Our son is 11 years old and attending middle school as a 6th grader. We live in Michigan. We have suspected for the past couple of years he suffers from dyslexia. He can read and comprehend written expression very well. In fact, he enjoys reading and many times he chooses to read on his own.

His issues are not in reading or comprehension; but in spelling and writing. He spells phonetically, and his handwriting is almost unreadable. He becomes frustrated with writing and spelling easily as he continues to fail spelling tests even after many hours of studying. He can see the words on the board, but when he copies them down on paper, they are spelled phonetically correct, but are not spelled correctly. He continues to lose many points, and fail many assignments/tests as his handwriting or spelling are counted against him on tests.

Many of his teachers have recognized the fact that he spells phonetically, and, at times, reverses letters. However, he is to the point now in his school career that he feels that he is a failure and has very low self-esteem.

My wife and I are are very concerned for his success as he struggles and dislikes school due to these issues. We have wanted to have him tested; but do not know where or who to take him for testing. We also do not know what to do if the test results confirm this diagnosis. We know there is not medication, or a quick solution; but there are strategies that can help us.

In short, our son sees words on the board and writes them down phonetically. At times he will reverse his b's and d's, or even p's.

Where can we go from here to get him the help he so disparately needs in order to develop strategies that will help him overcome this disability?


Dr. Pierson's Response: 

Given that you work in the public schools, I am going to assume you know that you can refer your son for a special education evaluation for a suspected learning disability and are choosing to not go that route at this point.

Your best bet in West Michigan is the SLD Center—they have offices in G.R. and Kalamazoo. My friend and DyslexiaHelp contributor Dr. Michael Ryan is on the board. It's a solid organization. You can tell them I referred you.

In addition to assessing phonological (sound) processing, which from your description, it sounds like your son has pretty solid phonological awareness skills, the examiner will want to get an inventory of your son's letter-sound knowledge and orthographic understandings. It sounds like he'd benefit from some word study—learning roots of words and affixes (prefixes, suffixes, etc.), technical term: morphological understandings.

Even though your son is not struggling with reading, you may want to think about getting some baseline reading testing to ensure that he is indeed being an effective reader. As he gets older and text gets harder, sometimes kids struggle with reading comprehension and may need some strategy work. At my private clinical practice, we are getting a lot of referrals for 6th graders with subtle issues that no one has picked up on—kids who have been successful, but then as the amount of reading increases and they are faced with reading different genres of text and having different purposes for reading, they start breaking down. Additionally, understanding different genres of text can help students understand how to write for different purposes. If he is having difficulty getting his thoughts on paper, he may benefit from a language assessment to determine where the breakdown is. Many times kids have subtle verbal expression difficulties that can impact written expression. The assessment should include a look at higher-level language, such as ambiguities, inferences, and gaining meaning from context.

It will be important for the examiner to figure out exactly where and how your son is having difficulty—with phonology (again, I don’t think it’s with phonological awareness, but phonological memory and rapid naming should be checked), morphology, or vocabulary; starting and getting his ideas on paper or organizing his thoughts; or is there an underlying oral language problem? There are myriad reasons a child has difficulty with written expression.

I hope this information helps get you on the right path.