Dyslexia affects the development of literacy skills.
It is characterised by difficulties with processing sound, rapid naming, working memory and processing of information.
Current evidence suggests that these difficulties arise from ineffective language processing, which occurs in the left hemisphere of the brain. Dyslexia is more common than people realise and affects approximately 10% of the population.
Common symptoms:
- Difficulties decoding words (matching letters to sounds)
- Phonemic Awareness – identifying individual sounds in words
- Difficulties with reading comprehension and reading fluency
- Difficulties with sentence structure including a tendency to omit punctuation
- Avoidance of reading
- Difficulties rhyming and spelling
- Skips over words when reading
Support
Children can succeed in literacy through a specialised program to fill in the gaps and address the underlying weaknesses.
