What is Dyslexia?

First of all, dyslexia is not related to intelligence. Dyslexia is a reading difficulty unexpected for a person’s age, intelligence, and level of education. Dyslexia is a specific learning disability characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition, which impacts a student’s ability to read quickly and automatically.

Dyslexia is more common than most people realize. It affects 10% to 20% of our population, which is up to 1 in 5 people.

What is Dyslexia?

First of all, dyslexia is not related to intelligence. Dyslexia is a reading difficulty unexpected for a person’s age, intelligence, and level of education. Dyslexia is a specific learning disability characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition, which impacts a student’s ability to read quickly and automatically.

Dyslexia is more common than most people realize. It affects 10% to 20% of our population, which is up to 1 in 5 people.

Here’s a short Ted-Ed video explaining more about what dyslexia is:

Characteristics of Dyslexia in Children Ages 4-6

Inability to connect letter symbols with their corresponding sounds

Inability to read or sound out simple CVC words like hat, mop, win

Inability to connect sounds to the letters in the text - saying big instead of large

Inability to understand that words can be broken into parts - Cupcake can be broken apart into cup and cake

Complaints about reading being hard

A history of reading and spelling difficulties in the family - Dyslexia runs in families

Characteristics of Dyslexia in Children Ages 7 and Up

Progress in acquiring reading skills is extremely slow - Reading is very slow, awkward, and tiring

Difficulty reading unfamiliar words through sounding them out - makes wild guesses

Lack of word attack skills, or strategies, to read new words

Difficulty reading small “function” words like that, is, in, for, an

Avoidance of reading out loud

Inability to spell correctly

Inability to comprehend what they're reading

The information included on this page comes from The Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity. If you would like more detailed information on dyslexia, please click on their link below.
Dyslexia.Yale.Edu