Word Blindness

Question:

What is word blindness?

Answer:

‘Word blindness’ is an old-fashioned term used to mean that a person is unable to recognize and understand words that he sees.

This was the term used to describe dyslexia when it was first described by doctors in the late 19th century. It meas that the person does not seem to be able to remember the order and sequence of letters in a word from one time to the next. A child might be be drilled for hours on an easy word, but the next time he saw the word would not recognize it.

In our experience, this apparent severe dyslexia is caused by disorientation, which for dyslexic people means that they have an inaccurate perception of the words. That is, they might see the letters of the words jumbled around in all sorts of different ways. There is no way that a dyslexic person who suffers from this sort of disorientation can ever remember a word, because the word seems different every time they look at it.

Fortunately, we can can correct this problem of distorted perceptions quickly and easily with Davis Orientation Counseling. Once the student has a consistent perception of the letters and words, he can learn to attach meaning to the words through Davis Symbol Mastery (clay modeling)

(Answer by Abigail Marshall)