Trouble with reading? Is it dyslexia?

Is your child having trouble with reading? Could it be dyslexia? Expert Shira Moskowitz shares what parents need to know.

Dyslexia is more than just letter mix-ups.

It’s a learning difference that affects how kids read and understand words. In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to spot early signs of dyslexia in kids

• The truth about letter reversals

• And how technology can help support kids

• When dyslexia is missed: The impact on students of color

• What is dyslexia?

• Dyslexia: More than mixing up letters

(00:00) Intro

(01:00) What is dyslexia?

(02:05) The truth about letter reversals

(03:30) How early can kids show signs of dyslexia?

(05:40) How dyslexia affects kids beyond just reading

(08:05) How parents can support kids with dyslexia

(08:55) How technology can help

(00:00) Intro

Shira Moskowitz: What's so unexpected about dyslexia is that it's not readily obvious. It's not something that someone walks by or you sit with a kid for a couple minutes and you're like, "Yeah, that kid's got dyslexia."

Julian Saavedra: That's Shira Moskowitz, a reading specialist and special education teacher with deep expertise in dyslexia. She doesn't just understand the challenges, she helps students overcome them every single day.

Welcome to "The Opportunity Gap," a show where we talk about how to navigate the education system. I'm your host, Julian, an assistant principal with over 20 years of experience in education. By the end of the episode, you'll know the early signs of dyslexia, what support schools can provide, and what actually works at home.

Shira, I'm really excited to have you here. Welcome.

Shira: Thank you so much for having me. I've also been listening to the podcast for a long time, so I'm excited to be on it.

(01:00) What is dyslexia?

Julian: For our listeners and our watchers, can you tell us what is dyslexia?

Shira: So dyslexia is where a person's brain uses different neural pathways to read. So it's not that they cannot read, but that their brain reads using a different part than many other people.

Julian: Interesting. What are some of the unexpected symptoms of dyslexia?

Shira: I would say that what's so unexpected about dyslexia is that it's not readily obvious. It's not something that someone walks by or you sit with a kid for a couple minutes and you're like, "Yeah, that kid's got dyslexia." That's not generally the case. Dyslexia is generally characterized by its inconsistency. You see this kid that's doing really well, generally has other skills that are grade level or age appropriate, and then their reading just isn't.

Does that mean that every kid who's struggling with reading has dyslexia? No. And does that mean that when you walk by a kid and they're struggling with reading, you're like, "I know this"? No, there's so many other options. But this is one of those signs that everything else is going really smooth and the reading is the challenge. That's something to look into.

(02:05) The truth about letter reversals

Julian Saavedra: So in my mind, I've always heard about the idea that kids kind of read backwards, so to speak. Is that true or not true? Or...

Shira Moskowitz: It's true and not true.

Julian: All right, well, break it down. Because that's something that a lot of people talk about, like just like the kids, or people who have dyslexia, they read almost backwards or the letters appear differently.

Shira: So that could be the case for some people, but letter reversals is one of the common signs of dyslexia. So if you see a kid mixing up B and D, P and Q, or even B, D, P, and Q all of them, that might be one of your signs at a young age. Again, is it because a kid mixes up B's and D's that they have dyslexia? No, but it might be one of those indicators.

Because that's something that neurotypical people can readily understand, that's often a symptom that people gravitate towards when they talk about dyslexia. But really dyslexia is more characterized by an inability to manipulate the sounds, put the sounds together to make a word, if I give you a word to break apart the sounds. So it's really that sound manipulation. And if we go back to what I said in the beginning, it's not that they can't read, it's that they need to learn in a different way to support the way that their brain reads.

(03:30) How early can kids show signs of dyslexia?

Julian: Understood. So, what are some of the early signs of dyslexia that parenting adults might notice?

Shira: I think that what's surprising to me as a parent is that really the beginning stages of learning how to read are the things that you do with your kids probably anyway, like rhyming, singing songs. And when you notice that a child has trouble picking up a rhyme or picking up a pattern like that, that might be one of the signs of dyslexia even before they start school.

Julian: So we're talking like preschool, like three, four years old.

Shira: It could show up as early as that. Like I said with other things, just because a kid can't necessarily easily rhyme, does that mean they have dyslexia? No, but those could be things on your radar that if you start noticing a couple of these issues, that's when you want to bring it up to either your teacher if they're school age or a pediatrician if they're preschool age. The rhyming one is a big one because if we remember, I said about breaking apart sounds, rhyming is saying, "I can say this word, 'cat' and 'bat.' They both end in 'at.'" That means I was able to separate the first sound away. A child with dyslexia might have a more of a hard time doing that, and therefore rhyming is a harder skill.

The other thing that you might notice with a child is they're struggling to remember multi-step instructions or sequences that have lots of steps. So it's not that as soon as you see that your child is struggling with a multi-step instruction when you told them to do something that has three parts and they couldn't get through all three, "Oh no, I'm worried that my child has dyslexia." But when you're noticing a couple of these things and they're consistent, that's when you might say, "This might be on my radar."

Julian: Got it. So in your experience, is there a specific age that dyslexia usually appears? I know you said it can vary depending on the child's development, but is there like a usual ballpark time when this appears?

Shira: Yes, I'm an elementary school teacher, so that is generally my lens. But I'll also say that most of the time this shows up when kids are learning how to read, because it is a reading-based or a language-based challenge. It might not show up for a lot of kids until reading is really something that they're expected to be doing consistently. And then when they're realizing they can't, that's when adults around them, their teachers and their parents will notice that, "Hey, why can't my kid read?"

So I would say second grade is generally when kids are expected to have a solid grasp on reading. And so second grade is oftentimes where that question comes up because in first grade, this is pretty new stuff. So if a kid hasn't really gotten it all together in reading in first grade, many kids haven't, you know, and it takes them that time and that's developmentally appropriate. So if we're seeing them lagging behind and also not necessarily lagging behind in other areas, then we may say, "Is this dyslexia as opposed to having other more general learning concerns?"

(05:40) How dyslexia affects kids beyond just reading

Julian: What are some challenges that kids face beyond just reading?

Shira: So I'll break this down into two things. So because you said not just reading, it is primarily a reading-based difficulty.

Julian: Right.

Shira: But we don't realize how often we're reading outside of our reading class. So if you want to ask a kid to read a street sign really quickly, as you're driving, that's hard. It takes them a long time to process. But let's even think in school base. If you're not learning to read, I would say past around third grade, they're done teaching kids how to read and they start teaching kids content and reading is the vehicle that they learn it through.

So if we're talking about learning social studies or learning science, there's a lot of reading that comes along with that. So a lot of kids with dyslexia will focus all their energies on decoding, or that means like sounding out the words. And then by the end of it, they won't be able to tell you what that meant. And they won't be able to really tell you because they spent all their mental energy on the actual act of reading.

Julian: Do you mind just really quickly kind of like differentiating between what decoding is versus sight words?

Shira: Yes. Decoding means any word that you can sound out. So when I look at the word "cat," I see C-A-T. Those three sounds are what I would expect that letter to make, and then I can blend all those sounds together, put them together, and make the word "cat." So that would be a word that is decodable. Whereas a sight word, or sometimes people call it "high-frequency word" or "common words," different spaces call them different things, but they're those words that come up a lot in the English language but don't follow the traditional pattern. We borrow a word from a Greek or Latin root, and it sounds totally different than what we would expect.

So asking kids to know that "was" is not "was," we don't sound it out. We just know W-A-S is "was." So that would be that more common high-frequency sight word that in addition to having trouble sounding things out, kids with dyslexia have trouble memorizing all those words. There's no pattern. They're looking at these letters and they're being told, "You should understand that X, Y, and Z, these arbitrary shapes, make this sound," but they're focused so much energy on sounding out those other words that high-frequency words are a challenge as well.

Julian: And then that leads to frustration. So if I'm using all of my mental energy on figuring out what the word means or how does it sound, by the time I actually get to that point, I don't really want to start thinking about actually comprehending what the reading is saying.

(08:05) How parents can support kids with dyslexia

Julian Saavedra: All right, so I feel like I'm pretty good with understanding what dyslexia is. But now I'm at the point where I feel like my child might have some things related to dyslexia. What can families do to support our children?

Shira Moskowitz: I'm going to bring up, I think, three things. One is communication. That parent, that teacher, that doctor, whoever it may be, because we want to get an evaluation, we want to get a diagnosis. Dyslexia diagnoses are not as common as many other diagnoses because we talked about that it's so nuanced. But the worst thing that you can do is say, "Well, I'm not really sure, so therefore I'm just going to skip it." The other thing that you can do is think about what's happening at home that you can support. Think about what you can do to set your child up for success. Are you setting up resources? Are you providing them with some assistive technology at home, which sounds really fancy, but it could just mean like a laptop or a tablet or even a cell phone that can do some screen reading. Many of those things are free and built into devices already.

(08:55) How technology can help

Julian Saavedra: What apps? What programs? Like what are the things that you know are going to work?

Shira Moskowitz: Well, it's so funny because I was going to say that I very infrequently recommend tools that cost money. I work in an environment where that's generally a challenge. But it's also funny because dyslexia, for all of its complexities, the supports are surprisingly not complex. Two of the most common things that support a child in the moment when they're doing either a reading activity or any other learning activity are speech to text and text to speech. And those are things that are built into any device that you already have, or in some families' cases, the device that the school provides for your child.

I use speech to text all the time when I'm texting people just because it's easy, right?

All right, Shira, I have one last question. One thing that you wish every parent, every parenting adult, everybody that is in a child's life knew about dyslexia.

Shira: I think that everyone can read, and it's our job as the adult to provide the supports or to help them get those supports, whether they're the parent or the teacher, so that they will read, because reading really opens up the whole world for them. And seeing dyslexia as insurmountable is so sad because it's not. It's accessing a different part of their brain. So let's get them the resources so that they can access it.

I want that new app to be developed by that kid with dyslexia. I want them to be the CEO of the next company that changes the world. So let's be a part of that change for them, and let's give them the skills that they need.

Julian: Shira, I could talk to you all day long. Thank you for enlightening us with all the information. Appreciate you.

Shira: Thank you.

Julian: Thanks so much for listening today. We love hearing from our listeners, so if you have any thoughts about today's episode, you can email us at opportunitygap@understood.org.

And be sure to check out the show notes for links and resources to anything we mentioned in the episode.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences, like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give.

"The Opportunity Gap" is produced by Tara Drinks and Cody Nelson. Video is produced by Calvin Knie and edited by Nico Rothenberg.

Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director.

From Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Jordan Davidson.

Thanks again for listening.