Symptoms of Dyslexia :
As a Preschooler
- confusion between different sounds
- may not have developed a preference for left or right-handedness
- enjoys being read to, but shows little or no interest in letters or words
- difficulty with learning rhymes, and other phonological skills
- has difficulty ,or takes a long time, acquiring letter names and sounds
When in kindergarten or primary school
Reading
- slow and hesitant reading sometimes with little change of intonation
- difficulty tracking – may miss words or skip lines
- read from middle of words
- numerous errors in reading
Some Common Reading Errors
- confusion of short vowel sounds lid-led
- transposing of letters – left – felt
- misreading words of similar visual appearance help – held
- either missing out or adding in little words such as the – and – but
- reversing letters or whole words —
- unable to sound out or blend unfamiliar words
- wild guesses eg. musk for music
- omit
- Suffixes eg ing, -ed, -ly / Prefixes eg un- (unhappy read as happy)
- substitute words of similar meaning
- Tend to mumble when reading multi-syllabic words
- Struggle – slow laborious reading
- Lose track of reading resulting in poor comprehension or inability to follow sequence
Spelling
- Greater difficulty with spelling and writing
- Bizarre eg. spelling morke for smoke
- Phonetic but unable to internalise spelling rules
- Poor auditory discrimination of vowels
- Spelling words without vowels
- Omit letters limp – lip
- insert letters what – whant
- Transpose letters bird -brid
- Reversals b/d, p/q
- Invert letters n/u, m/w, d/q, b/p
- Very often not able to match letters to their sounds
- Spelling tends to remain poor or unreliable often into adulthood
Writing
- Difficulties in expressive writing, organising thoughts and ideas into words
- Difficulty finding right words
- Grammatical structure
- punctuation
- Illegible handwriting, various sized letters floating between lines
- Inability to write against margins
- Difficulties copying from board
- Often scolded for untidiness, carelessness, inattentiveness
Dyslexia in older children or teenagers
The types of problems experienced in reading might be:
- Hesitant and laboured reading, especially out loud
- Omitting or adding extra words
- Reading at a reasonable rate, but with a low level of comprehension
- Failure to recognise familiar words
- Missing a line or reading the same line twice
- Losing the place or using a finger or marker to keep the place
The types of problems in written work might be:
- Poor standard of written work compared to oral ability
- Poor handwriting with badly formed letters
- Good handwriting but production of work extremely slow
- Badly set out work with spellings crossed out several times
- Spells the same word differently in one piece of work
- Has difficulty with punctuation and grammar
- Confuses upper and lower case letters
- Writes a great deal but loses the thread
- Has difficulty taking notes in lessons
- Finds organisation of work and personal timetable difficult
- Clearly knows more than he can commit to paper
Types of problems associated with Math:
- Difficulty remembering tables and formulae
- Finds sequencing difficult
- Confuses signs such as + and x
- Can think at a high level in mathematics, but needs a calculator to remember basic facts
- Misreads questions that include words
- Confuses directions – left and right
- Finds mental arithmetic at speed very difficult