What is it?

Dyslexia is a language-based disability in which a person has trouble understanding written words. It may also be referred to as a reading disability or reading disorder. The core difficulty is with word recognition and reading fluency, spelling, and writing.

What are the features of it?

Most commonly, children with Dyslexia have difficulty reading and spelling for no apparent reason. The child may be intelligent, able to achieve well in other areas and be exposed to the same education as others, but is unable to read at the expected level. Common problem areas include spelling, comprehension, reading and identification of words.

Common challenges experienced by those with Dyslexia:

Pre-school Children:

• Delayed language and speech production.
• Difficulties producing speech sounds and pronouncing words.
• Difficulties with learning rhymes and identifying rhymes.
• Difficulties learning shapes and colours and may have difficulty writing their own name.
• Difficulties with re-telling a sequence of events or story in the correct order.

School Children:

• Difficulty with spelling.
• Reversing numbers and letters.
• Difficulty distinguishing left and right.
• Poor organisation.
• Difficulties telling the time.
• Difficulties writing by hand.
• Difficulties copying things accurately from the board to paper.
• Difficulties remembering or understanding what they just read.
• Difficulties remembering or understanding what they have just heard.
• Difficulties repeating what they have just been told.
• Difficulties writing down what they think.
• Difficulties understanding and following instructions.

Management strategies that support the child with Dyslexia (at preschool, school or home):

• Allow extra time to complete work (to take into account the extra time it takes to read and interpret the information).
• More repeated exposure to the same task than typical.
• Using visual cues rather than long verbal instructions.
• Using visual prompts wherever possible (i.e. pictures, not word lists, for organization).
• Continued practice of mastered (familiar) skills, rather than simply moving on new tasks without maintaining the old.

Occupational Therapy approaches and activities that can support the individual or their carers include:

• Using a multi-sensory approach to learning (using as many different senses as possible such as seeing, listening, doing and speaking).
• Providing visual prompts for both instructions and organisation.
• Visually sequencing tasks (or components within a task) using visual cues.
• Visual strategies to assist with reading and spelling (e.g. colour coding paper size according to letter size).
• Visual modeling rather than simply verbal instruction.

Speech Pathology approaches and activities that can support the individual or their carers include:

• Assessing the child's skill in the areas of emergent literacy which include: speech sound awareness and memory; vocabulary use and knowledge; listening comprehension; processing and understanding sentences; using words and sentences; conversational skills; oral story telling skills; knowledge of letter symbols and encoding and decoding letters and sounds.
• Developing phonological awareness skills (e.g. syllable segmentation, rhyming, identifying sounds in words).
• Focusing on oral language skills which may not be fully developed.
• Working on letter/sound identification.
• Using visual strategies to assist with spelling out words and spelling (e.g. coloured blocks to represent consonants and vowels).