DYSLEXIA

DYSLEXIA-: THE DISABILITY

Dyslexia is the most common among the learning disables. According to the common language it is simply taken as part of mental retardation. But it isn’t simply that. It really has a broad meaning. That is for sure that it is a metal disease but those who are suffering from it cannot be just considered as mentally retarded person.

Dyslexia is a term that has been loosely applied to reading disabilities. Dyslexia is a broad term defining a learning disability that impairs a person's ability to read. Dyslexia is separate and distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as a non-neurological deficiency with vision or hearing, or from poor or inadequate reading instruction. It is believed that dyslexia can affect between 5 to 10 percent of a given population although there has been no studies to indicate an accurate percentage.

There are three proposed cognitive subtypes of dyslexia: auditory, visual and attention. Although dyslexia is not an intellectual disability, it is considered both a learning disability and a reading

disability. Dyslexia and IQ are not interrelated, since reading and cognition develop independently in individuals who have dyslexia.All disciplines would probably agree that dyslexia is evidenced by persons of otherwise normal intellectual capacity who have not learned to read despite exposure to adequate instruction.

CHARECTERS OF DYSLEXIA AND ITS SYMPTOMS

As dyslexia is not a mental retardation it affect different aged person differently. We may see different symptoms and characters in child in primary classes and different in an elder person.

It is difficult to obtain a certain diagnosis of dyslexia before a child begins school, but many dyslexic individuals have a history of difficulties that began well before kindergarten. These symptoms include:

§ delays in speech

§ slow learning of new words

§ not crawling

§ difficulty in rhyming words, as in nursery rhymes

§ low letter knowledge

§ letter reversal or mirror writing (for example, "Я" instead of "R")

Early primary school children

§ Difficulty learning the alphabet or letters order

§ Difficulty with associating sounds with the letters that represent them (sound-symbol correspondence)

§ Difficulty identifying or generating rhyming words, or counting syllables in words

§ Difficulty segmenting words into individual sounds, or blending sounds to make words

§ Difficulty with word retrieval or naming problems

§ Difficulty learning to decode written words

Older primary school children

§ Slow or inaccurate reading (although these individuals can read to an extent).

§ Very poor spelling which has been called Dysorthographia.

§ Difficulty reading out loud, reading words in the wrong order, skipping words and sometimes saying a word similar to another word

§ Difficulty associating individual words with their correct meanings

§ Difficulty with time keeping and concept of time when doing a certain task

§ Difficulty with organization skills

§ Children with dyslexia may fail to see (and occasionally to hear) similarities and differences in letters and words, may not recognize the spacing that organizes letters into separate words, and may be unable to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word.

Secondary school children and adults

Some people with dyslexia are able to disguise their weaknesses (even from themselves) and often do acceptably well - or better - at GCSE level (U.K. - at 16 years old). Many students reach higher education before they encounter the threshold at which they are no longer able to compensate for their learning weaknesses.

One common misconception about dyslexia is that dyslexic readers write words backwards or move letters around when reading. In fact, this only occurs in a very small population of dyslexic readers. Dyslexic people are better identified by writing that does not seem to match their level of intelligence from prior observations. Additionally, dyslexic people often substitute similar-looking, but unrelated, words in place of the ones intended (what/want, say/saw, help/held, run/fun, fell/fall, to/too, etc.)