Davis Picture-At-Punctuation

Davis Dyslexia Correction Methods

What is Davis Picture-at-Punctuation?

There's an excellent article called Mental Imagery in Reading which summarizes the many studies that have been done in this area. You will find it here: http://www.readingonline.org/research/Sadoski.html

As this article makes clear, the concept of incorporating visualization into reading has been around long enough to generate fertile ground for studies. Basically, it has been repeatedly shown that readers who have strong mental imagery have better recall and comprehension, and that the visualizing skill can be taught to students to improve comprehension. Davis methods are unique in application, but Davis is not the only method that teaches imagery as part of an overall approach to improving comprehension skills.

Picture-at-Punctuation is described in the book, The Gift of Dyslexia, in the section called "Three Steps to Easier Reading." The main distinction of Picture-at-Punctuation is that we have included it within a three-step process that connects to building visual tracking, accurate spelling, reading sequencing, and word recognition skills. Our approach probably encourages more frequent image association, as opposed to reading methods that instruct students to form an image after a paragraph or passage.

We also focus on punctuation because our experience has been that many dyslexic students often don't see, understand, or respond to punctuation. Our particular approach reinforces the habit of recognizing and responding to certain punctuation marks that signal a pause or stop in speech when the text is spoken. These include commas, periods, semicolons, and quotation marks.

Our goal is for Picture-at-Punctuation to become ingrained as a habit, so that the dyslexic reader naturally pauses at frequent and appropriate intervals in the reading process to visualize the meaning of the preceding clause or sentence. This encourages and utilizes the strong visual-spatial thinking skills which usually go hand in hand with dyslexia, and ensures excellent comprehension.