Hester Hoette, lexilogist
Developmental psychologist · Founder of Lexilogy
I am a digger. I do not stop at the surface of a problem. I want to know what lies underneath: why a sound does not land, why a word does not stick, why one child learns to spell and the other does not, in the same classroom.
But there is another reason I understand the children I work with. As an adult,
I learned to read and spell all over again, in a language and a script that were not mine: Greek
I know the feeling of staring at a word that refuses to give up its secret. I know how quickly that feeling turns into a thought about yourself.
That is why one sentence carries everything I do: no child should ever think they are not smart enough because reading and spelling are hard.
In the nineteen-nineties I trained at the IWAL in Amsterdam, the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Learning Difficulties, under Theo Schaap, the man who put morphological reading and spelling training on the map in the Netherlands. Together we began something new: a programme for Greek.
Theo died in 2001. I carried on. Alone.
For sixteen years I ran a dyslexia practice in Athens.
And Greek forced a depth on me that I had found nowhere else
It is a language of five clear vowels, few one-syllable words, nearly always open syllables. And morphologically so transparent that words explain themselves: the Greek word for car is αυτοκίνητο, self-moving. Every Greek child feels that. The word tells its own story.
Its prefixes and suffixes are almost all its own. A few are enough to recognise almost every word.
Corpus by corpus. Sound by sound. Morpheme by morpheme. Word by word. I built what nobody else built, because nobody else took this route.
After Greek came English, a language assembled from different worlds: more than half of its vocabulary comes from Latin and French, a quarter is Germanic, and a part comes directly or indirectly from Greek. Then Dutch, Germanic at its core but threaded through with Latin words, often arrived via French. It is no coincidence that this is exactly the order in which I built the programmes themselves: Greek first, then English, and Dutch last.
And then you see something beautiful. Take the Greek word symphonia, "sounding together": syn- (together) plus phōnē (sound, voice).
Greek gives us συμφωνία.
English keeps the word almost untouched: symphony.
Dutch gives us symfonie.
The spelling itself tells the story. The y is a fossil of the Greek letter υ (ypsilon): the same y you find in symbol, system, type. But the ph, the fossil of the Greek φ (phi), was simplified in Dutch generations ago to a plain f, while English still keeps that ph.
This is how a lexilogist looks at words. Most specialists know dyslexia from one language: one frame of reference, one blind spot.
I have taken three languages apart from the inside, and so I see connections that others miss
That is inside every block of Lexilogy
The name Lexilogy did not come from me. It came from a dear friend, the writer Aikaterini Sideri, who also recorded the Greek words you hear in the programme. She watched me take every word apart for years to see how it was built, and she gave that work its name.
People sometimes ask: why not lexology? Because that would be wrong.
The Ancient Greek word for word is λέξις - lexis
And when a Greek word ends in -ις, the iota (i) becomes the connecting letter of the compound:
lex-i-log-y
Even our name is built correctly. It could hardly have been otherwise.
Lexilogy carries my method, but it is the work of many
Interaction designer Joes Koppers turned the method into image, sound and software, and is still building. Joes is not a coincidence. He is a phenomenon when it comes to interfaces, with years of experience specifically in educational programmes.
Every lesson is carried by voices. My niece Emma Hoette, dancer, choreographer and visual artist, and actress Isabel Kyriazi vocalised the colourful spoken instructions and words that accompany every English lesson and stimulate the learning process. The Greek version speaks through the writer Aikaterini Sideri and actor and voice artist Yannis Yfantis, the Dutch through actress and teacher Christine Bijvanck. Musician Kostas Kousis edited every sound with endless patience.
The word selection of the English version was made under the supervision of linguist Constandinos Kalimeris and of my son Adam Psomakas, linguist and classicist, who now teaches Greek and Latin at a Dutch lyceum.
Adam is still my sparring partner for words. Sometimes I push something through because it is didactically right and fits how a child's brain works, while he says: linguistically, perhaps. Perhaps otherwise. Exactly that friction makes the programme better.
And yes, Lexilogy is partly a family workshop. My son guards the words, my niece gives the English lessons her voice. This work is too big for one person, and too dear to hand to strangers.
No child ever hears their names. But every child hears their work, every day
In every country I have worked in,
the same children fall through the cracks:
The ones who struggle every day but are never "severe enough" for the system. Support criteria are built to limit intake. Morphological training has been cut away almost everywhere. And children who learn in two languages fit no protocol at all. And in every country I have worked in, I saw the same thing:
Explicit, structured instruction exists for phonological processing
For morphological processing, it does not
At school, at best, children are shown word families, or how an ending is added to a stem. A child without difficulties in morphological processing picks it up anyway, after years of exposure. A child who struggles needs it taught step by step, explicitly, exactly as happens in Lexilogy.
I made a different choice.
Lexilogy is built on a scientifically evaluated, peer-reviewed method, and it is available to every child who needs it: no waiting list, no referral letter, no threshold. And my dream reaches further than a programme.
I want children to think like lexilogists
Children who do not memorise words, but see through them
Am I stubborn? Yes. But I am also right.
This is what I see in every child who completes the programme. Before Lexilogy, a child writes by ear: sound by sound, without seeing the building blocks that hold the word together. After, that changes.
A word is no longer a string of letters to memorise, but a structure you recognise
Take sufficient. Where a child once heard "sufishent", it now recognises the root fic, from the Latin facere, the same root found in efficient and deficient, always spelled with a c.
That insight does not stop at English. A Greek child learning εκκίνηση (ek kinisi) no longer writes «εκίνηση»: it now sees two separate, meaningful parts, εκ- and κίνηση, each carrying its own κ. Just like in the English word misspell: mis- and spell, each carrying its own s. A Dutch child learning oppas ('babysitter') no longer writes 'opas': it sees op- and pas, each carrying its own p.
Three words, three languages, one and the same skill:
not just hearing anymore, but seeing
That insight sits inside every block of Lexilogy, in all three languages.