Dyslexia is a learning disability or reading disability that can limit children's ability to read and learn. In some cases, public schools may resist dyslexic children who will require extra educational support. Some public school teachers admit that they receive little or no formal training in dealing with dyslexia, in order to recognize it and deal with it in students. 1
More about dyslexia
Dyslexia manifests in a variety of ways, including impaired phonological awareness and decoding, difficulty with orthographic coding and auditory short term memory impairment. It is estimated that dyslexia affects between 5 and 10 percent of the population. Dyslexia is not an intellectual disability in that reading and cognition are essentially independent of each other. In that sense, it is one of the truest of learning disabilities.
Detecting, diagnosing and dealing with dyslexia
Dyslexia is often undiagnosed until a child is in school and forced to read and learn on a daily basis. Some early signs and symptoms that parents may note, indicating the possibility of dyslexia include the following: delayed learning of speech and new words, difficulty with word games especially rhyming, poor ability to retain knowledge of letters, letter inversion or mirror-graphing of letters (e.g. d and b, "Я" instead of "R"). Dyslexia.com offers a list of dyslexia traits and behaviour.
Symptoms of dyslexia may manifest in primary school children as follows:
• Difficulty learning letter order or alphabet
• Difficulty in corresponding letter symbols with sounds made
• Difficulty with phonemic discretion (segmenting words into sounds) or blending sounds/phonemes.2
• Straightforward difficulty in decoding written words.
• Mixing of similar sounds like "m" and "n," as in "aminal."
For older children, dyslexia can be indicated by slower than average reading and poor spelling. Since these signs can cause embarrassment, some children can become good at hiding them or shy away from activities where these signs are displayed to others.
As with many disorders and disabilities, the question has been asked if it is really helpful to use the label "dyslexia." For example, the authors of "Does Dyslexia Exist?" write, "Attempts to distinguish between categories of 'dyslexia' and 'poor reader' are scientifically unsupportable, arbitrary and thus potentially discriminatory." 3
Sources, Further Reading:
1. What training do teachers get in recognizing dyslexia?
2. Lovio R, Näätänen R, Kujala T (June 2010). "Abnormal pattern of cortical speech feature discrimination in 6-year-old children at risk for dyslexia". Brain Res. 1335: 53–62.
3. Elliott, Julian G.; Gibbs, Simon (2008). "Does Dyslexia Exist?" Journal of Philosophy of Education, 42 (3–4): 475–491. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9752.2008.00653.x.
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