The primary cause of “dyslexia” in my country (Australia) and yours is, I believe, the result of our children not being taught how to decode words. More research has probably been done on this than any other area in education and yet our educators continue to use inferior methods hoisted on them by powerful vested interests.
Teach kids that words have parts, and instruct them fully in the sounds and sound combinations together with how to combine these, and NO MORE DYSLEXIA. I have proved this hundreds of times with kids designated unteachable.
However, the task is always harder with older kids because they have such negative emotions associated with reading. Here is where EFT can help in a big way. EFT, combined with appropriate instruction in the rules of our language system – there’s the correct combination!
Regards,
Steve Wells
Further to my last post, I’d like to tell you about my experience a couple of days ago with a 10 year old boy. I had worked with him successfully to improve his reading by having his mother and a tutor teach him phonics over 4 months. In this time, his reading comprehension improved 23 months on a standardized reading test, and his word attack skills improved by 15 months. I should point out that results like these are not unusual once children are taught using a phonics approach.
The problem however, was that although this boy was performing better and everyone had noticed it, he still didn’t feel good about reading. What these kids often say is that they find reading “boring.” Having learned EFT since I first worked with him, I decided to use a little in our last session. We tapped on the “boring feeling” and he noticeably relaxed, but the best thing was that he slowed down and read the words much more accurately. See, the frustrating thing before this was that he tended to read much too quickly, thus blending together inaccurately words which we knew he was capable of reading as he knew all the sound combinations within them. Seeing the bigger words tended to bring up his old anxiety feelings about reading, and when in this state he tended to rush things and thus read inaccurately. His new relaxed state was very noticeable, and I have now encouraged his mother to have him tap before each of their home reading sessions.
Here is where I think EFT will excel in education – by removing the emotional impediments to learning. There are stacks and stacks of kids out there whose emotional states are getting in the way of their learning – I know, I spent 5 years working with the most disturbed of them when working within the education system. What a boon EFT would have been then.
Let me say again, though, that EFT will not fully make up for poor instruction. It might help to make it more bearable however, and save the child from the emotional harm, and damage to their self image which can often accompany this.
