Identifying Dyslexia
Dyslexia is not an intelligence or motivation issue.
Dyslexia is one of the most common specific learning difficulties, affecting around 10% of the population, across a range of intellectual abilities and challenges.
Identifying dyslexia means understanding how indicators can present at school and home, if a child’s emergent reading skills are not developing along expected lines. This helps to determine their learning needs and make necessary adjustments to instruction to improve the chances for success. The indicators are not limited to just reading, writing and spelling. The list below shows how wide the range of difficulties can be, although children with dyslexia will not present with all of them, or in the same way.
Sound Awareness
- Lack of sensitivity to rhyme: does not show an interest in word play or nursery rhymes
- Has difficulty identifying (clapping or counting) syllables in spoken words: (sun/shine, hos/pit/al)
- Has difficulty recognising words that begin or end with the same sound (man - mop)
Speech Production
- Confuses similar sounding words: cheese - keys; thin - fin
- May have difficulty saying multi-syllabic words with varied sound patterns (animal, spaghetti)
- May have speech articulation issues (th/f)
Language Comprehension
- Lacks understanding of concepts involving space or time (front/back, before/after)
- Frequently requests repetition of directions
- Has difficulty drawing conclusions and predicting outcomes
Language Expression
- Makes grammatical errors (“we goed to the store”)
- Tells a story in a disorganised fashion (lacks a clear beginning, middle, and end)
- May use words such as “stuff” or “thing” in place of a specific word
Memory
- Has difficulty learning sequences (days of the week)
- Responds to only a part of a direction
- Inconsistently remembers names
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