Characteristics of Students with Dyslexia

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 (S. Shaywitz, 2003).

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 and 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 (S. Shaywitz, 2003).

Kindergarten and First Grade Strengths:

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.

• Surprisingly 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 (S. Shaywitz, 2003)

Problems in Speaking:

• Leaving out parts of words or confusing the order of the parts of words

• Speech that is not fluent; pausing or hesitating often when speaking

• Imprecise language; 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"

• When summoned, oral responses do not come quickly

• Trouble remembering dates, names, telephone numbers, random lists (S. Shaywitz, 2003).

Problems in Reading:

• Very slow progress in acquiring reading skills

• The lack of a strategy to read new words

• Trouble reading words that need sounding out; taking wild guesses at words.

• Inability to read small function words such as that, an, and, in.

• Stumbling on multi-syllable words, or the failure to come close to sounding out the full word; failure to decode parts of words, such as conible for convertible.

• A terrific fear of reading out loud.

• Oral reading that is choppy and labored, not fluent

• Oral reading filled with substitutions, omissions, and mispronunciations.

• Reliance on context to discern the meaning of what is read.

• Avoidance of reading for pleasure.

• The trouble with mathematics word problems (S. Shaywitz, 2003).

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”

• The ability to read and to understand at a high level overlearned (that is, highly practiced) words in a special area of interest

• A surprisingly sophisticated listening vocabulary

• Excellence in areas not dependent on reading (S. Shaywitz, 2003).

Problems in Speaking:

• Persistence of earlier oral language difficulties

• The mispronunciation of the 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 careful thought when put on the spot

• Spoken vocabulary is smaller than listening vocabulary (S. Shaywitz, 2003).

Problems in Reading:

• Childhood history of reading and spelling difficulties

• Word reading biomes more accurate over time but continues to require great effort

• Lack of fluency

• Trouble reading and pronouncing uncommon, strange, or unique words.

• Persistent reading problems

• Usually, long hours spent reading school or work-related materials

• Preference for books with figures, charts, or graphics

• Disinclination to read for pleasure

• Disastrous spelling

• Particularly poor performance on rote clerical tasks (S. Shaywitz, 2003).

Signs of Strengths in Higher-Level Thinking Processes:

• Strengths noted in the school-age period

• High learning capability

• A noticeable improvement when provided additional time on multiple-choice exams.

• Noticeable excellence when focused on a highly specialized area, such as medicine, law, public policy, finance, or basic science

• Excellence in writing if content and not spelling is important

• Big-picture thinking; inclined to think out of the box

• Noticeable resilience and ability to adapt (S. Shaywitz, 2003).