Your Guide to Monitoring Signs of Dyslexia

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I have worked with many well-intentioned parents who had no idea their children were falling behind in reading or at risk for dyslexia. Parents have an idea of where their children should be developmentally with their health and motor skills due to doctor checkups. Unfortunately, reading progress is not monitored the same way but reading milestones and signs of dyslexia are just as evident as walking milestones and delays when parents know what to look for. 

Will Your Child Outgrow Reading Problems?

It has been my experience that, when faced with the reality that their child struggles with reading, families tend to believe that the reading problems are just temporary or will be outgrown. The Journal of Pediatrics published a study that found the reading achievement gap between neurotypical readers and dyslexic readers is already present in first grade and persists into adolescence. Children do not simply wake up one day and have everything they were struggling with automatically make sense. It takes identification and early intervention to set children up for reading success.

It is important to be vigilant and monitor your child’s reading progress. Below is an easy-to-follow synopsis of reading benchmarks and signs of dyslexia that has been pulled from the book Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz. Furthermore, you will also find some helpful information as to why the dyslexia indicators are important. 

The way your child speaks can also hold valuable information on signs of dyslexia. Follow this link for a detailed breakdown of dyslexia signs in speech. Please refer to the book Overcoming Dyslexia- Second Edition if you would like a more in-depth analysis of reading and speaking signs of dyslexia.

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Preschool Reading Monitoring

Children are considered to be in the emergent literacy phase during their preschool years. They may not be able to read yet,  however, they are exploring their environment and beginning to understand the role of language. Conceptually, children understand that printed material is relaying a message although they have not broken the code to read it. They are able to engage in pre-reading skills such as reciting nursery rhymes and participate in rhyming games. They are also able to recognize some letter names, especially the letters in their names.

Signs of Dyslexia
  • Failure to learn nursery rhymes 

Nursery rhymes provide students the opportunity to manipulate the sounds of oral language, which is also called phonological awareness. Phonological awareness has been proven to be highly related to reading and writing success in later years. Nursery rhymes build phonological awareness by allowing children opportunities to play with words that rhyme as well as words with alliteration (words that all begin with the same sound). Overall, the inability to master this skill shows that the child does not display sensitivity to sounds in words.

  • Failure to recognize at least 10 letters

Reading both letters and words requires the same skills in a reader: to encode a symbol, store in your memory, and then output a label. If a child is struggling with letter names, it is likely that they will continue to struggle as those letters compound into words. Solidifying letter names also provides a strong foundation for remembering the corresponding letter sounds. Research by the National Literacy Panel has shown that alphabet knowledge is a strong predictor of later reading and writing success.

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Kindergarten and First Grade Reading Monitoring

By the end of kindergarten, children are able to identify all upper and lower case letter names. They also know most of their letter sounds and can use that knowledge to decode simple words. Children are furthering their phonological awareness by separating words into syllables and developing it into phonemic awareness (the ability to manipulate and isolate individual sounds in words). In first grade, their phonemic awareness has advanced to manipulating words with three sounds. For instance, when asked to say the word mat without the (m) sound, a child can accurately respond with the word at. By the end of first grade, children have a reading vocabulary of 300 to 500 words including sight words.

Signs of Dyslexia

The National Reading Panel has identified phonemic awareness, the ability to manipulate and isolate individual sounds, as the first out of five components necessary to learn to read. The other four are phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Taking it a step further than rhyming, children should be able to pull multisyllabic words apart. In first grade, this should progress to pulling apart words into individual sounds. For instance, they should be able to pull apart the word hotdog into (hot) (dog) and then the word hot into (h)(o)(t). For more information on easy ways to teach your child phonemic awareness, please visit this link.

  • Inability to accurately link letter names and sounds

The alphabetic code is the relationship between letters and their corresponding sounds. Mastering the alphabetic code is the only way to guarantee that children will be able to decode unknown words. A proficient reader progresses from linking letters and sounds to eventually linking letter clusters together such as -igh and -eigh to their corresponding sounds.

  • Inability to read one-syllable words

This indicator is a natural consequence of the inability to link letter names and sounds.  In first grade, a child has the ability to use the alphabetic code to decode 3 letter words such as mat as well as nonsense words such as zim. Due to the lack of neural linkages between letters and their sounds, it is also common to see reading mistakes on words that have no relationship to each other except to have one letter in common. For example, a child could read the word pit as the word map.

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Second Grade and Beyond Reading Monitoring

In second grade, students are building their fluency when reading, meaning they are reading words accurately, rapidly, and with expression. They are also regularly decoding multisyllabic words. Their phonemic awareness has increased to the level of mastering phoneme deletion, the ability to remove a sound from a word. In third grade, students are reading chapter books and are able to summarize the main points of the reading. They have the ability to use prefixes and suffixes to understand unknown words and as well as use dictionaries appropriately. By fourth grade, students are reading to learn and for fun.

Signs of Dyslexia
  • Difficulty reading unknown words 

By second grade, the neurotypical child will be able to implement reading strategies to decode unknown words such as breaking the word into syllables, identifying prefixes and suffixes, etc. A dyslexic student might randomly guess words based on context or otherwise due to their lack of strategy on how to approach unfamiliar words.

  • Over-reliance on context in order to read unfamiliar words

Children with dyslexia tend to rely more on the context of the page when they meet an unfamiliar word. You might find that a child will replace a word that makes sense in the context of a sentence but does not match the word on the page. For instance, they might replace the word entrance with the word door. Similarly, you might find a dyslexic child is able to read an unfamiliar word in the context of a page but is not able to read the word in isolation.

  • Omitting parts of words

It is common for children with dyslexia to omit sounds and whole syllables from words. A dyslexic child might be reading the word transferable as transable. They are spending so much energy linking the letters to their sounds. By the end of a multisyllabic word, the “gas” in their brain has been spent and the result is them throwing together the sounds that they can remember. 

  • Slow, laborious reading

The oral reading of a dyslexic child can be overall choppy, full of word substitutions and mispronunciations. They have an especially difficult time reading multisyllabic words and may need assistance breaking the word up into manageable pieces. Due to the effort that it takes for them to decode print, their oral reading can lack fluency and inflection.

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Next Steps

It is important to take in the indications listed above with discernment. You want to ask yourself how many of the indicators is your child experiencing and how frequently is it happening? Any of the bullet points listed above in isolation should not be a cause for concern. In order for you to seriously consider if your child has dyslexia, you will need to see symptoms persistently and over a longer period of time.

If you believe your child is at risk for dyslexia, the next step is to get them identified. The International Dyslexia Association has a screener that I have linked here along with information on how to move forward with an evaluation. The dyslexia diagnosis can empower your child to understand the why behind their reading struggles. It can also help you get them the suuport they need such as proper intervention or accommodations. Educational Diagnosticians, Licensed Specialists in School Psychology (LSSP), and psychologists can all formally diagnose dyslexia. If you choose not to rely on your school district for an evaluation, you can also ask your pediatrician for a referral.

Please take a look at our services page if you would like information on our dyslexia therapy services. We provide dyslexia therapy through the Take Flight intervention. Take Flight is a multisensory, structured approach to teaching written by the education staff of the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia and Learning Disorders at Scottish Rite for Children hospital. The intervention focuses on the five key components of basic reading instruction that have been scientifically identified by the National Reading Panel- phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

You can reach us via our connect page if you have any questions or a story to share!

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