Ron Davis approach for treating dyslexia

Page: 45-48

Rekha (Malwa Central College of Education for Women, Ludhiana, Punjab)

It is estimated that between five to ten percent of the population experiences learning disabilities and reading disabilities are perhaps the most common among them. Dyslexia is a reading disability which affects maximum school going children. Education of these children is a matter of concern for all the educators. Different studies had tried to find suitable interventions for educating these children; one of the most effective is Ron Davis Approch. There is the Davis Dyslexia Correction Programme of Ron Davis (1997, 2003) that originated in 1984 in California and at present is being applied worldwide by facilitators in six different languages. What separates this approach from others is the fact that students are guided verbally and visually to obtain an orientation point. According to Davis (1997, 2003), people with reading problems read differently in the sense that they see things around them from different orientation points an attribute that stands them in good stead in the world of concrete images but lets them down when they have to interpret images that are one or two dimensional such as writing. Then they “disorientate”. He worked out how this disorientation could be stabilized when it for example comes to reading, and this forms the basis of his technique that he calls Orientation Counseling. As soon as a student has learned to stabilize his/her disorientation, multisensory techniques are used to further correct the reading problem.