Georgie Cooney is a Dyslexia tutor for ICEP Europe and the founder of Dystinction Education. As October is Dyslexia Awareness Month, Georgie has written a blog for us on how to identify students who may be dyslexic and strategies to help these learners.
Teachers are also short on time and energy during a busy school term. I highly respect any teacher who goes the extra mile to try and figure out why up to a third of the children in their classroom may not be learning to their full potential. So, if we are in a situation where we feel stuck, hopeless and helpless as a teacher or indeed a parent or carer, what can we do to support those learners to learn differently?
First, we need to look at identifying those kids who may well have dyslexia. ‘Dyslexia is a set of processing difficulties that affect the acquisition of reading and spelling’ (Delphi Study, 2025). I’m choosing to focus on dyslexia especially as October is Dyslexia Awareness month.
How do we identify a student who might have dyslexia?
The short answer is that it’s going to look different in the early years to the primary years and then again at secondary level (not to mention third level education too).
I always find it remarkable how dyslexics manage to get the whole way to adulthood without their needs being identified. Sometimes this is because they have been able to use their cognitive ability and skills to simply cope in the education system. However, in more depressing situations the outcome is that they didn’t cope. In fact, they looked for other ways to survive which as we know from statistics*, unrecognised learning needs can lead to alcohol and drug abuse and sometimes crime or imprisonment.
So, let’s intervene early people!
Can we also PLEASE check sight and hearing before we panic. It is incredible how many kids come to me who are struggling to read due to visual difficulties. Additionally, in a handful of cases, a hearing test has detected something going on or referred it on for an auditory processing assessment. We learn through our senses so if one or more of our senses is having a hard time, then we, the learners, will be having an even harder time.
Early/Pre Primary Years:
- Difficulty with rhyming
- Difficulty with syllable appreciation
- Difficulty with phonemes (sound recognition) and sounding out
- Difficulty recognising common words
- Reads word by word with little or no expression
- Decoding (reading) errors
- Guess words from pictures or visuals or context
- Reluctant to spell or write letters
- Processing difficulties (working memory is still developing)
- Could be some speech and language expressive difficulties
Upper Primary Years:
- Continued difficulty with all of the above
- Difficulty with letter-sound knowledge
- Difficulty with recognition and retrieval of regular and irregular sight words
- Problems copying information
- Slow reading
- Difficulty learning new words (both decoding/reading and encoding/spelling)
- Spellings are often very ‘idiosyncratic’ meaning that the individual finds a way to spell that sometimes make sense only to them.
- Difficulty learning to read leads to difficulties reading to learn, which is unfortunately what is needed at second and third level education
- Poor reading fluency
- Slow writing speed
- Organisation and management of work
- Lacking confidence in their literacy abilities
Also, let’s not forget the underlying anxiety issues that so many of our dyslexics have during their education. Self-esteem and confidence levels can be extremely weakened and as teachers, we have a responsibility to look out for this and help them to strengthen and see their positive attributes and skills. We must also give them TIME. Time to process information, time to finish work and tasks, time to finish exams and tests! Let them prove to the world how able they are.
Executive Functioning Skills
Many dyslexic learners struggle with their executive functioning skills, which is why at second and third level education, support is sought for study skills and revision.
How can we help?
If we learn through our senses and we know that many of the kids in our classrooms have sensory dysregulation then we need to teach in a multisensory way. If a child is struggling to copy for example, then we present the information to them, for them to keep.
‘Tell me, I will forget. Show me, I may remember. Involve me, I shall understand’.
This very old proverb explains beautifully, the need to teach to meet every learner’s senses. We can use:
- Visuals/documentaries/clips/news
- Social media, podcasts, radio, news
- Sound effects
- Theme tunes
- Drama/dance/performance
- Taste/Smell
- Keyboards
- PowerPoints/Interactive whiteboards
- Projects/presentations
- I am leaving my favourite for the last one – games, games, games!
What will make the learning more memorable? The teacher delivering the information or the kids getting physically involved. I certainly remember going on holiday more than someone telling me about their holiday!
The last thing that needs addressing (particularly for dyslexic learners) is that we must help them with remembering and the memory. Along with some processing issues, working memory and storing words and sounds in the memory can be very troublesome. This is particularly annoying when it comes to having to learn irregular spellings. Here are six memory strategies that we could use to help our learners:
- Time Management: Short, frequent practice/recall with an increasing gap between the practices/recollections (e.g. it moves from daily practice to weekly for example).
- Visualising/imaging: ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ – much easier than having to store a thousand words at the same time. For example, if we’re learning the /ea/ word family, we could picture (and illustrate) a beach scene with a little story e.g. I went to the beach to swim in the sea. I saw my teacher drinking tea. I went to speak to her, and she bought me an ice-cream. She reached out and pointed out a a seagull and a seal out at sea! What a dreamy day we had.
- Card games are a brilliant way to repeatedly practise recognition and retrieval and there are so many games out there such as A-G-O cards, Kendore Learning card games and Got It cards. There is no problem with overlearning when it comes to dyslexia.
- Mnemonics: This can be personalised (works better) but you could also have visuals to support acronyms such as: Big Elephants Can’t Always Use Small Exits (because). Rhythm Helps Your Two Hips Move (rhythm). One collar and two sleeves on your shirt or blouse for ‘necessary’.
- Chunking: Grouping the information reduces the number of items in the working memory, as in onset and rime (my /ea/ example above), root word plus affixes e.g. work, working, homework, worked, worker, overworked etc. Articulating syllables always worked well for me. To this day, I still say (in my head) ‘Wed-nes-day, gov-ERN-ment, Feb-RU-ar-y, parl-I-A-ment’.
- Good, old fashioned verbal rehearsal – a bit like how ‘them Victorians did it’. Saying something over and over until it becomes imprinted as in rote learning of times tables. You have to hold the information in the working memory whilst acting on it, which is great practice. Of course ultimately, it then sticks into the long-term memory, which is what we want.
‘Knowledge itself is power’. We need to arm our dyslexic learners with all the ‘power tools’ they can get to engineer their way through the education system.
If you would like to delve further into this topic, there is a Dyslexia and Literacy module in the MA/PG Dip in Inclusive and Special Education, a joint programme between Hibernia College and ICEP Europe.
* “The rate of dyslexia in prisons is significantly higher than in the general population, with studies reporting figures from 47% to potentially 80% of incarcerated individuals with literacy challenges potentially having dyslexia, according to this 2023 study and this 2022 article from Succeed With Dyslexia.
