistently with your child's fully functional, though relatively empty, Fast Route system. Dynaread uses a series of sequential readers. Using a whole array of techniques from Memory Science, our short online lessons equip your child's Fast Route reading system with the necessary reading vocabulary to read a new Reader text every couple of days. Reading them sufficiently fluently, accurately, and with comprehension. This instills the all important confidence and drive, as we reverse the negative “I cannot read” into the energizing discovery that they CAN read.

What we look for in our test

The Dynaread Dyslexia test measures the performance of your child's Fast Route and Slow Route reading systems. We do this in a very structured way: Progressing from simple tasks, to more complex ones. We measure pronunciation response time and pronunciation accuracy, and compare these with seven to nine year old average peer readers. This approach provides us with a means to discern how each system functions today and how they function in relation to one another. This information, in turn, allows us to identify those children which do struggle with their Slow Route and who may be helped by our approach.

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