How do you know if a student in your classroom is exhibiting signs of dyslexia? The earliest clues primarily involve spoken language. The very first clue to a language (and reading) problem may be a delayed onset of speech. Once the child begins to speak, look for the following signs and symptoms of dyslexia:

Signs of Dyslexia in The Preschool Years

• Difficulty learning common nursery rhymes such as “Jack and Jill” and “Humpty Dumpty”
• A lack of appreciation for rhymes
• Mispronounced words; persistent baby talk
• Difficulty in learning (and remembering) names of letters
• Failure to know the letters in his or her own name

Signs of Dyslexia in Kindergarten and First Grade

• Failure to understand that words can be broken into smaller parts; for example, batboy can be pulled apart into bat and boy, and later on the word bat can be broken down still further and sounded out as “b” “aaaa” “t”
• Inability to learn to associate letters with sounds, such as being unable to connect the letter b with the “b” sound
• Reading errors that show no connection to the sounds of the letters; for example, the word big is read as goat
• The inability to read common one-syllable words or to sound out even the simplest of words, such as mat, cat, hop, nap
• Complaints about how hard reading is or running and hiding when it is time to read
• A history of reading problems in parents or siblings

In addition to identifying speaking and reading problems, children with dyslexia may also exhibit strengths in higher-level thinking processes including:

• 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 resolving puzzles
• Talent at building models
• Excellent comprehension of stories read or told to him/her

Signs of Dyslexia from Second Grade On

Problems in Speaking

• Mispronunciation of long, unfamiliar, or complicated words; the fracturing of words—leaving out parts of words or confusing the order of the parts of words; for example, aluminum becomes amulium
• Speech that is not fluent—pausing or hesitating often when speaking, lots of um’s during speech or glibness
• The use of imprecise language, such as vague references to stuff or things instead of the proper name of an object
• Not being able to find the exact word, such as confusing words that sound alike: saying tornado instead of volcano, substituting lotion for ocean, or humanity for humidity
• The need for time to summon an oral response or the inability to come 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 be sounded out; making wild stabs or guesses at reading a word; failure to systematically sound out words
• The inability to read small “function” words such as that, an, in
• Stumbling on reading multi-syllable words, or the failure to come close to sounding out the full word
• Omitting parts of words when reading; the failure to decode parts within a word, as if someone had chewed a hole in the middle of the word, such as conible for convertible
• A fear of reading out loud; the avoidance of oral reading
• Oral reading filled with substitutions, omissions, and mispronunciations
• Oral reading that is choppy and labored, not smooth or fluent
• Oral reading that lacks inflection and sounds like the reading of a foreign language
• A reliance on context to discern the meaning of what is read
• A better ability to understand words in context than to read isolated 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 the text she can’t pronounce, such as car for automobile
• Disastrous spelling with words not resembling true spelling; some spellings may be missed by spell check
• Trouble reading word problems in mathematics
• Reading that is very slow and tiring
• Homework that never seems to end, or with parents often recruited as readers
• Messy handwriting despite what may be an excellent facility at word processing—nimble fingers
• Extreme difficulty learning a foreign language
• A lack of enjoyment in reading, and the avoidance of reading books or even a sentence
• The avoidance of reading for pleasure, which seems too exhausting
• Reading whose accuracy improves over time, though it continues to lack fluency and is laborious
• Lowered self-esteem, with pain that is not always visible to others
• A history of reading, spelling, and foreign language problems in family members

In addition to signs of a phonologic weakness, dyslexic students may also show signs of strengths in the higher-level thinking processes associated with the right hemisphere of the brain:

• Excellent thinking skills: conceptualization, reasoning, imagination, abstraction
• Learning that is accomplished best through meaning rather than rote memorization
• Ability to get the “big picture”
• A high level of understanding of what is read to them
• The ability to read and to understand at a high level overlearned words (that is, highly practiced) in a special area of interest; for example, if their hobby is restoring cars, they may be able to read auto mechanics magazines
• Improvement as an area of interest becomes more specialized and focused, when they develop a miniature vocabulary that they 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 (versus factoid-driven) subjects such as philosophy, biology, social studies, neuroscience, and creative writing

Observable Signs of Reading Difficulties

You may notice the following signs of of reading difficulties:

• Slow to learn the connection between letters and sounds
• Difficulty decoding single words (reading single words in isolation)
• Difficulty spelling phonetically
• Consistent reading and spelling errors such as:
  • Letter reversals: “d” for “b” as in “dog” for “bog”
  • Word reversals: “tip” for “pit”
  • Inversions: “m” for “w”, “u” for “n”
  • Transpositions: “felt” for “left”
  • Substitutions: “house” for “home”
  • Omissions: skips word entirely
• Confusion with small words: “at” for “to,” “said” for “and,” “does” for “goes”
• Guessing the correct word: “purple for pickle”, ‘wondered for wounded’
• Relies on predicting or context
• Difficulty learning new vocabulary
• Transpose number sequences and confuse arithmetic signs
• Trouble remembering facts
• Slow to learn new skills; relies heavily on memorizing without understanding
• Difficulty planning, organizing and managing time, materials and tasks
• Awkward pencil grip (fist, thumb hooked over fingers, etc.)
• Poor fine motor coordination