Characteristics of Dyslexia
Characteristics by Age/Grade
The characteristics of dyslexia vary from person to person, as does the severity of the condition. Many young children exhibit one or more of the following characteristics, but that may not mean that they are dyslexic. No single symptom characterizes dyslexia.
It is the persistent occurrence of a number of these symptoms ‑- in spite of efforts to correct these weaknesses through proven interventions -- that will alert parents and teachers to the possibility of dyslexia.
The primary difficulties of a student with dyslexia are in phonemic awareness and manipulation, single word decoding, reading fluency, and spelling (which cannot be the only indicator). These difficulties can lead to problems in reading comprehension and writing.
Generally, characteristics of dyslexia show up as difficulties with:
- Learning sound/letters correspondence
- Difficulty in learning to write the alphabet in sequence
- Sounding out each letter when reading words
- Remembering basic sight words, especially irregular words that cannot be sounded out
- Reading real words in isolation
- Decoding nonsense or irregular words (such as two and does)
- Poor spelling and handwriting, in spite of adequate spelling instruction and practice
- Letter transpositions, additions, omissions, and reversals
- Slow, labored and inaccurate oral reading
- Reading comprehension suffers when students cannot decode words, but they often have good to superior listening comprehension
- Directional confusion (left/right, over/under, before/after)
- Recognizing and producing rhyming words
- Late in establishing a dominant hand
- Family history, ideally diagnosed and not just suspected
Furthermore, these difficulties can be separated into two categories:
Spoken language difficulties
- delayed speech
- mispronunciations, mixing up sounds and syllables in words
- difficulties with word retrieval, needing time to summon oral response
- confusing words that sound alike, saying "tornado" instead of "volcano"
- using imprecise language, saying "stuff", "things" instead of the proper name of an object. Using lots of "ums" during speaking, lack of quickness in speech
- pausing or hesitating often when speaking
Reading difficulties
- slow progress in acquiring reading skills, in spite of educational opportunities
- lack of a strategy to read new, unknown words
- inability to read small function words such as that, an and in
- oral reading that is choppy and difficult to understand, filled with mispronounciations, substitutions, and omissions
- reading causes fatigue
- requires quiet environment and extra effort to concentrate on reading
Additional information can be found here: