How is dyslexia diagnosed?

So, this month we’ve been discussing all things Dyslexia. If your child is having reading or writing challenges you may have wondered, “Does my child possibly have Dyslexia?”  Today we are going to talk about the signs of Dyslexia and how to go about receiving a diagnosis. While we encourage you to read through these common signs, please not to panic or diagnose your child yourself! We do hope that if you are noticing these common signs, that you speak to your child’s teacher, doctor or us here at Hyperion about them immediately.

So what are the signs of Dyslexia?

• Late talker
  • Less than 20 words by 18 months
  • Less than 100 by 24 months
  • Not putting 2 words together by 2 years
• Family history of reading difficulties
• Difficulty pronouncing words
• Difficulty playing word games or repeating nursery rhymes
• Difficulty learning letter sounds and names
• Unexpected errors when reading
  • For example, “what” for “whale”
• Difficulty taking words apart
  • For example, dividing “cat” into the sounds c-a-t
• Uses vague language such as “stuff” or “thing” instead of specific vocabulary
• Messy handwriting
• Poor spelling
• 
  

So what are the strengths of Dyslexia?

• Creative
• Imaginative
• Good at puzzles
• Great understanding of stories
• Is an ‘expert’ of a specialized topic or area of interest
• Great ability to learn

So what do you do if you see these signs?

Receiving a diagnosis of Dyslexia can involve participating in testing with multiple professionals including a psychologist, neuropsychologist, speech-language pathologist, and/or special educator.  Areas to be assessed include:

• Intelligence
• Spoken language skills
• Word recognition
• Decoding (reading unknown words)
• Spelling
• Phonological processing
• Reading fluency
• Reading comprehension

So, what can you expect after the diagnosis?

Stay tuned! We will return next week to share some information about what to consider after receiving a Dyslexia diagnosis.


Resource: Sally Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia