About Literacy Difficulties & Dyslexia

Is your child struggling to progress at school? Are they having difficulties with reading, writing or spelling? Would you like to find out why your child is struggling and what you can do to help? Speech pathologists at Talking Matters can assess your child's learning strengths and weaknesses and provide a range of options for developing their skills.

Reading and writing skills are strongly tied to communication skills. Children are sometimes considered to have dyslexia if they are not fluent readers and spellers and yet appear to be of at least average intelligence and their reading and writing difficulties cannot be explained by other learning difficulties or disability. These difficulties have been shown to be linked in over 80% of cases to difficulties with phonological processing skills (ability to understand/access sound patterns in words), which is a language based skill. In order to read, children need to be able to:

recognise letters and relate them to the sound they make
blend a string of sounds together to make a word
recognise whole words that cannot be sounded out such as "was"
understand the meaning of individual words
remember a string of words and understand their meaning within a sentence
relate the different sentences to each other

In order to write, children need to:

think of a sentence
break it into individual words
break each word into individual sounds
relate the sound to a letter shape and write this
write a series of letter shapes in the correct sequence for each word
form a series of words to make a sentence
link a series of sentences to make a text
remember to use grammatical markers and punctuation

There is more information available about dyslexia in our blog. You may also find this downloadable "Dyslexia Toolkit" from the National Centre for Learning Disabilities useful (large PDF file over 11MB). There is also quite an informative YouTube documentary entitled "Embracing Dyslexia" for people who want to learn more about Dyslexia.

Therapy to develop speech, language and phonological awareness skills usually helps with development of literacy skills. Children should see a speech pathologist early if they are having difficulties learning to read or spell so they can receive help before they get too far behind in their learning.