The challenge of writing

One of the reasons I am so passionate about early identification is that if dyslexia is not spotted early then many other difficulties arise. Often the child is mislabeled and the support and interventions that would have helped to overcome their difficulties are not provided.

As these children learn to compensate for their difficulties not all the strategies they use are positive. Very often children will find ways of opting out of literacy tasks. Children will pretend that they don't want to do a task rather than not being able to do the task..... "This is boring!", "Its too easy!", "Its babyish!" Teachers and adults then focus on the behaviours rather than what is causing the behaviour. In my experience teachers still find it puzzling when a child can verbally explain answers and show a real understanding of concepts but then struggle to write a few 'simple' sentences.  But this is not an unusual profile.

Writing is a complex process and if any of the many building blocks are weak, it will be a struggle. There is the physical process of writing - gripping the pencil,  remembering the correct orientation and letter formation. Then you need to be able to spell the words or at least be able to make a phonetically pausible attempt and you have the 200 odd irregular high frequency words to contend with.  Next you need to formulate an idea and which idea should go first? And you can't just write how you speak or think, you need to consider the genre, audience and purpose before composing a sensible sentence with an opener and a connective. Oh and don't forget to pick your best vocabulary...don't use 'said' or 'big' or 'nice'.  Finally you need to keep the whole sentence in your head while you write it down.  Easy - right ?!

Of course there are many children who pick up these skills quickly and easily and as an adult we hardly think about the writing process as most of it is automatic for us.  However for a dyslexic child there can be a breakdown in any area and very often in more than one area.  Writing then becomes a very hard and laborious process. If our mental energy is taken up on physically writing there is no energy for formulating sentences. If you have to think about the spelling of nearly every word again their is no energy left to think of ideas or creative vocabulary or even punctuation.

It all sounds obvious, but teachers are now so programmed to push writing and particularly creative, independent writing that they forget that without strong underlying skills writing can be a nightmare!
They start to think the dyslexic child is being lazy or difficult.

We have all been in situations where we feel overwhelmed by a task or situation.  I can remember attending a teacher training course in French.  Although I have functional French, I do not know 'educational' French. Understanding French is not an automatic skill for me. So after a couple of hours of focusing hard and coping, suddenly my brain was overloaded and I could no longer follow anything. Luckily no one asked me any questions or put me on the spot and I could just let the information wash over me.

Imagine if this was your daily experience, overloaded and struggling to keep up......
Many dyslexic students are given tasks every day, even every lesson that are actually beyond them. They do not have enough automatic skills to successfully complete writing tasks. And so they are overloaded.

The best way to support dyslexic students is to honestly evaluate their skills in each aspect of writing. In any writing task a child should only have to focus hard on one skill, the others should be automatic or supported. For example if a child struggles with the physical process of writing, consider scribing for the child or using a computer so they can focus on vocabulary and composition.  If the child struggles with spelling provide a word list of key words for the task in front of them.  If the child struggles with remember their ideas, a teacher could record them on Post its or a whiteboard.  'Talk tins' could be used to record a sentence so the child can play back their idea while they write each word down.

Weaker skills need to be worked on in isolation and over a longer period of time through interventions and daily practice. While the skills are developing scaffolds and adaptions must be made for a dyslexic student to succeed.