How Dyslexia Affects Learning
How dyslexia can affect learning, studying and teaching
Reading
Reading is a key part of most learning, and it can put people with dyslexia under a lot of pressure. For example, they may read at half the speed of their classmates and may find it hard to remember what they have read. Their vocabulary may also be limited, which can lower their level of understanding. People with dyslexia may experience some or all of the following:
- Visual stress
- Reading overload
- Slow reading speed
- Difficulty summarising
- Difficulty choosing and organising study materials
- Not understanding or not remembering what they have read
- Difficulty picking out the main points of a text
- Misreading what they have read (assignments or exam questions)
Spelling
People with dyslexia may find written expression and vocabulary so difficult that teachers cannot understand their written work.
Note-taking
The difficulties some people with dyslexia have may include some or all of the following:
- Difficulty writing and listening at the same time
- Difficulty taking detailed notes and understanding them when reading them back
- Difficulty picking out the main points during lessons
- Problems copying quickly and accurately
Writing
People with dyslexia may have problems with their written work, including some or all of the following:
- Poor construction and/or slow writing may stop them from expressing their ideas
- Difficulty planning and structuring written work
- Problems getting their ideas across
- Difficulty linking theory with practice
- Poor written expression and/or sentence structure
- Difficulty understanding the rules of writing
- Difficulty linking the abstract with the concrete
- Problems correcting and editing
- Leaving out vowels when writing
Speech
Some of the difficulties of people with dyslexia may be linked with spoken language, as well as with writing and reading.
Learners may have problems when they need to take in information quickly and accurately. They may also misunderstand instructions or other information and find it hard to follow what is said in group situations. Finding the right word and pronouncing words with many syllables may also be difficult.
Organisational skills and time management
Some people with dyslexia have problems with short-term memory, which can affect note-taking, reading, writing and organisation in general. Dyslexia can also make it hard to organise time, which would help them meet deadlines.
These difficulties are very often overlooked, and as a result people with dyslexia are sometimes thought to be lazy, unmotivated, careless or thoughtless.
Maths
Many people with dyslexia are very good at maths; some of them, however, may have difficulties because of problems with visual perception, short-term or working memory, or with sequence and order. Learners may have some or all of the following difficulties in maths:
- Visual problems such as reversing and swapping
- Mistakes when writing letters
- Losing track in complex calculations, or being unable to keep all the steps in mind
- Difficulty remembering signs and symbols
- Problems remembering formulas and theorems
- Difficulty learning specialist vocabulary
- Difficulty with arithmetic and basic numeracy
- Difficulty moving from the concrete to the abstract