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The characteristics of dyslexia occur in
various combinations in all degrees of severity ranging from
mild to extreme. All of these characteristics will not occur
in one person.
- Difficulty with phonological awareness,
the ability to attend to and/or manipulate the individual
sounds of words
- Poor ability to discriminate visual likenesses
or differences in words even though vision is normal
- Confusions in orientation of letters
(p,d,b), or in numbers (6,9)
- There may be reversal of concept (top
for bottom), or geographical reversals (east for west),
or time reversals (first for last, yesterday for tomorrow)
- Poor ability to copy, particularly from
the blackboard
- There may be many omissions, insertions,
or substitutions in reading
- Poor ability to discriminate between
close gradations of sound (pit, bit, pin, pen) even though
hearing is normal
- Poor ability to recall whole words, or
sounds within words
- Speech and language disorders such as
delayed speech and poor sentence construction are common
- Difficulty with word retrieval, i.e.
names of people or objects
- Difficulty following directions
- They may work slowly and fail to complete
assignments
- Writing vocabulary may be meager because
of difficulty in producing the letters, recalling correct
spelling or in organizing thoughts
- Delay in adequate use of arithmetic is
a contradictory situation, because so many dyslexics have
good or superior ability in mathematics. Many problems in
math are caused by reversals, transpositions, and by poor
visual recall, which makes the memorization of math facts
difficult
- Organization is often a problem
- The most CONSISTENT
aspect of dyslexia is its
INCONSISTENCY. Parents
and teachers are confused when the child can read a word
in one sentence and be unable to recognize it in the next.
They say children are lazy or careless when they spell the
word three different ways in the same paragraph
This erratic learning behavior is even more
frustrating for the child. It is this inconsistency that caused
one child to say, "For some, reading is a feather. For me,
it's a ton."
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