Dyslexia is a specific learning disorder that is diagnosed based on a specific set of developmental and skill deficits related to reading and spelling. Over twenty years of strong research shows that the child with dyslexia struggles to understand and use individual sounds in spoken words. These deficits in phonological awareness result in very specific reading and spelling difficulties:
- He struggles to sound-out most words accurately.
- He has numerous mispronunciations when reading stories and textbooks.
- His reading is often slow, hesitant, choppy, word-by-word.
- He has extremely poor and highly inconsistent spelling in written work.
Spelling is often the most telling: Even after studying hours and hours and making a good grade on the weekly spelling test, the child with dyslexia struggles to spell words correctly and consistently within his written work: his spelling is often way off base and cannot be easily read. For example, within the same passage, the word vacation might be spelled multiple ways including “vustjin”, “thasjn”, or any other odd combination of letters.
