TeacherTalk: Dyslexia - The Undetected Troubles

Welcome to our educational blog. Here we explore all things pertinent to education, discuss current topics and provide tips, from research and educational experts, to aid practice.

This edition, has come from Katy Jones, SEND SLE for CLT.

Introduction

You may think that Dyslexia needs no introduction.  Most teachers seem to believe they have a good grasp on dyslexia, its impact on learning and how to support students with dyslexia in the classroom. 

However, it is estimated that over 10% of the population are dyslexic.  How many of the children in each school are actually diagnosed?  How many are not yet recognised?  How many are struggling with difficulties that they are compensating for or masking? This blog explores “The undetected troubles” of children with dyslexia.

Research 

I have been into many teachers’ classrooms and noticed a lack of provision or accessibility for children with dyslexia. Dyslexia does not stop when you leave the English classroom.  It does not only exist where there is ‘lots of writing to do’.  It is multifaceted and needs wildly variable accommodations.

The multi deficit model (MDM – McGrath, 2020) of dyslexia is formed on the basis of a growing body of evidence which suggests that the relationship between phonological awareness and written language is far more complex than previously thought. 

Indeed if you have ever listened to a dyslexic child read you can feel the delay in processing and see the brain working harder to identify and say the words.  This difficulty with the multiple cognitive processes, which manifest in reading, is part of an information processing disorder not simply affecting spelling and reading but impacting on all aspects of learning successfully.  

Most dyslexic’s have their own ‘work arounds’.  These are developed without input from others and successfully mask the complicated processes being skilfully utilised by the dyslexic learner’s brain. You may not notice if you aren’t looking but these children are functioning at 10 times the power of other children to ‘keep up’.  But what if they are tired or upset or life is not as we would wish it to be for them? Where does that stamina come from?  How do they keep going in the face of having to work harder and smarter to be ’the same’ and how does this manifest in the classroom?

Without accommodations, adaptations and recognition, children often become disaffected with learning early.  If they have personal challenges or other cognitive difficulties then the effort it takes does not seem worth the limited praise they receive in lessons for being ‘the same’.  This will eventually become a dislike of school especially once they reach High School.  It will also inevitably translate into unwanted learning behaviours which mask the underlying problems. 

Research (Glazzard, 2010) into the self esteem of dyslexics suggests that early identification and being able to give a name to the struggles they are having is empowering.  It avoids low self-esteem and the recurrent “I must be stupid”, thoughts that many children experience in school or when tackling independent work.  It is only when diagnosis comes too late that young people give up when faced with a reason for their struggles. A young person saying “I can’t because I am dyslexic” is a genuine fear parents and teachers have expressed to me about labelling. Indeed, many academics are vociferous in their opinion that we are obsessed with labelling ourselves and others and that over pathologizing is demonising normal human variance.

However as someone who has seen many differences in hundreds of young people I know the power of early identification and intervention.  I have seen the ‘Aha’ moments in students when they learnt a bit more about dyslexia and realised that this was talking about them. Children are far more comfortable in their own skins when they arrive at secondary school with ‘dyslexia’ regardless of whether they have had a formal diagnosis. They are often more skilled at their ‘work arounds’ and they function much more successfully than those who are simply ‘below age related expectations’.  They are also able to recognise what they need and advocate for themselves in a way that children without a label cannot do.  

High school can be too late to build self-esteem back up, to recognise and overcome their own barriers to learning and become successful learners and often fear of learning and anxiety around learning has become entrenched. 

If we don’t recognise that children are struggling or they are simply “below age related” and no specific difficulty is identified we cannot employ appropriate reasonable adjustments which enable access to learning and build on the strengths of the individual.  What happens to the children we fail to recognise and accommodate early? I probably don’t need to remind you about the prison population statistic that up to 50% of incarcerated adults have extremely poor literacy levels and are likely dyslexia.

Anxiety is experienced by most neurodivergent people. Dyslexics become fearful because of their constant frustration and confusion in school.  These feelings are exacerbated by the inconsistent way dyslexia presents itself in the classroom.

Personal self image is particularly vulnerable due to this insecurity.  By the age of 10 most children have a fairly unchangeable sense of self which may be good or bad.  This self image can be impacted by feelings of inferiority.  If children feel successful they will develop a positive self image and are likely to become far more resilient in their learning and more positive about their own future. If they learn their effort makes no difference then they will always battle the feelings of failure.

Added to these difficulties with their self worth is the teasing they experience from both teachers and peers. Being ‘not good enough’ at reading and writing can be hard to hide and students develop both positive and negative coping strategies to avoid negative appraisal (Doikou-Avlidou, 2015).

Remaining curious, knowing what dyslexia looks like in its entirety (not just literacy difficulties) and ensuring accessibility for all in your classroom through the removal of barriers to learning are all essential components of overcoming ‘the undetected troubles’ that young people with dyslexia face every day.   

Key Strategies 

‘What to look out for in my classroom’ a guide for teachers:

1. Poor reading fluency (slow, hesitant or laboured reading) and delayed reading skills (e.g. ignoring punctuation and intonation). 

2. Difficulties with understanding what they have read and picking out the main points (all their brain power goes into decoding).

3. Weak phonology and difficulty with blending and sequencing letters when attempting spelling patterns. 

4. Weak word recognition and spelling (poor visual processing) for familiar words.

5. Auditory processing difficulties: mispronunciations e.g. “effelent”, missing letters in words consistently (as if they can’t hear the word in their head), unable to discriminate sounds.

6. Auditory memory deficits: struggling to follow instructions, forgetfulness, organisation difficulties, poor or incomplete information recall. 

7. Slow processing: difficulty keeping up, failing to complete tasks, distractedness, difficulties with rapid naming and recall. 

8. Difficulties with time concepts e.g. before or tomorrow, and sequencing of events, poor time keeping. 

9. Difficulties with fact recall e.g. months of the year, times tables, alphabet.

10. Explains verbally better than what they’re able to write down. 

To conclude 

Looking out for difficulties in the classroom is the first step to recognition.  Remaining curious and developing a professional hypothesis about a child, putting in strategies to support that child where you see a difficulty emerging and reviewing the support you have tried are essential components of Quality Teaching.  Don’t wait to be told a child is dyslexic because the impact on that child’s confidence and self esteem could be irreversible.