October is National Dyslexia Awareness month. What do you know about this “condition” that impacts as many as 1 in 5 individuals?
You can “Google” dyslexia and you will find pages of websites and the amount of information may be overwhelming. But, I like to keep it simple. Dyslexia is a reading disability at the word level. The word is derived from Greek roots: “dys” which means “bad” and “lex” which means word.
Dyslexic people have difficulty with reading and spelling words. To put this in context, let’s scroll down and take a look at an elegantly simple graphic illustrating the complexity of skilled reading.
Dyslexia directly impacts the word recognition portion of skilled reading, shown in blue. Since poor word reading reduces accuracy and fluency, comprehension may suffer as well. But that does not define dyslexia.
We have identified some specific processing deficits that are common to dyslexia, the most prominent being weak phonological awareness. A particularly critical aspect of this is the ability to hear, isolate and manipulate the sounds within words. Struggles in this area correlate highly with struggles to master the phonology of our language (think phonics). So, dyslexic students typically are poor word decoders and spellers. But there is more. Words that have been accurately decoded anywhere from about one to five times, in the case of skilled reading, are stored in a part of the brain we sometimes refer to as the brain’s letter box. This task presents yet another challenge to the dyslexic reader. Skilled readers relatively effortlessly store tens of thousands of “sight words” for quick and accurate access in their brains, but only after they have been fully and successfully analyzed. So, dyslexic readers do not build a lexicon of “sight words” to promote accurate and fluent reading.
Dyslexic reading is characterized by a slow labored rate of reading, and apparent inattention to detail, which leads to inaccuracy in word identification. It is not unusual for an upper grade child with dyslexia to continue to mix up words like: what-that, where-were, them-than, and more. It is also not uncommon for a dyslexic child to read a word correctly last week and forget it this week. 
Indeed, dyslexia is fairly easy to spot in a slightly older child who has spent several years in school and made little progress with reading. However, we can screen for suspected dyslexia when children are younger, in K and first grade. Some of the “red flags” that may be symptomatic of dyslexia in a young child include difficulty learning the alphabet letter names, followed by difficulty learning letter sounds. One of the earliest indicators of phonological processing deficits before the child received formal reading instruction is difficulty hearing, identifying and producing rhyme. Indeed, young children who are read to extensively have likely been exposed to hours and hours of rhythm and rhyme during their preschool years. The child who catches on to rhyme quickly and readily is less likely to be dyslexic. I have taught dyslexic students in second and third grade whose phonological awareness was so poor they still could not identify and produce rhyme. However, there are tools that allow us to screen for early phonological processing skill development in more detail.
I do want to leave you with one thought. Dyslexia is an equal opportunity “disability.” It is no respecter of intelligence or of perseverance. No one is dyslexic because they are unintelligent or because they are lazy. Dyslexia is real, we have mapped it in the brain, and it has a significant hereditary component. Finally, it is absolutely critical we identify dyslexia in children during their early school years because brain plasticity is at its peak, and we want to catch dyslexia before the child develops ineffective compensatory reading strategies which are difficult to retrain.
Julia Lewis is a Reading Specialist and Special Education Teacher
This article is part of a four-week series Macaroni Kid Upland, Claremont & La Verne is featuring on Dyslexia this month. We hope to bring awareness and education regarding dyslexia to our community. For more information regarding dyslexia
visit Decoding Dyslexia
