Stealth Dyslexia  - Page 2

The most academically disabling difficulty affecting children with stealth dyslexia is almost always dysgraphia, or difficulty writing by hand.  Several factors often contribute to their difficulties with written output.  First, they typically have the characteristic dyslexic difficulty turning words in their heads into signals capable of causing the motor system to form the appropriate letters needed to make words.  They may lack the kinds of visual templates that can be used to form words, or be unable to translate auditory word images into the kinds of signals the motor system needs to form letters.  Second, they may have spatial or sequential processing difficulties that make it difficult for them to remember how to form individual letters (resulting in oddly formed letters, reversals, inversions, and irregular spacing), or to remember what order letters or even sounds come in a word.  These children are often especially hard for parents and teachers to understand, because they may have verbal IQs in the highly or profoundly gifted range and show every sign of verbal precocity, yet be unable even to write the alphabet--even as teenagers.  Third, dyslexic children may have difficulties with sensory-motor dyspraxia.  Motor coordination problems are common in dyslexia, and may cause difficulties with the manual aspects of handwriting even for children who are trying to copy directly from examples of printed words.  Often these children experience the extreme frustration of knowing what words they want to write, while being unable to get their fingers to make the proper motions.  Finally, dyslexic children often have difficulties of visual processing that can contribute to poor hand-eye coordination, or difficulty using visual feedback to guide their writing.

The severe handwriting impairment associated with these deficits produces one of stealth dyslexia's most noticeable manifestations:  the characteristically enormous gap between oral and written expression.  Even extremely precocious adolescents with outstanding oral language skills, remarkable knowledge bases, and extremely lively minds can produce written documents of such brevity and simplicity that they look as if they had been written by a struggling third grader.  The psychic trauma that can result from this gap between aptitude and output is impossible to exaggerate. 

Another tip-off to the presence of stealth dyslexia is the presence of spelling difficulties in a child's written output that are far out of character with either their general language, working memory, or attention skills.  While these children are sometimes able to score within age norms on multiple-choice tests of spelling recognition, or even on weekly tests of spelling words that study carefully for, they essentially always show significant and surprising deficits when they try to spell words from memory.

The dyslexic deficits in handwriting and spelling tend to be more persistent and resistant to treatment than the reading deficits.  It's important that children with dyslexic dysgraphia be identified as early as possible so that they can be given appropriate handwriting interventions, and so that they can begin as early as possible to develop proficiency in keyboarding.  Keyboarding should become their primary means of written expression for as much schoolwork as possible--in many cases, for math as well as language output.
                                                                               Stealth Dyslexia   Page 3