While there are key characteristics of
dyslexia, every person with dyslexia has a slightly different cluster of
difficulties. This is why individual
intervention and support is most effective.
Anyone who works with dyslexic students or
parents who have more than one child with dyslexia will tell you that there are
different types of dyslexia. While cumulative,
systematic multi-sensory teaching benefits all dyslexic students, there are
different materials and approaches which can be used depending on the type of
dyslexia. In any intervention, it makes
sense to utilise a child’s strengths and work on improving areas of weakness.
Different websites and authors explain
these differences in their own way and use different terminology. Some choose
to split the main areas of difficulty while others group certain difficulties
together. This can be confusing and is perhaps unnecessarily complicated.
Nessy.com have an ebook that lists different types of difficulties and explains how each person with dyslexia has a different combination. Other websites mention 4, 7 or even 12 types of dyslexia.
In essence, there are 3 main types of dyslexia. Nearly all dyslexics struggle with working
memory however some have more visual perceptual difficulties and some have more auditory
processing difficulties and some have equal difficulties in both areas. In addition, all
of these groups may have slow processing (this may be identified as rapid naming deficit) and motor
skills difficulties (this may include dysgraphia or dyspraxia).
1. Those dyslexics who have more
difficulty with processing auditory information but have strong visual skills
have dysphonetic dyslexia
(it is
also called phonological dyslexia.) This group also includes double
deficit dyslexia which is children with difficulties with phonological
awareness and rapid naming.
These are the children who muddle words that sound similar like ‘bag’ and ‘back’ or ‘rag’and ‘rug’. They will have trouble identifying all the sounds in a word when they try to segment a word for spelling. They will try to use their visual memory and could spell chased as ‘cashed’ or farmer as ‘framer’. They often miss sounds or syllables or suffixes from longer words like ‘epty’ for empty, 'swim' for swimming. These children will have trouble reading names or sounding out polysyllabic words. They can often say the sounds in a word but have trouble blending them together and they may swap over the order of the letters.
When the child starts to learn to read they may initially do quite well as they use their strong visual skills to learn key sight vocabulary and use picture cues to decipher simple texts. However, their decoding skills do not develop in the same way. If the school uses a scheme that is based on introducing sight vocabulary a little at a time, with predictable sentence structure like Oxford Reading Tree then the child will appear to be learning read. However, as texts become more varied, complex and less predictable they will have no skills to work out new words. Suddenly, the teacher and/or the parents will realise the child has reading difficulties. If the school uses a phonic based scheme like Read Write Inc then these reading difficulties will be evident earlier.
These are the children who muddle words that sound similar like ‘bag’ and ‘back’ or ‘rag’and ‘rug’. They will have trouble identifying all the sounds in a word when they try to segment a word for spelling. They will try to use their visual memory and could spell chased as ‘cashed’ or farmer as ‘framer’. They often miss sounds or syllables or suffixes from longer words like ‘epty’ for empty, 'swim' for swimming. These children will have trouble reading names or sounding out polysyllabic words. They can often say the sounds in a word but have trouble blending them together and they may swap over the order of the letters.
When the child starts to learn to read they may initially do quite well as they use their strong visual skills to learn key sight vocabulary and use picture cues to decipher simple texts. However, their decoding skills do not develop in the same way. If the school uses a scheme that is based on introducing sight vocabulary a little at a time, with predictable sentence structure like Oxford Reading Tree then the child will appear to be learning read. However, as texts become more varied, complex and less predictable they will have no skills to work out new words. Suddenly, the teacher and/or the parents will realise the child has reading difficulties. If the school uses a phonic based scheme like Read Write Inc then these reading difficulties will be evident earlier.
These children benefit from using flip books to generate words families and colour coding letter patterns.
2. Other dyslexics struggle more with visual perception and are said to have dyseidetic dyslexia (this may also be called surface dyslexia or visual dyslexia.) These children often struggle with Maths as well as reading and writing. They find it hard to visualise maths concepts and develop a concept of number. They do not notice visual patterns and rely on their weak working memory skills to try to remember number facts and calculation methods.
These children need to make words with magnetic letters and play games with these words. Verbalising what is tricky about a word is helpful in learning spellings, as are mnemonics.
3. Some dyslexics have both visual and auditory difficulties. These tend to be the child who are noticed early on and are most readily identified as dyslexic by teachers and parents. They struggle to develop reading and writing skills at all in a normal school context as they cannot use stronger skills to compensate. It is vital that these children receive structured, culmulative, multisensory support as soon as possible to overcome their difficulties. Lots of hands on and interactive activities are needed to make words memorable.
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