Things Dyslexic Students Struggle With and Their Hidden Superpowers
By Margo Fourman
Table of Contents
This article summarizes the most common things that people with dyslexia struggle with.
While dyslexia is usually seen as a disability, most dyslexics also have surprising strengths in their thinking styles.
Those strengths are often masked by their obvious difficulty with ‘simple’ things like reading and writing, and so often go unrecognized. We’ll summarize those common strengths too.
While dyslexia is usually seen as a disability, most dyslexics also have surprising strengths in their thinking styles.
Those strengths are often masked by their obvious difficulty with ‘simple’ things like reading and writing, and so often go unrecognized. We’ll summarize those common strengths too.
What dyslexic students struggle with
While scientists believe there are several different causes of dyslexia, at its core, a dyslexia diagnosis means a specific learning difficulty which primarily affects reading and writing skills. However, it does not only affect these skills. It affects everything in everyday life.
Therefore, the most common things dyslexic students struggle with are:
- Reading skills – They may be slow readers, or learn late, or unable to remember or process what they are reading at the level you would expect from their general skills and intelligence.
- Reversing letters and numbers when reading. For example, reading “saw” as “was”.
- Rereading or skipping words or lines
- Taking notes in classes and lectures. This may look like: Can’t write fast enough; can’t listen at the same time as writing; can’t understand the notes when looking back at them.
- Processing and understanding written information
- Writing sentences – Those may seem muddled, where the grammar is odd: They may start from the most important idea and try to fit the sentence around it
- Writing essays that reflect their intelligence and knowledge
They often also have difficulties with things like:
- Processing information that they listen to. They may need you to speak faster or slower. Unfortunately, most teaching relies on listening or reading.
- Telling left from right.
- Following sequential instructions.
- Following travel directions which include telling right from left, up from down, reading maps and reading the sign posts quickly enough.
- Remembering words, phrases, names and isolated data.
- Memorizing written lists and phone numbers
- Staying on topic.
- Understanding how to answer written questions, whether word math problems or exam questions
- Expressing their ideas effectively in a way that other people can follow them.
- Planning and Organization
- Learning to tell time.
Together, these limitations often lead dyslexic learners to:
- Avoid reading, especially reading out loud
- Become tired or frustrated from reading.
- Have trouble finishing assignments and tests within time limits.
- Find it difficult to retain information and need to reread something several times.
And unfortunately, these obvious challenges tend to lead to emotional problems as well:
- Low self-esteem, stress and anxiety
- Becoming incredibly frustrated, especially with tasks that other people would consider easy
- Perhaps worst of all, these difficulties often attract judgements like “lazy”, “doesn’t listen”, “doesn’t try hard enough”, or “could do better”. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: dyslexics have to work incredibly hard to accomplish tasks that others might find easy.
Yet there is hope.
The daily challenges they deal with are not their fault. They just haven’t found someone who truly understands them, and who can help them process more efficiently and teach them how to learn. Once the underlying challenges are addressed they often exceed expectations.
Which brings us to the second part of this article.
While it’s true that dyslexics encounter many problems in academics and in life, they also have some extraordinary gifts…
The daily challenges they deal with are not their fault. They just haven’t found someone who truly understands them, and who can help them process more efficiently and teach them how to learn. Once the underlying challenges are addressed they often exceed expectations.
Which brings us to the second part of this article.
While it’s true that dyslexics encounter many problems in academics and in life, they also have some extraordinary gifts…
So let’s talk now about the hidden strengths — shall we call them superpowers? — of people with dyslexia.
Their unique ways of processing information gives people with dyslexia some remarkable advantages. Some of them may need help to learn how to take advantage of this potential.
- Spatial knowledge and manipulation
- Visual thinking
- Thinking outside the box
- Making connections
- Seeing the big picture both literally and figuratively
- Finding creative solutions to problems
- Understanding complex patterns
- Finding more efficient ways to do things
When leveraged and applied properly in life, these lead to some extraordinary benefits.
“Instead of emphasizing ‘deficits’ only, the diagnosis and intervention for children with dyslexia should consider their nonverbal creativity strengths.”
(Hin Yan Lam, J. and Xiuli Tong, S., 2021)
“Instead of emphasizing ‘deficits’ only, the diagnosis and intervention for children with dyslexia should consider their nonverbal creativity strengths.”
(Hin Yan Lam, J. and Xiuli Tong, S., 2021)
Some of the things that can be worked on, to support people with dyslexia to express their strengths
Most teaching is done in a sequential fashion, and dyslexics tend to learn better through deeper learning: connecting new knowledge with prior knowledge.
For this they need to learn active learning and understand why mind maps are often recommended for dyslexic people.
Working memory is often an issue, and they need to learn tips and tricks to support more effective function around that.
However, the difficulties we see with working memory and processing speed do seem to become less of an issue with reduction of sensory overload, if present, and with improved communication and integration between the two brain hemispheres.
Sometimes people with dyslexia may see the text as moving, or doubling, or blurry. Children rarely tells us what’s going on unless we ask them. They assume that what they see is the same as everybody else. This can be addressed.
Auditory processing (remembering and following instructions, understanding classes or lectures) can be addressed. Knowing right from left can be addressed. These issues are often the tip of the iceberg. When we meet the person, we often find that other issues need to be addressed first for more successful learning.
