This course is for teachers to learn why some children have so much difficulty with reading and writing, often called 'dyslexia', and to learn more about best practice in teaching literacy to all in light of recent scientific discoveries. Participation in or completion of this online course will not confer academic credit for University of London programmes
3.3 Attention
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From the course by University of London
Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing
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From the lesson
'Co-morbidity', and psychological and social aspects
The ‘dys’-constellation (dyspraxia, dyscalculia etc); audition; vision; loss of self-esteem; long-term effects of school drop-out and antisocial behaviour – evidence from Canada; ‘positive’ aspects of dyslexia and unusual aptitudes; discussion around pros and cons of ‘labelling’ a child
Meet the Instructors
Dr Jenny Thomson
Dr Vincent Goetry
So, one part of the dyslexia wider constellation,
is the relationship between reading and attention.
At first consideration, it might seem, well,
if someone has an attention problem versus a reading problem,
surely that's going to look quite different.
But, actually the two can often really share symptoms and behaviors.
And so, sometimes differential diagnosis can be really quite tricky.
So, if for example,
let's think about a child with primary attentional issues, first of all.
And we're going to provide a link to some websites that
will give you more in-depth information about attentional issues.
But, here I'm just going to
say that attentional issues can be both of the hyperactive type.
So, this is where a child is really struggling to stay in their seat.
Also, you're seeing lots of movement,
difficulty staying on one task.
It's often the type of attention difficulty that's much more noticed by people,
because of the movement and activity associated with it.
But then, also attentional issues can be of the inattentive type.
So, this is where you might have a child who just seems to be daydreaming away.
And so, it's a lot less visible in many ways,
but it can result in equal loss of learning time.
And sometimes, you can have a mix of both of these in one child.
Sometimes they may show more predominantly one pattern or the other.
So, with either of these profiles,
imagine a child in the first few years of primary school.
They're receiving lots of direct reading instruction.
So, if their attention is not fully on that teaching,
they may be missing parts of the instruction.
And we know that with reading instruction,
because of the complexity,
it's a sequential process where, really,
you need all the parts in order to move forward.
So, we're going to have children here who may be missing some kind of
crucial parts if they're not attending the critical time.
Also, within the act of reading,
these children, even if they've computed the lessons,
they were there, when they're reading,
you'll often see that they may take an approximate approach to reading.
So they may skip lines and not notice it.
They may substitute similar types of words,
so if it's a small function word like ah,
the, his, her, their,
were, was, these can often be switched
around a bit interchangeably in the most extreme cases,
which can be okay in terms of preserving the meaning of things.
But sometimes these kind of approximations can result in comprehension issues.
So, this is a profile you can see if a child has primary attention issues.
Their reading is going to be impacted,
as will many of their academic subjects skills.
But then on the other side,
if we imagine a child with a primary decoding issue,
if they're finding reading frustrating,
if they're sometimes feelings so frustrated
that they start to disengage from
either the reading lessons themselves or the process of reading,
they're actually going to show quite similar patterns.
It may be that when they're reading again,
they're not sure that they're going to be successful,
so they may get a bit approximate about certain things.
Or, they may have just either not understood
certain lessons and so have gaps in their knowledge.
Or, they may actually start developing kind of
hyperactive type behaviors to avoid having to do the reading activities.
So you can see already, we're now seeing,
even though there can be two different primary causes,
the behaviors can start looking really quite similar.
Then, to kind of complicate matters,
actually the two things can co-occur.
So actually, there can be a primary issue with both.
So at this point,
you might be feeling slightly confused and thinking,
"Well this all sounds a bit complicated".
And clearly, the primary thing here is that,
if the child is behind in reading for whatever reason,
they need support to catch themselves up.
So, in some ways, in some instances,
it may be that you just can't disentangle the two,
but you just want to,
with the reading get the child back up to speed as much as you can.
And then actually you may see,
I mean if then the attention issues reduce,
it might then be clear that,
ah this was actually a reading issue all along.
Whereas, if reading progress doesn't diminish the attentional issues,
then it may be that actually the attention or issues are still quite primary.
But there are ways that you can untangle the two a bit.
So for example, children with a more primary reading issue,
do as a group tend to have more severe phonological awareness issues.
And so, Vincent has talked about ways you can look at Phonological Awareness.
And so this is an area where if a reading difficulty's core,
you are likely to see significantly reduced skills in that area,
where you may not so much in a child with attention issues.
And here I am talking in generalizations,
but these are some broad trends to keep in mind.
Also, in a previous week,
I was mentioning that one way to look at reading comprehension is,
after a child has read a text
themselves and if they've struggled with the comprehension questions,
sometimes for a child with dyslexia,
if you then read the questions orally without the demands of the decoding,
the child with dyslexia can actually perform better in
the listening comprehension presentation.
But sometimes, for children with attention issues as the core,
they actually can do better when they have the text in front of them.
And so, when you present them the passage as a listening comprehension,
they actually make show the reverse patterns.
So they may do worse in that case when they're having to rely
purely on their listening comprehension.
So another possible way to tease things apart.
Also, really, a key thing here is just to be a detective about the child's wider life.
So for example, it may be that the attentional issues seem to be very
much restricted to the school day or even particularly reading lessons.
And so there again,
you might get a sense of,
it seems like the reading issues are causing the attentional related behaviors.
Whereas, if there's big attentional issues even when the child is at home,
not having to do anything academic,
it could be a more pervasive attentional issue.
And also, sometimes you can see quite striking differences.
If children are on a medication for their attention issue,
you can see that a child will perhaps,
when they've just taken their medication first thing in the morning,
it could be that their reading comprehension is just
much stronger than a few hours later,
when the effects of the medication are wearing off.
And so again here,
you can get the sense that the child in optimal attentional conditions,
they can actually comprehend the content here,
but they're really being hampered by this primary attentional issue.
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