What is Dyslexia? The conventional wisdom is that dyslexics are bright kids who can't tie their shoes and mix up their b's and d's. Like most bits of conventional wisdom, it is dead wrong. According to the British Psychological Society, Dyslexia is evident when fluent and accurate word identification (reading) does not develop or does so very incompletely or with great difficulty. Now this doesn't say very much. You may notice that there is nothing here to tell us why some children don't read. Nor is there any criteria for determining a cut-off point for dyslexia—in a school where 80% of the children are non-readers, where do you draw the line? Are all those children really dyslexic? But the interesting thing about this definition of dyslexia is that it is assumed that all children who have difficulty identifying words are dyslexic. The British Psychological Society has discarded all the usual nonsense about dyslexia being a 'special case'. Low IQ? Forget it. As the report notes, if low IQ were the cause of poor reading, ...individuals with low IQ scores should, of necessity, be poor readers...But children with low IQs who are good readers have demonstrated that this is not the case. And if the truth were known, all the other excuses that schools give for their lamentable record in teaching children to read don't hold water. A number of schools in the US, Britain and other English-speaking countries teach all their pupils to read. Perhaps one of the most striking examples is Kobi Nazrul, a primary school in Whitechapel (London)—where 90% of the pupils come from Bengali homes where little or no English is spoken. 63% get free school lunches. Yet according to official tests, every single one of their pupils can read. Our own tests showed that their 4th graders could spell as well as the average 6th grader in Britain! So what does this say about all the usual excuses? Of course it would be idle to pretend that all the pupils at Kobi Nazrul learned to read as though by magic. Many of these pupils would be diagnosed as 'dyslexic' if they had not been taught the English spelling code so thoroughly. These pupils do not read or spell as well as the other children in their class, even though their perfomance is more than adequate. So we are still left with the question of why some children find it so difficult to learn to read. The experts still cannot agree. The dominant theory is that dyslexia is a phonological deficit—meaning that some children just can't hear sounds in words very well. They can tell the difference between 'bat' and 'cat', but they don't realise that both words are made from three different sounds. It's fair to say that most experts don't think there is a single cause, but they differ on how important different factors are. With our extensive experience in teaching dyslexic children, we are inclined to think that working memory is the key factors. Dyslexics almost always have poor working memory and short-term memory. They cannot hold sounds in their heads for long enough to blend them together into words, so they find it very difficult to learn to translate the visual patterns of letters into the corresponding sounds. It would be wrong to dismiss the debate over what is dyslexia? as so much hair-splitting, designed more to keep the research grants flowing than to serve any useful purpose. The way children are taught to read is very heavily influenced by research, and in the last 20 years psychologists have been extremely successful in disproving some of our progressive educators' more fanciful notions.