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Overcoming
Dyslexia
from NBC's
Today Show guest Dr. Sally Shaywitz
For more articles on disabilities and special ed visit
www.bridges4kids.org.
Dr. Sally
Shaywitz will be one of the featured speakers at the LDA of
Michigan's Annual Conference. Find out more about this
conference at
http://www.ldaofmichigan.org.
In her latest book, Dr. Sally Shaywitz instructs parents in
what they can do year-by-year, grade-by-grade, step-by-step
for a dyslexic child. Read an excerpt of "Overcoming Dyslexia:
A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems
at Any Level," below.
I now want to gather together all the clues that combined will
serve as an early-warning system for recognizing dyslexia. The
clues will help you answer the question: Should my son or
daughter (or I) be evaluated for dyslexia?
No one wants to be an "alarmist" and put her child through an
evaluation for trivial or transient bumps along the road to
reading. Evaluations can take time, and those carried out
privately can be expensive. But I think we have to remind
ourselves that our children are precious, one of-a-kind
individuals and have only one life to live. If we elect not to
evaluate a child and that child later proves to have dyslexia,
we cannot give those lost years back to him. The human brain
is resilient, but there is no question that early intervention
and treatment bring about more positive change at a faster
pace than an intervention provided to an older child. And then
there is the erosion of self-esteem that accrues over the
years as a child struggles to read.
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 poblems 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 words-leaving out parts of words or
confusing the order of the parts of words; for example,
aluminum becomes amulium
Speech that is not fluent-pausing 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 multi-syllable 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 processing-nimble 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
over-learned (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 pronounced-for example, metropolitan becomes
mitan-and 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 pattern-the occurrence of a number
of these symptoms over a prolonged period of time. That
represents a likelihood of dyslexia.
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