Dyslexia: How can I recognize the disorder?
Dyslexia is a severe, long-lasting literacy disorder. About four percent of schoolchildren in Germany are affected. Find out here which symptoms you can recognize dyslexia and how it is treated.
Dyslexia – what is it?
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), dyslexia is probably a hereditary or developmental disorder in learning written language. This disorder cannot be explained by lack of intelligence or laziness.
There are also some famous and successful people with dyslexia: Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Thomas A. Edison, Hans Christian Andersen, Cher and Jürgen Fliege. Even poor teaching is not a trigger for dyslexia.
In children with dyslexia, massive problems can be observed in the processing of visual and auditory perceptions, language processing and phonological awareness. This means that affected children have difficulties distinguishing individual linguistic sounds and are therefore unable to translate them into written language. Scientists suspect that the disorder is genetic and even hereditary. They were able to find that in people with dyslexia some regions of the brain are not sufficiently connected, which is what causes the problems. In rare cases, the dyslexia is also based on very late language development. Increased television consumption is also suspected of promoting dyslexia.
dyslexia and dyslexia
It is important to distinguish dyslexia, a dyslexia, from LRS, also known as dyslexia. LRS is not a severe weakness, but a mild, treatable weakness that is not based on a perceptual disorder. Unlike dyslexia, it can usually be traced back to causes that can be corrected, such as poor eyesight, hearing impairment, poor concentration, poor teaching methods or missing classes.
signs of dyslexia
Dyslexics have trouble translating spoken language into writing and vice versa. At the beginning of learning to read, for example, there are difficulties with saying the alphabet, naming letters or forming rhymes. Later, deficits in reading and spelling appear, which are also evident when learning foreign languages. Dyslexia can also mean that the children do not keep up in other subjects because they cannot absorb or write down the material in the given time frame. Here are some signs that you can tell if your child may have dyslexia:
When reading and reading aloud:
- Your child reads very slowly and/or haltingly.
- It often omits or mixes up letters, syllables, or words.
- It often loses the line in the text.
- It has great difficulty in starting to read, it hesitates for a long time.
- Your child finds it difficult to read meaningfully.
- Your child can hardly retell what he has read or recognize connections.
- It draws on his general knowledge, not the information in the text.
- It has difficulty reading double sounds (e.g. double ‘t’ in ‘mother’).
- Your child’s speech is slurred/slurred.
In spelling:
- Your child has great difficulty copying from the blackboard.
- It is difficult for him to write down what he has heard (in dictation, tasks).
- Your child makes many mistakes in unpracticed dictations, but also when copying texts.
- Your child misspells the same word over and over again.
- It has a notable number of grammatical and punctuation errors.
- Your child has problems with capital and small letters.
- It reverses the order of the letters within a word or omits parts.
- Your child needs an above-average amount of time to do paperwork.
- It has illegible handwriting.
- It confuses similar words and letters.
If your child shows some of these symptoms at the beginning of literacy acquisition, this is not immediately a cause for concern. Many children have problems at the beginning and can make reading and spelling mistakes of varying degrees. However, the problems usually diminish very quickly in most children and mostly disappear over time. Children with dyslexia, on the other hand, make mistakes much more often and the problems persist for a long time. What is particularly striking is that the errors do not follow any rules or systematics: one and the same word is repeatedly misspelled in different ways.
Early detection of dyslexia
The earlier dyslexia is recognized, the greater the success of the therapy. It is ideal if the dyslexia is noticed in pre-school or the first two years of school. In many cases, children with dyslexia can no longer reach an average level in their written language, despite intensive therapy. You can find out more about this topic in our article Therapy for dyslexia .
It is extremely important for children with dyslexia to be recognized for who they are by parents and teachers. This helps relieve them of the pressure that is weighing on them. Other problems can develop from school failures and experiences of failure and failure. Children with dyslexia often suffer from low self-esteem, fear of failure, fear of school, wetting or problems with social development because they cannot meet their own performance expectations and those of their parents and teachers.