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DYSLEXIA: A PERSONAL ENCOUNTER
By Haryati Ahmad

A warning bell pealed in my mind that something may be wrong when my second daughter,
Adik, was still struggling with reading, spelling and writing towards the end of her Standard
1. More still, when I had to go out of town for work one day, she wrote me a sweet note and
among others she asked me not to forget to buy some jajan for her. The hooks for her ‘j’s
were written the wrong way!!!

Adik was officially diagnosed as a mild-to-severe dyslexic on 1 January 2013.
In simple words, her condition then was judged as mild; but, without intervention it could
become severe.

Some of the things that I learned at the Johor Bahru branch of Dyslexic
Association of Malaysia that day included the facts that not only dyslexics see some letters
in their mirrored images (thus, the confusion with ‘b’s and ‘d’s, and p’s and ‘q’s), but they
may also see, read and write alphabets and syllables in reverse (since then, Adik once
copied ‘toes’ as ‘tose’ and read ‘butik’ as ‘bukit’). In addition, they will usually also have
problems with mathematics and short attention span.

After some days of moping around, I took two urgent steps: I asked Adik what
she saw on a page while reading, and I spent days in front of my computer researching
about dyslexia. Adik’s answers were that the pages were “terang sangat” and the writings
were “berhimpit-himpit”.

The Internet yielded more answers. I found numerous interventions that can
be applied to Adik. One that worked for us was paired-reading. At the beginning, we
alternately read aloud one paragraph to each another. She would read one paragraph, and I
read the following paragraph, and she continued with the next paragraph. We stopped after
two or three pages. Then, there came the day when she was able to read one whole page
before I needed to read anything. Progress was slow, but sure, and rewarding.

Adik is 14 this year. She no longer sees pages as “terang sangat” and
writings as “berhimpit-himpit”. And I had stopped being her reading buddy a long time ago.
However, as dyslexia is a life-long learning difficulty, she still frequently asks me how to spell
some words, she still reads and writes words wrongly (recently she read ‘naan’ as ‘nana’,
and wrote ‘first’ as ‘frist’) and she still struggles when solving Math word problems.

Dyslexia is not a sickness. It is a learning difficulty that requires early
assessment and intervention. Early diagnosis is the first step in getting a dyslexic the help
she needs, and early intervention ensures that any potential severity associated with this
condition can be properly averted and/or managed.

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