Dyslexia:

As a parent you’ve undoubtedly heard the educational doomsday forecast that ‘if your child is not reading on grade level by the fourth grade, he/she will have a 75% chance of never reaching grade level reading skills.’ Great! Your child seems to be struggling with reading so now you have one more thing, (along with the West Nile Virus), to keep you awake at night!

The important information to discover is whether he has a reading delay or true dyslexia. A reading delay means he’s just missed some of the strategies such as phonics or word attack skills and that with early help, those skills will come. It’s a matter of filling in the gaps. Getting tutoring. Dyslexia is much different.

Dyslexia is a complex learning difficulty because it varies from individual to individual. In general it is a specific type of learning difficulty where a person of normal intelligence has persistent and significant problems with reading, writing, spelling and, sometimes, mathematics. The person may be extremely creative, think laterally and have excellent problem-solving skills or artistic skills. It may be helpful to think of dyslexia as an information processing difficulty.

Margaret Livingstone, Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School and the Dyslexia Research Laboratory, Beth Israel Hospital in Boston defined dyslexia as follows: "Developmental dyslexia is the selective impairment of reading skills despite normal intelligence, sensory acuity, and instruction. Several perceptual studies have suggested that dyslexic subjects process visual information more slowly than normal subjects. Such visual abnormalities were reported to be mmfound in more than 75% of the reading-disabled children tested." Therefore, it is important to rule out problems with sensory acuity (including visual acuity and visual processing) before labeling an individual as truly dyslexic.

Characteristics or Warning signs of Dyslexia

If your child has 3 or more of the following warning signs, you should have your child tested for dyslexia or a language processing/reading disorder.

In Preschool, your child may:

Have delayed speech
Mix up the sounds and syllable in long words
Have chronic ear infections
Have constant confusion of left versus right
Be late in establishing a dominant hand
Have difficulty tying his shoes
Have trouble memorizing their address. phone number, or the alphabet

In Elementary School, your child may:

Have Dysgraphia (slow, non-automatic, handwriting that is difficult to read)
Demonstrate letter or number reversals, continuing past the first grade
Exhibit extreme difficulty with cursive writing
Have slow, choppy, inaccurate reading
Guess at words based on shape of the word or context of the sentence
Skip or misread prepositions (at, to, of)
Ignores suffixes on words
Struggle to sound out unknown words
Have poor spelling skills
Forget sight words (they, does, were) or homonyms (their, they’re, and there)
Have difficulty telling time with a clock that has hands
Demonstrate trouble with math
Have difficulty in memorizing multiplication facts
Have difficulty in memorizing a sequence of steps
Exhibit problems with directionality
Have difficulty when speaking with finding the correct word. May use lots of “whatyamacallits” and “thingies”
Make common sayings come out twisted
Have extremely messy bedrooms, backpack, and desk
Dread going to school and complain of stomach aches or headaches
Have average or above average intelligence, but has difficulty with reading, writing and spelling.

In High School, your young adult may:

Have all of the above symptoms plus:
Have limited expressive and receptive vocabulary
Demonstrate extremely poor written expression
Exhibit a large discrepancy between verbal and written skills and written
composition
Be unable to master a foreign language
Have difficulty reading printed music
Earn poor grades in many classes and may drop out of school

Where can I find someone to diagnose Dyslexia?

Not everyone is trained in diagnosing and treating Dyslexia and there is not just one test, it requires a battery of testing to determine if a child has dyslexia or other processing disorders.

Remember to first rule out whether or not your child needs glasses or whether or not he has a visual perceptual problem like the Irlen Syndrome. (For more information on this Irlen Syndrome, see the article under visual processessing disorders on this website.

Research reveals several important points about when to have your child evaluated:

Parents report waiting too long to get testing for their child because they believed their child just had a ‘developmental lag.’
There is a crucial ‘window of opportunity’ for identification which is during the first couple of years in school.
The National Institute of Health states “that 95% of poor readers can be brought up to grade level if they receive effective, early help.”
Older children can be diagnosed and helped as well; it just takes a more intensive, longer program to accomplish the same thing.
The most effective reading program must include intensive instruction in at least these areas: phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension strategies

Our diagnostic battery of tests uses nationally recognized standardized testing and takes about three hours to complete

Once your child is diagnosed it’s important to help him understand that now that the problem is known, he can start getting help. Let him realize that 20 million school-age children suffer from reading problems as he does, but that only a small fraction can get help like he will receive. Dyslexia often runs in families and I think that by explaining that other family members have this reading problem, too, your child understands that the situation isn’t hopeless. Keeping self-esteem high is important.