Dyslexia: Difficulties, Strengths, and Recommendations

This report discusses the difficulties faced by a student with dyslexia in literacy skills, self-respect, and oral communication. It also highlights the strengths of the student and provides recommendations for intervention and support.

Dyslexia
Student’s Name:
Student’s ID:

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Table of Contents
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................2
Reported Learning Difficulties.....................................................................................................................2
Strengths and Interests...............................................................................................................................3
Recommended Actions................................................................................................................................3
Reading and Spelling Intervention Plan.......................................................................................................4
Time Scale...................................................................................................................................................4
Summary.....................................................................................................................................................5
Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................6
References...................................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction
Alex, an 11 years and seven months old student and is in his final year of primary school and
will enter high school next year. Alex stammers or hesitates under stress and also had a problem
in finding the correct word to express it during the conversation. The paper will summarize the
difficulties faced by Alex in literacy skills, self‐respect, and oral communication as well as
strengths of Alex. It will also recommend actions to be taken to start working with Alex. It will
analyze the programme to be developed for overcoming the literacy issues of Alex along with
shorter and longer terms objectives. It will also determine the time scale of the proposed
programme. Moreover, it will suggest some recommendations for the school of Alex.
Reported Learning Difficulties
Alex stammers or hesitates under stress, and his overall stumbles through most of his verbal
words. He also had a problem in finding the correct word to express it during the conversation.
He does not have an easy time in his school. Alex speech issues were recognized much before
his entering to school, and so Alex was put in a programme to motivate him for the development
of his articulation (Azmi, Nasrudin, Wan & Ahmad, (2017). Alex was removed from the
programme after six months as his speech has adequately improved. His mother has found that
while reading with him, he would find excuses to ignore it (Benmarrakchi, El Kafi, Elhore Haie,
2017). He was not interested in books and seemed to be sulky and tries to ignore any type of
schoolwork. He also faces troubles with single words as well as struggles while reading his
school books.
Alex reading is labored, and his words are often mispronounced, omitted or substituted. If he
reads the words accurately in a sentence, he might misread while repeating in other sentence
(Cameron, 2016). He do not love to read loudly and goes to great distances to present himself as
modest when he is asked to read aloud. He makes excuses either by asking to go to the toilet
when his turn comes, act up, make joke of the words, tumble on the floor and laugh so that the
teacher sent him out the classroom, His letters become wobbly and misshapen while writing and
often ignores writing and breaks his pen or pencil and get distracted instead of starting any tasks
of writing both at home and at school (Cameron & Billington, 2017).

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A non-word reading test was performed poorly by Alex and showed great difficulties in
interpreting words in an exam of word reading and opted for random guesses. He struggles while
decoding texts and Alex’s comprehension is severely hampered (Cameron & Greenland, 2019).
Alex tries to work hard, but then again his works does not show his efforts. Alex’s lack of self-
confidence put himself down and stop attempting any tasks. Recently he has stopped trying some
new things, as he is himself feeling he could not accomplish anything and his efforts are not
worth it. He thinks himself worse and stupid in comparison to his peers (Cimermanová, (2015).
Strengths and Interests
Alex is good at solving complex puzzles as well as loves to create model planes in his leisure
time. He is also excellent in mathematics with outstanding reasoning and problem-solving skills.
He does not face difficulties with comprehension (Dinç, 2017). He is good at reading short
sentences silently and answer the questions related to it utilizing clues like images in the books
(Fawcett, 2018). He is good at comprehension if a text is read to him. Alex remembers in
details about the texts while listening to loud reading or recordings.
Recommended Actions
With the help and support of a psychologist, who is well-equipped with tested and tried
strategies, Alex will be able to learn and become high achiever like the normal student. The plans
are as follows:
 Educational Games - The benefit of games for Alex will be that he can learn to include
them in his lessons. There are several educational games available for dyslexia students.
Some of the sites which provide educational games are given below:
 Dyslexiagames.com - Workbooks of this site have many 3D drawing, reading activities
and puzzles made according to the strength of dyslexic students, the visual thinking
 Nessy.com - It offers several computer games which can help Alex to understand the
sounds which create words, where Alex specifically struggles. Its cartoony and colorful
styles will help to appeal and engage Alex
 Simplex Spelling - It will help Alex to understand the phonics and construction of words
 Working with Parents - The psychologist must meet the parents of Alex regularly for
discussing the progress of Alex and strategies implemented for him. His parents can also
update him on their strategies applied at home and the rate of success of those strategies. By

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sharing information about the progress, both the parents of Alex and the psychologist could
work together for finding leaning techniques to help Alex in improving his learning
successfully
Reading and Spelling Intervention Plan
A well-structured and systematic intervention programme will be to help Alex who entered
school with poorly developed literacy skills. The intervention programme will target the
improvement of learning skills and phonology with reading skills (Green, 2017). Lexia Core5
Reading is a programme of Lexia which can be adopted for Alex as this programme helps to
provide different literacy guidance to the students from Pre K to 5 (Hamdan, Amorri & Hamdan,
2017). The research-proven programme of Lexia can help Alex by providing organized,
personalized and clear learning in the reading areas, target the skill gaps and give the educators
with student-specific information and resources needed for Alex. This programme will
encourage and engage Alex in a game-like atmosphere. It will also provide progress monitoring
information of Alex without a test. The intervention programme will include training in letter-
sound knowledge, segmenting, combining and reading texts from books (Juul & Petersen, 2017).
Shorter-term Objectives- 3 to 6 months
 To utilize multisensory learning at home to help Alex for fighting his issues
 To help him to work on his problems by maintaining a diary to note down his concerns and
his due tasks
Longer-term Objectives - 1 year
 To improve the reading and learning problems of Alex with the help of a reading expert,
learning specialist, speech therapist, psychologist and teachers of his school
Time Scale
The proposed intervention programme, Lexia Core5 Reading will be implemented in schools.
The proposed intervention programme will continue for six months (Lavender, 2017). The daily
sessions will be 30 min individual session for reading with Alex and another 30 mins small
group sessions for learning with Alex and three to five dyslexic children. There will be three
individual and three group sessions every week (MacCullagh, Bosanquet & Badcock, 2017). The

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proposed intervention programme is a research-proven programme that will combine training in
reading and learning skills. The learning sessions will focus on narrative and vocabulary skills
using storybooks as the basis of its themes (Tariq & Latif, 2016).
The baseline skills at the entry point will be established by examining the dyslexic children
receiving the intervention in the first two weeks with dyslexic children not attending the
intervention. The dyslexic children will be chosen for the intervention programme due to their
difficulties in word level reading, the progress of the proposed intervention programme based on
four factors. The four factors are single word reading, early word reading, prose reading
accuracy and non-word reading (Yeo, Bunn, Abdullah, Shukri & Oehlers-Jaen, 2015).
Summary
Some recommendations for the school of Alex are as follows:
 The school of Alex must be dyslexic friendly not only for Alex but also for all the dyslexic
students in the school. The school must make a framework which can provide support to the
dyslexic students to build their current skills and help them to develop some new skills
 Disability Standards in Education (DSE) need to make a framework to make sure all dyslexic
students including Alex can take part in education on the same basis as other normal students
The duties of teachers towards Alex are given below:
 Multisensory Learning - The multisensory activities will help Alex to process and absorb
knowledge in a retainable way with the help of senses such as movement and touch along
with hearing and sight. This type of learning will not only be helpful for Alex but also the
whole class. Involving in something new and exciting will increase the involvement of Alex
in class. Some of the examples of this type of activities are as follows:
 Physical Activities for practicing Spellings - Examples are jump rope and hopscotch.
Alex will spell the words while jumping above the rope or to each square. The teacher
can pair up Alex with another student and tell them to spell the words one by one
 Writing sentences and words with tactile materials - Examples are sand, glitter glue,
beads and LEGO (Webster, 2016)
 Hunts for words and letters - The teacher can make divide the students into groups.
Alex can be included in one group, and each group can be given the word. Then the

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teacher can write letters in notes and hide them in the classroom. The groups have to find
out the letters and make the given word and stick them on a poster by cutting the letters
 Supportive Tools and Technology
 Line Readers - Line readers highlight and magnify the text over which they are put. It
will help Alex to move through his book and keep it in place particularly the words seem
to be morning around, and it will make the text less distracting
 Pocket Spell Checkers - Alex writes the word how he thinks it is spelled and most of the
time it is phonetically. So the spell checker will help to correct the spelling, It will also
help Alex to strengthen his confidence in both spelling and to write as well help to
memorize the correct spellings
 Give Sufficient Time to Finish Homework - If the homework takes a day to finish, the
teacher can allow it to finish it by Friday so that Alex can have the entire week to complete it.
The teacher must also inform his parents about the schedule of the homework so that they
could check the homework with Alex at his house in advance
Yes, Alex can be subject of National Consistent Collection of Data (NCCD) as he needs
adjustments to address his issues of dyslexia
The recommended reasonable adjustments are given below:
 NCCD can arrange for a better facility for Alex, so the school identifies the needs of Alex
and arrange for best support in his school
 NCCD can organize for quality resources made by experts to give the school teachers and
management with better understanding and awareness of difficulties in learning especially
for dyslexic students including Alex.
Conclusion
The paper concluded the difficulties faced by Alex in literacy skills, self‐respect, and oral
language as well his strengths. It also recommended actions to start working with Alex. It
evaluated the programme to be developed for arresting the literacy issues of Alex along with
shorter and longer terms objectives. It determined the time scale of the proposed plan. Moreover,
it suggested some recommendations for the school of Alex. It will attempt to show knowledge

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about dyslexia could be utilized to make sure that Alex who is at the risk of dyslexia could be
identified much before the failure.

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References
Azmi, A. Z., Nasrudin, N. H., Wan, A. W. N., & Ahmad, J. R. (2017). Mobile application to
enhance writing skills ability among dyslexic children: CinTA. Journal of Fundamental
and Applied Sciences, 9(5S), 195-209.
Benmarrakchi, F., El Kafi, J., Elhore, A., & Haie, S. (2017). Exploring the use of ICT in
supporting dyslexic students' preferred learning styles: A preliminary evaluation.
Education and Information Technologies, 22(6), 2939-2957.
Cameron, H. E. (2016). Beyond cognitive deficit: the everyday lived experience of dyslexic
students at university. Disability & Society, 31(2), 223-239.
Cameron, H., & Billington, T. (2017). ‘Just deal with it’: neoliberalism in dyslexic students’ talk
about dyslexia and learning at university. Studies in Higher Education, 42(8), 1358-1372.
Cameron, H., & Greenland, L. (2019). ‘Black or minority ethnic’ (BME), female, and dyslexic in
white-male dominated disciplines at an elite university in the UK; an exploration of
student experiences. Race Ethnicity and Education, 1-19.
Cimermanová, I. (2015). Teaching English as a foreign language to dyslexic learners. Teaching
Foreign Languages to Learners with Special Educational Needs, 39-62.
Dinç, R. (2017). Action research about development of reading and writing skills of the dyslexic
student. Kuramsal Eğitimbilim Dergisi, 10(2), 320-334.
Fawcett, A. (2018). The Challenge of Transitions for Dyslexic Students in Higher
Education. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 44(1), 15-19.
Green, S. (2017). A critical reflection on how information communication technology can
facilitate high-quality teaching and learn for dyslexic children and their spelling. The
STeP Journal (Student Teacher Perspectives), 4(4), 61-69.
Hamdan, K., Amorri, A., & Hamdan, F. (2017). Robot Technology Impact on Dyslexic Students’
English Learning. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology,
International Journal of Social, Behavioral, Educational, Economic, Business and
Industrial Engineering, 11(7), 1885-1890.

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Juul, H., & Petersen, D. K. (2017). Length effects in pseudo-word spelling: stronger in dyslexic
than in non-dyslexic students. Annals of dyslexia, 67(3), 369-382.
Lavender, R. J. (2017). What can dyslexic paramedic students teach us about mentoring? A case
study. Journal of Paramedic Practice, 9(5), 202-206.
MacCullagh, L., Bosanquet, A., & Badcock, N. A. (2017). University students with dyslexia: A
qualitative exploratory study of learning practices, challenges and
strategies. Dyslexia, 23(1), 3-23.
Tariq, R., & Latif, S. (2016). A mobile application to improve learning performance of dyslexic
children with writing difficulties. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 19(4),
151-166.
Webster, D. M. (2016). Listening to the Voice of Dyslexic Students at a Small, Vocational
Higher Education Institution to Promote Successful Inclusive Practice in the 21 st
Century. International Journal of Learning and Teaching, 2(1), 78-86.
Yeo, R., Bunn, T., Abdullah, A., Shukri, S. A., & Oehlers-Jaen, A. (2015). Evaluating the
progress of dyslexic children on a small-group maths intervention programme. Asia
Pacific Journal of Developmental Differences, 2(2), 144-157.