health mind and body

Dual-language an extra barrier for dyslexia kids

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Vanessa Radom made aliyah from the States with her husband, Mark and their 4 young children in 2006. This is a fairly common story.

Like other olim, they knew they would encounter challenges, but they didn’t realize one would come in the form of their daughter’s dyslexia that would take seven years to properly diagnose. Unfortunately, this is also a common story.

Dyslexia is a neurological, language-based disorder that affects 1 in 5 children, according to an ongoing Yale study. Children with dyslexia struggle with reading, comprehension, writing, and spelling, however they also have an average to superior intelligence, are particularly creative and out-of-the-box thinkers and have a strong motivation to succeed.

For olim, the struggle to adopt a new language compounds the barrier to the identification and diagnosis of dyslexia. When a child with dyslexia is trying to learn a second language it takes longer to identify that the challenge is coming from the dyslexia. Radom struggled for years to figure out how to help her daughter, Liora.

“Kids with dyslexia who are trying to learn two languages have to master and break the code for two languages that have different coding systems,” said Dr. Rinat Green, psychologist and founder of Kol Koreh, a non-profit that provides resources for kids with dyslexia. “It overwhelms the system.”

One of the keys to helping kids with dyslexia is early intervention. “Researchers have discovered that when given appropriate and proven intervention at a young age, the brain can self-correct and begin to use the weak reading areas more efficiently,” said Green. 

Thankfully, when Liora Rodam was in nursery school, the teacher noticed that she wasn’t picking up certain important aspects of Hebrew language and alerted Liora’s parents. But it wasn’t until fourth grade, when Rodman decided to get Liora a private tutor for English reading and writing, that they uncovered the root of the issue. “The teacher said, ‘We’ve gone over this 1,000 times and she just isn’t getting it. She doesn’t look uninterested, she’s really struggling’,” Rodam recounted.

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