Dyslexia Mastery

Early primary school children

• Difficulty learning the alphabet or letters order
• Difficulty with associating sounds with the letters that represent them (sound-symbol correspondence)
• Difficulty identifying or generating rhyming words, or counting syllables in words  (phonological awareness)
• Difficulty segmenting words into individual sounds, or blending sounds to make words  (phonemic awareness)
• Difficulty with word retrieval or naming problems
• Difficulty learning to decode written words
• Difficulty distinguishing between similar sounds in words; mixing up sounds in polysyllabic words (auditory discrimination) (for example, “aminal” for animal, “bisghetti” for spaghetti)

Older primary school children

• Slow or inaccurate reading (although these individuals can read to an extent).
• Very poor spelling  which has been called dysorthographia (orthographic coding)
• Difficulty reading out loud, reading words in the wrong order, skipping words and sometimes saying a word similar to another word (auditory processing disorder)
• Difficulty associating individual words with their correct meanings
• Difficulty with time keeping and concept of time when doing a certain task
• Difficulty with organization skills (working memory)
• Children with dyslexia may fail to see (and occasionally to hear) similarities and differences in letters and words, may not recognize the spacing that organizes letters into separate words, and may be unable to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word (auditory processing disorder).
• Tendencies to omit or add letters or words when writing and reading.

Secondary school children and adults

Some people with dyslexia are able to disguise their weaknesses (even from themselves) and often do acceptably well — or better — at GCSE level (U.K. – at 16 years old). Many students reach higher education before they encounter the threshold at which they are no longer able to compensate for their learning weaknesses.

One common misconception about dyslexia is that dyslexic readers write words backwards or move letters around when reading. In fact, this only occurs in a very small population of dyslexic readers. Dyslexic people are better identified by writing that does not seem to match their level of intelligence from prior observations. Additionally, dyslexic people often substitute similar-looking, but unrelated, words in place of the ones intended (what/want, say/saw, help/held, run/fun, fell/fall, to/too, who/how etc.)

Comorbidities

Several learning disabilities often occur with dyslexia, but it is unclear whether these learning disabilities share underlying neurological causes with dyslexia.^[39] These disabilities include, but are not limited to:

• Dysgraphia— a disorder which expresses itself primarily through writing or typing, although in some cases it may also affect eye–hand coordination direction or sequence oriented processes such as tying knots or carrying out a repetitive task. In dyslexia, dysgraphia is often multifactorial, due to impaired letter writing automaticity, finger motor sequencing challenges, organizational and elaborative difficulties, and impaired visual word form which makes it more difficult to retrieve the visual picture of words required for spelling. Dysgraphia is distinct from dyspraxia in that dyspraxia is simply related motor sequence impairment.
• Dyscalculia— a neurological condition characterized by a problem with basic sense of number and quantity and difficult retrieving rote math facts. Often people with this condition can understand very complex mathematical concepts and principles but have difficulty retrieving basic math facts involving addition and subtraction.
• Attention Deficit Disorder — a high degree of co-morbidity has been reported between ADD / ADHD and dyslexia,  although the contributions of dyslexia-related challenges such as auditory verbal working memory to attention issues has not been well established
• Cluttering— a speech fluency disorder involving both the rate and rhythm of speech, resulting in impaired speech intelligibility. Speech is erratic and nonrhythmic, consisting of rapid and jerky spurts that usually involve faulty phrasing. The personality of people with cluttering bears striking resemblance to the personalities of those with learning disabilities.