Multisensory Reading Clinic

 

How do you know if your child has dyslexia and needs specific help in learning to read and spell?

 

 

It takes very specific skills with professional training and education to diagnose an individual with dyslexia, therefore NOT everyone can identify if your child has dyslexia. If you are planning to see a psychologist or neurologist, ask him/her if s/he knows how to do it. 

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Dyslexia literally means difficulty (dys) with words (lex). According to Shaywitz, S., 2003, author of Overcoming Dyslexia,  dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurological in origin characterized by difficulties with accurate and fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and reading abilities, as well as a problem in reading comprehension. 

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Because dyslexia is a specific learning disability that affects learning to read, spell, write, and comprehend the results of the student's reading assessment will tell us if he has signs and symptoms of dyslexia.

 

But if you want to go deeper into your child's language problem, such as the rate of his processing difficulty, a further evaluation with a neurologist/psychologist who has a background and training with dyslexia is needed.

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However, below, and previous pages will give you enough information if your child needs professional help in learning to read, spell, write, and comprehend the correct way.

 

At seven years old, or by grade two, most children have started learning to read and by grade three, most children can read at their own grade level, so if your child is still struggling to read, he might have dyslexia, and if he cannot get the help that he really needs, his reading level will lag behind and further behind.

 

He is also falling further and further behind his classmates not just in reading, but also with other skills that require reading such as math problem-solving, sciences, history, etc.  In addition, your child’s spelling and comprehension skills are other clues that he needs specific help in learning to read and spell. His spelling is horrible, or he cannot spell words he has not seen and he has a problem comprehending what he read. Well, it is common sense that if a child cannot read, of course, he cannot comprehend, but if he has a problem comprehending what he read, it means he has not reached the fluency of that concept yet. If it remains unnoticed, it means that your child could have strong memory skills and it will be apparent in his later years, usually in high school where tasks that involve reading and reading comprehension are more demanding and yes, even if he has strong memory skills, the reading assessment will tell us if he has a specific learning difficulty!

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Earliest Clues

• Family history of reading problems. Dyslexia runs in families. If you, your partner, uncles, aunties, cousins, and grandparents have dyslexia, it increases the probability that your child has dyslexia too; and if one of your children is dyslexic, it is likely that your other children have dyslexia as well.

• Delay in speaking; typically, children say their first word at about one year old or so and say simple two phrases at about 18 months to two years old. Children with dyslexia may begin saying their first words after 15 months and may speak in phrases after their second birthday,  but then again some dyslexic children may not demonstrate a speech delay

• Difficulties in pronunciation; sometimes referred to as “baby talk,” by five or six years old, most children have little problem saying most simple words correctly. Typical mispronunciations of dyslexic children involve leaving off beginning sounds such as lephant for elephant, and inverting the sounds within a word such as aminal for the animal, bastekball  for basketball

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Pre-kindergarten/preschool

• Trouble learning and singing common  nursery rhymes such as Jack and Jill, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and Hickory, Dickory Dock – familiarity with nursery rhymes is an early indicator of getting ready to read and a strong predictor of early reading success

• Difficulty learning and remembering the names of letters in  the alphabet, especially learning them in order- sequencing

• Has trouble recognizing the letters in his own name

• Continue mispronouncing familiar words; persistent “baby talk” for example, he tends to say ‘spusgetti,’ instead of spaghetti

• Doesn’t recognize rhyming patterns like cat, bat, rat, sat- most often dyslexic children are unable to tell which word pair rhymes

• Tends to avoid or hates playing games with sounds and with rhyming words because dyslexic children have trouble penetrating the sound structure of words

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Kindergarten and/or First Grade

  Reading

• Reading errors that show no connection to the sounds of the letters on the page - will say “puppy” instead of “dog” and "home" instead of "house" with pictures of a dog and a house on a page and vice versa. This error indicates that your child cannot read but he is guessing words based on what he sees in the pictures. Children cannot learn and will never learn to read and spell by just looking at and figuring out what they see in the pictures. They need to accurately sound out words. Most dyslexic children are insensitive to the awareness at the sound level, thus they need phonics literacy instruction and MUST also learn to connect and pull out sounds for minimal pairs of words

• Reading words with clusters of letters like bl, cl sl, especially, with r (br, cr, dr) and three-letter words (spl, scr, spr) are very difficult to read and spell, thus a child needs a strategy to pull them out and put them back together.

• Reading is not an enjoyable or pleasant experience but a struggle

• Prone to reversal problem 'b' instead of  'd,'  and 'saw instead of was and vice versa

 

Spelling

• Difficulty in spelling, and/or learning to spell words

• Can't spell words he has not seen/horrible at spelling

• If he can spell the learned words during the test,  he tends to forget them easily thus a child MUST learn the rules of the language and spelling strategy

 

Handwriting

• Awkward pencil grip

• Very large, misshapen, and uneven size letters

• Wobbly handwriting

 

Second  Grade and Up

   Reading:

• Is very slow in acquiring reading skills

• Has trouble reading unfamiliar words, often making wild guesses because he cannot sound out words

• Avoids reading out loud

• Most of the time, he can only read words that he has seen - he's memorizing these words

  Spelling

• Difficulty in spelling/learning to spell words or horrible in spelling

• Cannot spell words he has not seen

• If he can spell the learned words during the test, he tends to forget them easily

 

Reading Comprehension

• If the child can "read" mostly words that he has already seen, he is usually having difficulty comprehending what he reads

• Having trouble solving math problems that involve reading, even if he excels in math

• Inferential questions are also a struggle for him to answer

 

Writing

• Having trouble/difficulty with any written tasks

• Most of the time, his handwriting is awkward and wobbly

 

Speaking:

• Searches for specific words and ends up using vague language such as "stuff" or "thing" without naming the object

• Pauses and uses lots of umm's and ahh's when speaking

• Confuses words that sound alike such as "satistics" for statistics, "pacific" for specific

• Mispronunciation of long, unfamiliar, or complicated words

• Seems to need extra time to respond to questions 

 

Young Adults/Adolescents and Adults

Reading:

• A childhood history of reading and spelling difficulties

• While reading skills have developed over time, reading still requires great effort and is done at a slow pace

• Rarely read for pleasure especially if it involves longer reading materials

• Slow reading of most materials - books, manual, subtitles in films

• Avoids reading aloud

 

Speaking

• Not fluent, not glib, often anxious when speaking

• Pausing or hesitating often when speaking; using lots of "um's"  and ahh's and imprecise language, for example, "stuff," "thing," instead of the proper name of an object when speaking

•  Often mispronounces the names of people and places

• Difficulty remembering names of people and places; confuses names that sound alike

•  Retrieval difficulties; struggles with retrieving words; has the "it was on the tip of my tongue" moment frequently

• Expressive language problem; rarely has a fast response in conversations, and/or writing; struggles when put on the spot

• Spoken vocabulary is smaller than listening vocabulary

• Earlier oral language difficulties persist

 

Spelling

• Weak spelling skills

• Cannot spell unfamiliar words

• Having difficulty spelling the multisyllabic (longer) words

 

Reading Comprehension

• Most of the time, he is having difficulty comprehending what he reads

• Inferential questions are a struggle for him to answer

• Analyzing the concepts in pages of the book is a nightmare