| I have been asked by several parents if I think their child might be
dyslexic. This assumption us usually made based on letter or number
reversals in their writing. Letter reversal is a myth about dyslexia, and
is completely normal in children till a mental age of approximately 8 years
old. The following is an excerpt from Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz
(the bible of dealing with dyslexia-so to speak). The excerpt gives you a
picture of what behaviors a dyslexic child might present.
Please take the time to read over the excerpt, if after reading this you
think you might have a student who may have dyslexia, let me know and I can
give the student a Dyslexia screening test. This test is not a diagnosis of
dyslexia (because it is a neurological problem, a medical doctor must
diagnose) but it accurately tells you if they are presenting those
tendencies and then we will better know how to deal with the childs
educational needs.
EXCERPT:
Childhood is a time for learning. A child who delays breaking the phonetic
code will miss much of the reading practice that is essential to building
fluency and vocabulary; as a consequence, he will fall further and further
behind in acquiring comprehension skills and knowledge of the world around
him. To see this happen to a child is sad, all the more because it is
preventable.
Joseph Torgesen, a reading researcher at Florida State University who has
carried out many of the critical studies on intervention, has this to say
about the need to identify children early on and the cost of waiting: To the
extent that we allow children to fall seriously behind at any point during
early elementary school, we are moving to a "remedial" rather than
a "preventive" model of intervention. Once children fall behind in the
growth of critical word reading skills, it may require very intensive
interventions to bring them back up to adequate levels of reading accuracy,
and reading fluency may be even more difficult to restore because of the
large amount of reading practice that is lost by children each month and
year that they remain poor readers.
Most parents and teachers delay evaluating a child with reading difficulties
because they believe the problems are just temporary, that they will be
outgrown. This is simply not true. Reading problems are not outgrown, they
are persistent. As the participants in the Connecticut Longitudinal Study
have demonstrated, at least three out of four children who read poorly in
third grade continue to have reading problems in high school and beyond.
What may seem to be tolerable and overlooked in a third grader certainly
won't be in a high schooler or young adult. Without identification and
proven interventions, virtually all children who have reading difficulties
early on will still struggle with reading when they are adults.
Luckily, parents can play an active role in the early identification of a
reading problem. All that is required is an observant parent who knows what
she is looking for and who is willing to spend time with her child listening
to him speak and read.
The specific signs of dyslexia, both weaknesses and strengths, in any one
individual will vary according to the age and educational level of that
person. The five-year-old who can't quite learn his letters becomes the six-
year-old who can't match sounds to letters and the fourteen-year-old who
dreads reading out loud and the twenty-four-year-old who reads
excruciatingly slowly. The threads persist throughout a person's life. The
key is knowing how to recognize them at different periods during
development. Therefore, I have gathered the clues together to provide three
distinct portraits of dyslexia: first, in early childhood from preschool
through first grade; next, in school-age children from second grade on; and,
last, in young adults and adults.
Clues to Dyslexia in Early Childhood
The earliest clues involve mostly spoken language. The very first clue to a
language (and reading) problem may be delayed language. Once the child
begins to speak, look for the following problems:
The Preschool Years
Trouble learning common nursery rhymes such as "Jack and Jill" and "Humpty
Dumpty"
A lack of appreciation of rhymes
Mispronounced words; persistent baby talk
Difficulty in learning (and remembering) names of letters
Failure to know the letters in his own name
Kindergarten and First Grade
Failure to understand that words come apart; for example, that batboy can
be pulled apart into bat and boy, and, later on, that the word bat can be
broken down still further and sounded out as: "b" "aaaa" "t"
Inability to learn to associate letters with sounds, such as being unable
to connect the letter b with the "b" sound
Reading errors that show no connection to the sounds of the letters; for
example, the word big is read as goat
The inability to read common one-syllable words or to sound out even the
simplest of words, such as mat, cat, hop, nap
Complaints about how hard reading is, or running and hiding when it is
time to read
A history of reading problems in parents or siblings
In addition to the problems of speaking and reading, you should be looking
for these indications of strengths in higher-level thinking processes:
Curiosity
A great imagination
The ability to figure things out
Eager embrace of new ideas
Getting the gist of things
A good understanding of new concepts
Surprising maturity
A large vocabulary for the age group
Enjoyment in solving puzzles
Talent at building models
Excellent comprehension of stories read or told to him
Clues to Dyslexia From Second Grade On
Problems in Speaking
Mispronunciation of long, unfamiliar, or complicated words; the fracturing
of wordsleaving out parts of words or confusing the order of the parts of
words; for example, aluminum becomes amulium
Speech that is not fluentpausing or hesitating often when speaking, lots
of um's during speech, no glibness
The use of imprecise language, such as vague references to stuff or things
instead of the proper name of an object
Not being able to find the exact word, such as confusing words that sound
alike: saying tornado instead of volcano, substituting lotion for ocean, or
humanity for humidity
The need for time to summon an oral response or the inability to come up
with a verbal response quickly when questioned
Difficulty in remembering isolated pieces of verbal information (rote
memory)trouble remembering dates, names, telephone numbers, random lists
Problems in Reading
Very slow progress in acquiring reading skills
The lack of a strategy to read new words
Trouble reading unknown (new, unfamiliar) words that must be sounded out;
making wild stabs or guesses at reading a word; failure to systematically
sound out words
The inability to read small "function" words such as that, an, in
Stumbling on reading multisyllable words, or the failure to come close to
sounding out the full word
Omitting parts of words when reading; the failure to decode parts within a
word, as if someone had chewed a hole in the middle of the word, such as
conible for convertible
A terrific fear of reading out loud; the avoidance of oral reading
Oral reading filled with substitutions, omissions, and mispronunciations
Oral reading that is choppy and labored, not smooth or fluent
Oral reading that lacks inflection and sounds like the reading of a
foreign language
A reliance on context to discern the meaning of what is read
A better ability to understand words in context than to read isolated
single words
Disproportionately poor performance on multiple choice tests
The inability to finish tests on time
The substitution of words with the same meaning for words in the text he
can't pronounce, such as car for automobile
Disastrous spelling, with words not resembling true spelling; some
spellings may be missed by spell check
Trouble reading mathematics word problems
Reading that is very slow and tiring
Homework that never seems to end, or with parents often recruited as
readers
Messy handwriting despite what may be an excellent facility at word
processingnimble fingers
Extreme difficulty learning a foreign language
A lack of enjoyment in reading, and the avoidance of reading books or even
a sentence
The avoidance of reading for pleasure, which seems too exhausting
Reading whose accuracy improves over time, though it continues to lack
fluency and is laborious
Lowered self-esteem, with pain that is not always visible to others
A history of reading, spelling, and foreign language problems in family
members
In addition to signs of a phonologic weakness, there are signs of strengths
in higher-level thinking processes:
Excellent thinking skills: conceptualization, reasoning, imagination,
abstraction
Learning that is accomplished best through meaning rather than rote
memorization
Ability to get the "big picture"
A high level of understanding of what is read to him
The ability to read and to understand at a high level overlearned (that
is, highly practiced) words in a special area of interest; for example, if
his hobby is restoring cars, he may be able to read auto mechanics magazines
Improvement as an area of interest becomes more specialized and focused,
when he develops a miniature vocabulary that he can read
A surprisingly sophisticated listening vocabulary
Excellence in areas not dependent on reading, such as math, computers, and
visual arts, or excellence in more conceptual (versus factoid-driven)
subjects such as philosophy, biology, social studies, neuroscience, and
creative writing
Clues to Dyslexia in Young Adults and Adults
Problems in Speaking
Persistence of earlier oral language difficulties
The mispronunciation of the names of people and places, and tripping over
parts of words
Difficulty remembering names of people and places and the confusion of
names that sound alike
A struggle to retrieve words: "It was on the tip of my tongue"
Lack of glibness, especially if put on the spot
Spoken vocabulary that is smaller than listening vocabulary, and
hesitation to say aloud words that might be mispronounced
Problems in Reading
A childhood history of reading and spelling difficulties
Word reading becomes more accurate over time but continues to require
great effort
Lack of fluency
Should My Child Be Evaluated for Dyslexia?
Embarrassment caused by oral reading: the avoidance of Bible study groups,
reading at Passover seders, or delivering a written speech
Trouble reading and pronouncing uncommon, strange, or unique words such as
people's names, street or location names, food dishes on a menu (often
resorting to asking the waiter about the special of the day or resorting to
saying, "I'll have what he's having," to avoid the embarrassment f not being
able to read the menu)
Persistent reading problems
The substitution of made-up words during reading for words that cannot be
pronouncedfor example, metropolitan becomes mitanand a failure to
recognize the word metropolitan when it is seen again or heard in a lecture
the next day
Extreme fatigue from reading
Slow reading of most materials: books, manuals, subtitles in foreign films
Penalized by multiple-choice tests
Unusually long hours spent reading school or work-related materials
Frequent sacrifice of social life for studying
A preference for books with figures, charts, or graphics
A preference for books with fewer words per page or with lots of white
showing on a page
Disinclination to read for pleasure
Spelling that remains disastrous and a preference for less complicated
words in writing that are easier to spell
Particularly poor performance on rote clerical tasks
Signs of Strengths in Higher-Level Thinking Processes
The maintenance of strengths noted in the school-age period
A high learning capability
A noticeable improvement when given additional time on
multiple-choice examinations
Noticeable excellence when focused on a highly specialized area
such as medicine, law, public policy, finance, architecture, or basic
science
Excellence in writing if content and not spelling is important
A noticeable articulateness in the expression of ideas and feelings
Exceptional empathy and warmth, and feeling for others
Success in areas not dependent on rote memory
A talent for high-level conceptualization and the ability to come
up with original insights
Big-picture thinking
Inclination to think out of the box
A noticeable resilience and ability to adapt
These clues across the life span offer a portrait of dyslexia. Examine them
carefully, think about them, and determine if any of these clues fit your
child, you, or someone else you are close to. Look for clues in the
weaknesses and strengths. Identifying the weaknesses makes it possible to
spot dyslexia in children before they are expected to read and in adults
after they have developed some degree of reading accuracy but are continuing
to show the remnants of earlier problems, reading slowly and with great
effort.
If you think you or your child has some of these problems, it is important
to note how frequent they are and how many there are. You don't need to
worry about isolated clues or ones that appear very rarely. For you to be
concerned, the symptoms must be persistent; anyone can mispronounce a word
now and then, or confuse similar-sounding words occasionally. What you are
looking for is a persistent patternthe occurrence of a number of these
symptoms over a prolonged period of time. That represents a likelihood of
dyslexia.
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