Cases of dyslexia in the reading ability of class seven children at the Thogoto Primary School in the Kikuyu District of Kenya

Abstract

This paper sought to investigate the reading ability of six class seven dyslexic children at the Thogoto Primary School in the Kikuyu district of Kenya. The aim was to establish the linguistic information that multilingual dyslexic subjects miss. The study was done within the framework of the Psycholinguistic Theory of Language disorders dealing specifically with dyslexia.

The study was based on 6 reading tasks administered to the six pupils. Lists of English monosyllabic and polysyllabic words, Kiswahili disyllabic and Kiswahili polysyllabic words were administered to the respondents. They then read a list of nonsense words. They were then given English and Kiswahili sentences to read. The research shows that as we had hypothesized the dyslexic pupils read monosyllabic words better than polysyllabic words. They read Kiswahili better than English. They also had a challenge reading the inflectional endings in words. However, contrary to what the research had hypothesized, both functional words and content words were challenging for the respondents. Errors of omission, substitution, insertion and reversal were noted in both the Kiswahili and English data. Nonsense words were also challenging for the respondents.

The frequency of misreading was reported in tables as was the performance of each of the respondents. We analyzed the data statistically by calculating the mean of all the reading tasks. A summary of the total misreading results was then presented in a graph.