Chapter One
I now want to gather together all the clues that combined will serveas an early-warning system for recognizing dyslexia. The clues willhelp you answer the question: Should my son or daughter (or I) beevaluated for dyslexia?
No one wants to be an "alarmist" and put her child through anevaluation for trivial or transient bumps along the road to reading.Evaluations can take time, and those carried out privately can beexpensive. But I think we have to remind ourselves that our childrenare precious, oneof-a-kind individuals and have only one life tolive. If we elect not to evaluate a child and that child laterproves to have dyslexia, we cannot give those lost years back tohim. The human brain is resilient, but there is no question thatearly intervention and treatment bring about more positive change ata faster pace than an intervention provided to an older child. Andthen there is the erosion of self-esteem that accrues over the yearsas a child struggles to read.
Childhood is a time for learning. A child who delays breaking thephonetic code will miss much of the reading practice that isessential to building fluency and vocabulary; as a consequence, hewill fall further and further behind in acquiring comprehensionskills and knowledge of the world around him. To see this happen toa child is sad, all the more because it is preventable.
Joseph Torgesen, a reading researcher at Florida State Universitywho has carried out many of the critical studies on intervention,has this to say about the need to identify children early on and thecost of waiting: To the extent that we allow children to fallseriously behind at any point during early elementary school, we aremoving to a "remedial" rather than a "preventive" model ofintervention. Once children fall behind in the growth of criticalword reading skills, it may require very intensive interventions tobring them back up to adequate levels of reading accuracy, andreading fluency may be even more difficult to restore because of thelarge amount of reading practice that is lost by children each monthand year that they remain poor readers.
Most parents and teachers delay evaluating a child with readingdifficulties because they believe the problems are just temporary,that they wll be outgrown. This is simply not true. Reading poblemsare notoutgrown, they are persistent. As the participants in theConnecticut Longitudinal Study have demonstrated, at least three outof four children who read poorly in third grade continue to havereading problems in high school and beyond. What may seem to betolerable and overlooked in a third grader certainly won''t be in ahigh schooler or young adult. Without identification and proveninterventions, virtually all children who have reading difficultiesearly on will still struggle with reading when they are adults.
Luckily, parents can play an active role in the early identificationof a reading problem. All that is required is an observant parentwho knows what she is looking for and who is willing to spend timewith her child listening to him speak and read.
The specific signs of dyslexia, both weaknesses and strengths, inany one individual will vary according to the age and educationallevel of that person. The five-year-old who can''t quite learn hisletters becomes the six-year-old who can''t match sounds to lettersand the fourteen-year-old who dreads reading out loud and thetwenty-four-year-old who reads excruciatingly slowly. The threadspersist throughout a person''s life. The key is knowing how torecognize them at different periods during development. Therefore, Ihave gathered the clues together to provide three distinct portraitsof dyslexia: first, in early childhood from preschool through firstgrade; next, in school-age children from second grade on; and, last,in young adults and adults.
Clues to Dyslexia in Early Childhood
The earliest clues involve mostly spoken language. The very firstclue to a language (and reading) problem may be delayed language.Once the child begins to speak, look for the following problems:
The Preschool Years
Trouble learning common nursery rhymes such as "Jack and Jill" and"Humpty Dumpty"
A lack of appreciation of rhymes
Mispronounced words; persistent baby talk
Difficulty in learning (and remembering) names of letters
Failure to know the letters in his own name
Kindergarten and First Grade
Failure to understand that words come apart; for example, thatbatboy can be pulled apart into bat and boy, and, later on, that theword bat can be broken down still further and sounded out as: "b""aaaa" "t"
Inability to learn to associate letters with sounds, such as beingunable to connect the letter b with the "b" sound
Reading errors that show no connection to the sounds of theletters; for example, the word big is read as goat
The inability to read common one-syllable words or to sound outeven the simplest of words, such as mat, cat, hop, nap
Complaints about how hard reading is, or running and hiding whenit is time to read
A history of reading problems in parents or siblings
In addition to the problems of speaking and reading, you should belooking for these indications of strengths in higher-level thinkingprocesses:
Curiosity
A great imagination
The ability to figure things out
Eager embrace of new ideas
Getting the gist of things
A good understanding of new concepts
Surprising maturity
A large vocabulary for the age group
Enjoyment in solving puzzles
Talent at building models
Excellent comprehension of stories read or told to him
Clues to Dyslexia From Second Grade On
Problems in Speaking
Mispronunciation of long, unfamiliar, or complicated words; thefracturing of words-leaving out parts of words or confusing theorder of the parts of words; for example, aluminum becomes amulium
Speech that is not fluent-pausing or hesitating often whenspeaking, lots of um''s during speech, no glibness
The use of imprecise language, such as vague references to stuffor things instead of the proper name of an object
Not being able to find the exact word, such as confusing wordsthat sound alike: saying tornado instead of volcano, substitutinglotion for ocean, or humanity for humidity
The need for time to summon an oral response or the inability tocome up with a verbal response quickly when questioned
Difficulty in remembering isolated pieces of verbal information(rote memory)-trouble remembering dates, names, telephone numbers,random lists
Problems in Reading
Very slow progress in acquiring reading skills
The lack of a strategy to read new words
Trouble reading unknown (new, unfamiliar) words that must besounded out; making wild stabs or guesses at reading a word; failureto systematically sound out words
The inability to read small "function" words such as that, an, in
Stumbling on reading multisyllable words, or the failure to comeclose to sounding out the full word
Omitting parts of words when reading; the failure to decode partswithin a word, as if someone had chewed a hole in the middle of theword, such as conible for convertible
A terrific fear of reading out loud; the avoidance of oral reading
Oral reading filled with substitutions, omissions, andmispronunciations
Oral reading that is choppy and labored, not smooth or fluent
Oral reading that lacks inflection and sounds like the reading ofa foreign language
A reliance on context to discern the meaning of what is read
A better ability to understand words in context than to readisolated single words
Disproportionately poor performance on multiple choice tests
The inability to finish tests on time
The substitution of words with the same meaning for words in thetext he can''t pronounce, such as car for automobile
Disastrous spelling, with words not resembling true spelling; somespellings may be missed by spell check
Trouble reading mathematics word problems
Reading that is very slow and tiring
Homework that never seems to end, or with parents often recruitedas readers
Messy handwriting despite what may be an excellent facility atword processing-nimble fingers
Extreme difficulty learning a foreign language
A lack of enjoyment in reading, and the avoidance of reading booksor even a sentence
The avoidance of reading for pleasure, which seems too exhausting
Reading whose accuracy improves over time, though it continues tolack fluency and is laborious
Lowered self-esteem, with pain that is not always visible toothers
A history of reading, spelling, and foreign language problems infamily members
In addition to signs of a phonologic weakness, there are signs ofstrengths in higher-level thinking processes:
Excellent thinking skills: conceptualization, reasoning,imagination, abstraction
Learning that is accomplished best through meaning rather thanrote memorization
Ability to get the "big picture"
A high level of understanding of what is read to him
The ability to read and to understand at a high level overlearned(that is, highly practiced) words in a special area of interest; forexample, if his hobby is restoring cars, he may be able to read automechanics magazines
Improvement as an area of interest becomes more specialized andfocused, when he develops a miniature vocabulary that he can read
A surprisingly sophisticated listening vocabulary
Excellence in areas not dependent on reading, such as math,computers, and visual arts, or excellence in more conceptual (versusfactoid-driven) subjects such as philosophy, biology, socialstudies, neuroscience, and creative writing
Clues to Dyslexia in Young Adults and Adults
Problems in Speaking
Persistence of earlier oral language difficulties
The mispronunciation of the names of people and places, andtripping over parts of words
Difficulty remembering names of people and places and theconfusion of names that sound alike
A struggle to retrieve words: "It was on the tip of my tongue"
Lack of glibness, especially if put on the spot
Spoken vocabulary that is smaller than listening vocabulary, andhesitation to say aloud words that might be mispronounced
Problems in Reading
A childhood history of reading and spelling difficulties
Word reading becomes more accurate over time but continues torequire great effort
Lack of fluency
Should My Child Be Evaluated for Dyslexia?
Embarrassment caused by oral reading: the avoidance of Bible studygroups, reading at Passover seders, or delivering a written speech
Trouble reading and pronouncing uncommon, strange, or unique wordssuch as people''s names, street or location names, food dishes on amenu (often resorting to asking the waiter about the special of theday or resorting to saying, "I''ll have what he''s having," to avoidthe embarrassment if not being able to read the menu)
Persistent reading problems
The substitution of made-up words during reading for words thatcannot be pronounced-for example, metropolitan becomes mitan-and afailure to recognize the word metropolitan when it is seen again orheard in a lecture the next day
Extreme fatigue from reading
Slow reading of most materials: books, manuals, subtitles inforeign films
Penalized by multiple-choice tests
Unusually long hours spent reading school or work-relatedmaterials
Frequent sacrifice of social life for studying
A preference for books with figures, charts, or graphics
A preference for books with fewer words per page or with lots ofwhite showing on a page
Disinclination to read for pleasure
Spelling that remains disastrous and a preference for lesscomplicated words in writing that are easier to spell
Particularly poor performance on rote clerical tasks
Signs of Strengths in Higher-Level Thinking Processes
The maintenance of strengths noted in the school-age period
A high learning capability
A noticeable improvement when given additional time onmultiple-choice examinations
Noticeable excellence when focused on a highly specialized areasuch as medicine, law, public policy, finance, architecture, orbasicscience
Excellence in writing if content and not spelling is important
A noticeable articulateness in the expression of ideas andfeelings
Exceptional empathy and warmth, and feeling for others
Success in areas not dependent on rote memory
A talent for high-level conceptualization and the ability to comeup with original insights
Big-picture thinking
Inclination to think out of the box
A noticeable resilience and ability to adapt
These clues across the life span offer a portrait of dyslexia.Examine them carefully, think about them, and determine if any ofthese clues fit your child, you, or someone else you are close to.Look for clues in the weaknesses and strengths. Identifying theweaknesses makes it possible to spot dyslexia in children beforethey are expected to read and in adults after they have developedsome degree of reading accuracy but are continuing to show theremnants of earlier problems, reading slowly and with great effort.
If you think you or your child has some of these problems, it isimportant to note how frequent they are and how many there are. Youdon''t need to worry about isolated clues or ones that appear veryrarely. For you to be concerned, the symptoms must be persistent;anyone can mispronounce a word now and then, or confusesimilar-sounding words occasionally. What you are looking for is apersistent pattern-the occurrence of a number of these symptoms overa prolonged period of time. That represents a likelihood ofdyslexia.
Continues...
Excerpted from Overcoming Dyslexiaby Sally E. Shaywitz Copyright © 2004 by Sally E. Shaywitz. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
