NAMAS BHOJANI FOR TIME

Dhanalakshmi Ayyer reads to her son Sripathi, who with her help is now doing well in a mainstream school

Minds at Risk
	Dyslexia is less common in Asia than the U.S., but it's still a big and largely unnoticed problem
	By Anthony Spaeth Hong Kong

Posted Monday, September 1, 2003; 21:00 HKT
The term dyslexia was coined in 1888, but it didn't become commonly used in the West for more than five decades. In Asia, it has taken even longer, although the learning disability's effects were hardly unknown. "There was always some uncle or aunt in the family who was normal and intelligent in every other way except academics," says Dhanalakshmi Ayyer, a native of Madras, India. "Uncle or Aunt was branded as a little stupid or absent minded. I had one in my family."

In 1987, Ayyer discovered she had another: her son Sripathi. Ayyer's long fight to get help for her son is a tale echoed throughout a region just waking up to the reality of dyslexia. In the whole of China, for example, there are no special schools for dyslexics. Ayyer's native India is thought to have tens of millions of people with dyslexia, yet the government doesn't spend any money on it. Still, the fact that her son did get help and is now, at age 17, doing well in a mainstream school in Madras shows that Asia is starting to recognize that there are, in fact, solutions to this problem. "You can't fix poor eyesight, but you can wear glasses," says Dr. Akira Uno, Japan's foremost expert on dyslexia. "We can't get rid of a disability. But we can teach people methods to compensate for it."

Dyslexia is universal, but research suggests it doesn't affect every culture or language group equally. In mainland China and Japan, for example, dyslexia rates are estimated at less than 5% compared to 10%-20% in the U.S. There are intriguing theories as to why, and Japan has produced some important clues.

Japanese children first learn to read and write in parallel phonetic alphabets, hiragana and katakana, each containing 46 characters relating to 46 different sounds. After conquering them, the student embarks on learning Chinese characters. According to Uno, who works for Japan's National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, just 1% of Japanese students have dyslexic problems in reading the phonetic alphabets, while 2% encounter problems with Chinese characters. The numbers jump a bit when it comes to writing—2% for hiragana, 3.8% for katakana and 5% for ideograms—but they're still low by American standards.

Uno's conclusion after nine years of study is that Japan's two phonetic scripts correspond more exactly to sounds than the English alphabet. In other words, they are simply easier: there are no irregular words and no stumbling over mystifying spellings such as reign or write or rough. That could keep mildly dyslexic children from having trouble. A similar situation may prevail with Indian scripts and the Malay-based languages of the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia as rendered into Roman script.

The world of ideograms is an even kinder one for dyslexics. You don't read most Chinese characters as you read words in English; looking at them gives you no clue as to how they are pronounced. A student memorizes the sound of each character, and a child in Hong Kong learns a completely different sound from his counterpart in Beijing. If those two students were to meet at a national literary contest, they wouldn't be able to communicate verbally: they've been taught different sounds for each Chinese character or syllable. (They would, however, be able to read one another's poems without any difficulty.)

Since dyslexia is a glitch in the ability to combine pictures (such as letters) to make sounds and thus arrive at the meaning of a word, the Chinese have an advantage: they've already memorized the meaning (and sound) for each character. That's one likely explanation, according to Zhou Xiaolin, professor of psychology at Peking University, as to why the dyslexia rate in China is only 4%-5%.

More severely dyslexic Chinese do encounter trouble comprehending and writing characters. They can confuse or transpose elements, or concentrate on only one, missing the character's real meaning.

Although dyslexia may be less prevalent in Asia, the number of sufferers is still huge—and at this point, they're having to cope largely on their own. In Malaysia, relatively affluent families can send their children to private doctors to see if they have a learning disability. But if they're diagnosed as dyslexic, schools place them in classes with other "special-needs" students, such as the autistic or children with Down syndrome.

That's a confusion that's rife throughout the region. Anjuli Bawa discovered her son Aditya Singh was dyslexic when he was 10. "It's so hard for parents to accept," she recalls. "Like me, they mix up dyslexia with some sort of mental retardation." Bawa set up Action Dyslexia in 2000, a New Delhi-based ngo that advises parents with dyslexic children. "I have to explain to the parents that it's not the child's fault and that with a little help they can finish their education." Indeed, with a few concessions within school and with remedial training outside it, dyslexics can expect not only to lead a productive adult life but also to maintain a regular childhood. "The tendency still is to see dyslexics as abnormal," Bawa says, "whereas the truth is that to improve they have to be kept in the mainstream."

Japan's Uno, who in addition to his research currently teaches remedial learning techniques to 22 dyslexic kids, agrees. "Most children who visit me speak in a small voice and keep their heads down. The older children I see are punks: they come into my office and sit so low they're practically lying down in their chair." Dyslexia, in effect, has made them permanent outcasts. "They have been teased and told they are stupid. They have learned that no matter how hard they try in school, they will not be rewarded for their efforts."

What little help Asians have received has come from pressure groups formed by parents. Ayyer decided early on that a key problem for her son Sripathi was the government's insistence that all Indian schoolchildren learn their native tongue plus English and a second Indian language. (In the case of Sripathi, whose mother tongue is Tamil, the second Indian language was Hindi.) Ayyer did some research in 1998 and found that one of India's state governments had allowed dyslexic children exemptions from second-language studies. Ayyer petitioned the central government and secured her son the exemption. "The moment he was told he need not bother about Hindi, his confidence level and performance at tests went up dramatically." Then she teamed up with the Madras Dyslexia Association, and they lobbied for a national exemption for all dyslexics, which came through in 2001. A similar push in Malaysia by the Dyslexia Association, which survives on donations from well wishers and parents of dyslexic children, convinced the Education Ministry to give dyslexics an extra half-hour to do exams. "This is not enough," says the association's founder Sariah Amirin.

Lau Chor-wa and Leung Chi-ming are also hoping for better from their city, Hong Kong. Their two sons, aged 12 and 8, are both dyslexic, and husband Leung volunteers as the secretary of the Hong Kong Association for Specific Learning Disabilities. Lau well recalls the days when teachers refused to believe that her older son Kam-fung had a learning disability. "They just told me my child was lazy, that I was lazy for not teaching him or pushing him further, that we as parents were finding excuses for our children."

In a few short years, a lot has happened. The secondary school Kam-fung will attend this month will have teachers who are trained by Pathways Foundation, a local nonprofit organization that provides support for dyslexic families. Younger brother Kam-hei, meanwhile, has special-education classes daily. "I just want them to be able to get by on a daily basis," says Lau, "to know which bus to take, to know how to order from a menu, the sort of things most people take for granted." Asia has millions of dyslexic children struggling to lead normal lives. They shouldn't be taken for granted.

—Reported by Susan Jakes/Beijing, Hanna Kite/Tokyo, Carmen Lee/Hong Kong, Alex Perry/New Delhi, Mageswary Ramakrishnan/Kuala Lumpur and Bhagwan Singh/Madras

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