In France, reading is taught in CP, when a child is 6. During maternelle they will start pre-reading
skills which may include sight reading certain words – their names, colours, and
days of the week. They will start to
make the link between spoken words that they know and the written word. I remember clearly one exercise that my
eldest did was to match “le, un, la, une” to words that they knew - “maison, banana, garcon, fille”. My son found it really hard as he did not yet
have the right article for these common, basic words. However, he learnt them by learning to read
the article.
Most schools use a syllabic method to reading – that is,
they break down the word into easy chunks of recognisable syllables. We learnt a whole host of these – the “ai” de
balai; the “en” de dent, “ille” de fille.
And it works, by leaving reading until later and chunking it down most
children are reading within weeks and certainly by Christmas. In
fact, I started to teach my eldest to read in English, despite the books
saying leave it 2 years, as he took his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book
and tried to read it with his French reading skills. He was amazing.
But what do you do when it goes wrong? With my youngest by the “Toussaint” holidays
I was talking to his teacher – was everything ok or was it because my eldest
had found reading so easy that I had unrealistic expectations? The reply was slow but not catastrophic. However, by January it was a different story –
a note came home with his everyday work book highlighted, filled with sound
inversions, letters back to front….
Not knowing anything, the first thing I did was to google “sound
reversal” and surprise surprise got back dyslexia. Thereafter there was a conversation with his
teacher to see what she thought. She
said it was a possibility and that perhaps we should get him tested.
As dyslexia is treated as a medical condition in France, our
first step was to go to our doctor who, as he knows us really well did not
hesitate to give us the prescription for his assessment and any further sessions
that he may have required.
The hard part is to find an “Orthophoniste” (speech and
language therapist) – they are relatively few and far between and as their
remedial work is often of a long term nature they have a long waiting
list. It is common for the waiting time
for the assessment to be in the region of 3-4 months. Normally, they won’t see the child until they
have an available place for them if they require further help. We were fortunate that a new Orthophoniste
had just arrived in the next village and were able to get him assessed and his
sessions started within 2 weeks. This is
rare. We decided that her relative
inexperience was outweighed by the fact that our son would receive support
straight away just as problems were emerging
and would not have to struggle on.
It helped that she worked in the same medical centre as another
othorphoniste and we felt that she would be able to ask questions if need be.
We also felt that her youth may make her more open to our son’s bilingualism.
The initial assessment (bilan) was scheduled for one hour
but in fact as speed is one of my son’s problems it took nearly 2. At the end of it we discovered that he did
not recognise the entire alphabet and that he had phonological problems –
consistent with dyslexia but too early to say definitively. He also had
problems with his short term memory but had greater than average working memory
– probably due to his bilingualism – however one does not compensate for the
other. Ask his to simply repeat a series
of numbers, he can’t ; ask him to repeat a series of numbers backwards he can.
He began weekly ½ hour session of remedial work straight
away. We also talked to his teacher regarding the alphabet and she agreed to
take him into “soutien” – small group support after school with some children
from the year under him to work on this.
Which he loved and really helped.
We are in it for the long haul and I feel really fortunate
that he has managed to get regular, professional help from very early on and
feel confident that he will succeed in French – I now have to work out how to
tackle his English.
