Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty affecting a person’s ability to deal with text, and often numbers as well. Dyslexia is estimated to occur in about 10-20% of the population. As in the case of colour blindness, it is a permanent disability, which needs continuous support through schooling. But it is often accompanied by strengths in areas such as creative work, physical co-ordination and empathy with other people.

A dyslexic person has many strengths alongside their difficulties.
Strengths include:

• Good at ideas and innovative thinking
• Good problem solver and lateral thinker
• Creative in the way they make links and connections
• Have excellent visual and spatial awareness
• Good with practical tasks and creative in many ways
• Strong in the areas of art, music, design, architecture and engineering
• Good communicators

Difficulties include:

• Erratic spelling
• Misreading, leading to comprehension difficulties
• Poor handwriting
• Difficulties with sequences e.g. date order
• Ability to solve problems but inability to show process
• Poor organisation or time management
• Inaccurate number work

Dyslexics do not necessarily suffer the same difficulties. Each dyslexic person will have a different combination of strengths and weaknesses.

Some forms of dyslexia are aggravated by certain colour combinations; with black against white being the worst. Where possible, use matt, pastel coloured paper.

The following will be very familiar to dyslexics and their families. Have a read and see what dyslexics deal with every day.

Language spoken and written

How come he could read and or spell all these words yesterday, and can’t get a single one right today?

• Was he late in speaking?
• Does he sometimes leave letters out of words, or put them in the wrong order?
• Does he get tied up saying some words?
• Can he see the difference between b and d?
• Does his speed of reading comprehension seem slower than expected for his age and intelligence?
• Does he take much longer than average to do written work at school and at home?
• Is a lot of checking needed before he can copy things accurately?
• Does he have difficulty with writing and planning of essays?
• Does he never read for pleasure?

Number

If he can talk about life on Mars, why can’t he add two plus two?

• Does he put figures the wrong way round, eg 15 for 51, or 2 for 5?
• Does he need to use bricks or his fingers or marks on the paper to help him count?
• Does his speed on doing simple +, -, x, and division calculations seem slower than expected for his age and intelligence?
• Does he have unusual difficulty in remembering arithmetical tables?
• Does he lose his place, skip some of the numbers, or forget what point he has reached?
• Given four digits, eg 4 9 5 8, spoken at one-second intervals for him to say in reverse order does he ever make a mistake?

Physical and social

Good Lord, what will he do next!

• Does he have a poor sense of direction and difficulty in telling left from right?
• Do shoe laces and ties, changing clothes and dressing present problems?
• Does he find kicking or catching a ball difficult?
• Do instructions, telephone numbers etc sometimes have to be repeated?
• Does he lack self-confidence and have a poor opinion of himself?

So what is Dyslexia?

• Developmental disorder with brain basis.
• Genetic origin.
• Characterised by phonological deficits.
• Primarily (but not exclusively) affects learning to read and spell.
• Characterised by poor verbal memory and poor phonological learning.
• Often affects development of arithmetic skills, foreign language learning, speech development, and expressive language skills.
• May have knock-on effects on organisational skills and on confidence and self-esteem.
• Typically shows poor response to standard forms of literacy teaching.
• Life long condition but can be ameliorated
• Dyslexia is not restricted to children of high IQ.
• It is known that dyslexia has a genetic basis but environmental causes are not ruled out and children with poor language development may also develop reading problems.

It isn’t that other children do not experience these difficulties they often do. It is the quantity, intensity and persistence of such problems, which make the specific learning difficulty child different.