By Brigid McConville
As all too many parents know, the quest for “solutions” to dyslexia can be a long and frustrating one. But now a new teaching method – in which dyslexics model key words in clay – promises to put an end to the problems of dyslexia once and for all. The Davis Dyslexia Correction Programme, which was devised in America in 1982 by Ron Davis (himself a dyslexic), has come to Britain where it is rapidly winning converts.
The programme, essentially a week’s one-to-one tuition with follow-up work to do at home, claims an extraordinary 97 per cent success rate. Its basic premise is that people with dyslexia have a special gift: they think mainly in three-dimensional pictures rather than words. This means they can be immensely talented but that they cannot think with abstract words. Every time they read words such as “a” or “the” (which they can’t picture), they experience a mental blankness. As these blanks accumulate, confusion sets in, causing “disorientation” (distorted perception) as they try to make sense of the two-dimensional words in front of them.
