#38 The Complexity of Dyslexia

How can a student with a learning disability like dyslexia learn literature like Beowulf and yet spell the simplest words like "does" incorrectly? Dyslexia is a very complex struggle for many students.  This episode examines typical challenges that students have from dyslexia from those who are identified at an early age up to those who don't discover they have dyslexia until they become adults.  We will define dyslexia, explain what dyslexia is NOT, talk about it's causes, and look at the many challenges students typically experience.  You will how dyslexia is accommodated at college, and you will hear about several resources that explain dyslexia even further.

Identifying Dyslexia and Improving Student Success with Dr. Kathy Futterman
Dyslexia and Phonological Processing 101
International Dyslexia Association Fact Sheet about Dylexia
Insights From a Disability Specialist: 9 Critical College Concerns

Transcript

Mickie  0:00  
Have you ever read Beowulf? It's a rather heady piece of reading, a lot of it is old English and requires a great deal of thought behind the phrasing in the story. And it was one of the stories that was assigned to the high schoolers for English. I worked with several students on Beowulf. And one of the things that I did was to read it out loud to them, because I knew that reading it by themselves was was not going to work. So I read the story out loud, and we read it together, they listened, they followed along, and by the time we finished, they had a very good understanding of that story. It was so good in fact that some of my students with dyslexia and learning disabilities were helping some of the high school honor students with the story because they had such a good grasp of the story itself. One of these same students had a huge struggle with spelling, and for four years he would spell does d o s e, no matter what he wrote, it always came out do se sometimes he would stop and correct himself, and sometimes he wouldn't. Now how can an individual who can understand Beowulf, can explain it to an honor student, can help honor students with their work with regards to that story? How could this student with dyslexia and a learning disability who could not spell does be able to support and help an honor student with a story as complex as Beowulf? That's what I'm going to talk about today, I'm going to talk about the complexities of dyslexia. The reasons that students struggle with it, the kinds of things that you as a parent can do to help your child with dyslexia, and how sometimes dyslexia and learning disabilities are not even discovered until college. And then what? If you go to college with a learning disability or with dyslexia, how can you get help at the college level? What kinds of things can be done in college for you? So welcome to College, Disabilities, and Success, Episode 38, "The Complexities of Dyslexia" by Mickie Hayes. The opinions in this podcast are my own, but please reach out to your college, physicians, or legal services for additional information.

Mickie  2:20  
Since October is Dyslexia Awareness Month, I thought I would spend some time talking about dyslexia. I am by training a learning disability specialist and I have worked with individuals with learning disabilities for a long time. I began life as an elementary teacher and certified learning disability specialist. I spent 12 years as a high school learning disability teacher and another 15 or so as a college learning disability specialist and an adjunct faculty member teaching remedial reading and writing. So one way or another, I've spent most of my career on individuals with learning disabilities. So I'm going to talk to you today about learning disabilities, and exactly what that means in relation to dyslexia, and what dyslexia is, and why dyslexia can be a very large component of a learning disability. Very often, people use the terms learning disability and dyslexia interchangeably, and that's okay. The reality is a learning disability is a broader term, it's an umbrella term, and dyslexia is one characteristic of a learning disability. You can have dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, you can have problems with the reading and writing and language that you see on the text, that's dyslexia. But dysgraphia is also writing that on paper. Some students are fine with the reading and writing end of the learning disability, but they struggle with the math piece of it. So those students would would have dyscalculia. There are expressive and receptive language disorders, there are a variety of different disabilities under that giant umbrella of a learning disability. But today we're going to specifically talk about dyslexia. Let's take a moment to talk about what a learning disability is not or what dyslexia is not. Dyslexia is not a problem with vision, it is a problem within the brain itself. It's a neurological disorder within the brain, when a kid is mixing things up on the page and struggling to read what's on the page. It's not because the eyesight isn't working correctly. So that's one of the things you should do when you see problems happening. rule out the vision, if again. It's not a problem from excessive absences. If a kid is out of school a lot or misses a lot of school, they're missing teaching, they're missing the knowledge being taught to them, and there's gaps in their knowledge, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there is a learning disability going on. So you also have to look at that as well. So where does dyslexia come from? Research shows that dyslexia is inherited 40 to 60% of the time and that doesn't necessarily mean from the immediate family, it could be a genetic tendency with a different relative - cousins, uncles, that sort of thing. Dyslexia can be the result of poor health care, especially things like recurring ear infections where when language is being formed, the child is not hearing those formations. And so their language is corrupted and results in dyslexia. It could come from environmental conditions, lead poisoning, things like that. Dyslexia can also occur during the birthing process or premature birth, lack of oxygen at birth, poor prenatal health, alcohol, and chemical abuse by a mother while she's pregnant, those kinds of conditions as well. So there are a lot of different reasons for dyslexia. But the common one is genetics. So dyslexia, I said, is a language disorder. reading text. Reading text can be very complex. And at the end of this podcast, I will share with you some specific resources that you might find valuable in sorting out all of this information. 

Mickie  6:07  
When I was a high school teacher, I asked the kids when their learning disability was discovered, and some of the kids said that their learning disability was discovered early kindergarten, first grade, and a few of them didn't really have their learning disability identified until around the fourth or fifth grade. And then another group had their learning disability discovered heading into high school. And then some even when I taught at the college, I had no idea why they were struggling and were tested for the very first time in college and discovered that they had a learning disability. So one of the issues with a learning disability is kind of trying to recognize it. Now with the little ones. Sometimes it can be very obvious, be very careful, though, don't make the mistake that if your kid is doing reversals, that that will automatically mean a learning disability. In kindergarten, first grade, even second grade reversals are somewhat normal. And if you compare test results for reversals with typical kids who have no learning disability at that age, many of the test results show reversals for both groups. So there is a normalcy at that age that you can't just use that one factor as an identifying characteristic at an early age. So just be very cautious of that. But what can you tell at an early age, there is an excellent webinar that I'm going to mention now by Dr. Kathy Futterman, called " Identifying Dyslexia, and Improving Student Success." And there's a lot of valuable information in there. In that webinar, she sorts out identifying kindergarten, middle school, high school, so in brief with the little ones with the kindergarteners first graders, you're looking at difficulty rhyming some problem with sequencing and directionality, there's probably problems identifying the letter names, and the sounds that go with the letters. Most kids can pick up the ABCs. But identifying the sounds that go with the letters can be a little more challenging, and you might hear some mispronunciation of multi syllables. And again, with a little one, you really need to talk to the teacher, talk to the school psychologist, and find out if the things that you're seeing are just normal, typical behaviors, or if they are something that you need to be concerned about. Because at that age, it really is sometimes hard to tell. Now when you start hitting second grade, third grade, you start running into issues with spelling, spelling becomes a bigger problem. And there may be handwriting issues, dysgraphia may begin to show up quite significantly. And there may be problems with some writing complete sentences correctly. In other words, remembering to do all the things you need to do when you write a sentence like capital letters, periods, and that sort of thing. Now, when you get into the middle school years, you sometimes see reading fluency issues - the smoothness that a person is reading with, and if the reading is choppy, that could be something to be on the lookout for. There may be comprehension issues. When a student struggles with recognizing vocabulary and reading the words, decoding the words in the effort to read the word they sometimes forget to remember what's happening in the story. So sometimes, not always, but sometimes word recognition and comprehension go hand in hand, and you might see immature handwriting and reduced vocabulary. This reduced vocabulary is critical, especially when the students are writing. When you start getting into the late years of middle school and high school - and you might even see that earlier than middle school - students will often resort to writing down a really simplified text because it's much easier to write down a simple word than try to stop and figure out how to spell a complex word or multi syllabic word. So So if you have a student who talks a good talk and uses really good vocabulary, and then when you look at the writing, the writing looks very simplistic, you could be dealing with some sort of a learning disability, some sort of a dyslexia, because there's a struggle with knowing how to spell the word, and getting that word down on paper. So something is happening in there. And that is something that would be a red flag to look out for. Now, when you get into the high school, the projects get larger. And so kids with dyslexia often struggle with those larger projects, the organization skills that go along with it, the time management skills, trying to read what they have to read, in order to create the project that they have to create, there may be struggles with reading the multi syllabic words, the words they talk, but can't read on a paper, the words you hear them say, but then you know, they put a much simpler word on the paper, they may lack a knowledge of the structure of words, the prefix, suffix, root word, base word, they may have some trouble analyzing the text, and they might avoid reading out loud, they might really dislike reading a lot. And if you think about it, if you need to do something that you struggle with, day in, and day out, and day in and day out, you don't want to do it either. And that's what happens with reading for the older kids, especially. Now as you listen to this, think about what I said about the students that I asked the question, when do they get picked up for a learning disability, and they got picked up at different ages, because the work level changes at different ages, first grade work is pretty easy to maintain, till you start getting into that middle school, third, fourth, fifth grade work, it gets more complex as more project driven. And sometimes the kids are able to hold on to that point, but then it just it just becomes too much. Some kids can handle getting through that. But they struggle, but they managed to get through the middle school and sometimes even the high school, but they hit that college and the complexity is so much greater that it becomes noticeable. If they don't go to college, and they just go out to work. The complexities may show up at the job site, you just don't know. So some students are able to handle things up to a certain point and then they just become too much. If you listen to the last podcast I did Episode 37 about ADHD. Some kids struggle with both the dyslexia and ADHD. I explained in that podcast the complexities of ADHD, when a person is trying to read text, the distractibility just as an another new layer of frustration, dyslexia is identified based on testing, and I will do another podcast to go into the nuances of testing. I'm not going to do that today because it's rather complex, but I do want to spend some time going over testing with you at a later date. I will say this about testing. Sometimes students with dyslexia can have above average and gifted intelligence and still struggle to spell a simple word like does. Now remember when I told you the story at the beginning about Beowulf, the answer was rather obvious because they heard the story those students heard it, talked about it, analyzed it, and they were able to understand and get the story. And they learned it, they learned what they needed to know. So I want to take a moment to talk about assistive technology because regardless of your age of your child, assistive technology, especially in the high school, middle school, high school can make a big difference. But when you get to college, it's huge. There is so much going on with your classes at college. So you really need to explore assistive technology. I'm going to offer you a couple of suggestions. First of all, for text to speech, there is an app called Microsoft Lens, l e n s Microsoft lens and Microsoft lens allows you to take a picture with your phone, have a page of text, and then it will read it back to you and it is very good. And it is a way for a student to take any book, any college textbook and take a picture of the page. And here what is on the page. Listening is incredibly helpful when you're struggling with reading the words on the page. And that is one way to do this very easy. Now, if you're going speech to text in other words, you're speaking and you want the text on a paper you want it to be written as you're speaking and this is especially good for big reports. When you're talking through a subject use Microsoft Word office dictation which is one of the tabs on the Microsoft Word program and it works extremely well at allowing you to speak your words into the computer and then it will give you the text afterwards that you simply have to edit as needed. Now you can also get Learning Ally in college if you are registered with disability services, you can talk to them about getting Learning Ally, that should come to you with no cost, it should be part of your accommodations. And it would allow you then to be able to get all of your college textbooks in electronic format. So don't hesitate to use assistive technology, especially when you get to college. Because once you're in college, the college professors want to know what you know. And that's where accommodations come in, they level the playing field. Remember, colleges accommodate for equal access. And so using this technology will give you equal access to the knowledge that you need to show the professors that you know, so don't hesitate to talk to Disability Services to find out how they might be able to help you in terms of accommodation in college. The accommodations that an individual gets for dyslexia are usually hand in hand with the documentation that they provide. Now, if all you have is an IEP, or a 504 plan with a diagnosis on it, by the way, a lot of 504 plans don't have a specific disability diagnosis. They just say other health impaired OHI and other health impaired doesn't tell Disability Services, what the issues are that you're dealing with. So they may question the use of a 504 plan depending on how it's written. But if all you have is an IEP or a 504 plan, you may find that your accommodations are rather limited as to what they can do with regards to dyslexia. It's been my experience that most colleges want to see some sort of updated psychological evaluation, something that shows very specifically where your areas of struggle are so that they can accommodate for you with regards to those areas of struggle. But as I've always said in the past, don't go out and get new testing done until you talk to disability services at the college you plan to attend because they will tell you exactly what you or your child will need to register for services and receive accommodations. Now, assuming you have really super great current up to date documentation that is very well done, then you could end up with accommodations, such as a reader, a test reader, a scribe, you may find a notetaker would be very, very helpful, especially if writing slows you down and distracts from your attention in class. You could have breaks in your test, you might need the ability to use certain assistive technology at college, in your classes or outside of your classes. These are all services that can be accomplished and accommodations that can be given for a student with dyslexia. So it all depends on what your documentation says when determining the accommodations in college. Now some colleges will look at your past history for sure. And if these are things that you've had in the past, you may be able to get support for those accommodations. Even if your documentation isn't that terrific. That's the conversation you want to have with the Disability Services. Because the disability services office has guidelines and parameters established, every college will accommodate you. But they don't accommodate in the exact same way because every college according to the ADA is free to establish their own parameters and guidelines. As long as they're within the framework of the ADA accommodations in college are another one of the complexities of dyslexia and not every student with dyslexia needs every single accommodation because dyslexia in itself is different in every student. I am going to include a couple of references with this podcast in the show notes. There are some YouTube videos the one that I told you earlier about Dr. Futterman and then there's another one by a Dr. Richard Wagner, that's very good, and I will have those links as well. I will also include the link from the International dyslexia Association for an assortment of different fact sheets that they have with regards to different topics about dyslexia. And finally, I have an E book on my website. Mickey teaches comm m IC k i e teachers.com that has about 30 questions that you can ask Disability Services about if you need additional information. Thank you for your time today.

Mickie  19:30  
I hope you found today's session worthwhile. And I look forward to talking to you again next week. Have a great rest of the day. And I will talk to you again soon. Bye. The information contained throughout this podcast has been gleaned from my own personal experiences but to ensure accuracy please contact the Disability Services at the College of your choice to have first hand information and the most up to date policies and PR seizures follow up where your particular institution of higher education the content in any of these podcasts is not intended as a substitute for information from legal, educational or medical professionals. Always seek the advice of your attorney or qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have with regards to legal educational or medical concerns.