Signs of dyslexia in children: what to notice and what to do next

Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that makes reading and spelling unusually hard to learn. India’s Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 names it in its Schedule, alongside dysgraphia and dyscalculia. It is not a measure of intelligence or a result of too little effort, and a child with dyslexia can be quick, curious and articulate whenever nothing needs to be read or written. The glossary entry on dyslexia gives a short definition.

Noticing early matters because by the middle primary years almost every subject depends on reading. The Indian Academy of Pediatrics (IAP) advises identifying learning struggles early, expects children to have learned to read by about class 2, and puts it plainly: do not wait for children to fail.

In nursery, LKG and UKG it is too early to diagnose a learning disability; the IAP says one can only be diagnosed once formal schooling has started. Some early patterns are still worth mentioning to the paediatrician, particularly if several appear together. The IAP lists these among the early signs in preschool children.

• Speech that came late, or a small vocabulary for the child’s age.
• Difficulty with rhymes, in nursery rhymes or in the rhyming games of any language the family speaks.
• Trouble learning letters, numbers, colours and shapes, even after plenty of practice.
• Difficulty linking letters to the sounds they stand for.
• Poor fine-motor skills: holding a crayon, threading beads, using scissors or doing up buttons.

Many young children show one or two of these for a while and go on to read without difficulty. The point of noticing is to mention them early, keep reading to the child every day, and watch how the first years of school go.

From class 1 onwards, the signs below are drawn from the IAP’s list for school-age children, with examples of how they look in class. Each is a reason to talk to the class teacher and the paediatrician, not a verdict on the child.

• Reading and spelling mistakes that persist, including letter reversals and mistakes with aksharas and maatras in Hindi or another Indian script.
• Poor understanding of what has been read, often with slow, word-by-word reading.
• Difficulty in every language the child is taught, not only in one.
• Numbers written the wrong way round or in the wrong order, and trouble with number facts and word problems.
• Avoiding writing whenever possible.
• Disorganisation: a bag, a school diary and notebooks that never seem to be in order.
• Reluctance to go to school, especially on days with dictation, tests or reading aloud.

In an Indian classroom these tend to surface in particular places: the weekly dictation, copying from the board, the spelling test, the Hindi or regional-language period, and reading aloud in front of forty classmates. Report-card remarks across several years often show the same pattern long before anyone names it, so keep those report cards.

Almost every beginning reader reverses b and d, leaves out a maatra, guesses a word from its first letter or the picture, and spells by sound. In UKG and class 1 that is part of learning, not a warning. What matters is whether the mistakes fade as the child is taught and practises, or stay stubbornly the same.

Compare your child with their own teaching and effort, not with the best reader in the class. A child who has had steady teaching and reads with an adult most days, but in class 3 still cannot read short familiar words reliably, spells the same word differently each time and loses the meaning of a sentence by its end, is showing something persistent. So is a child whose reading lags far behind what they understand when someone reads to them.

Neither you nor the teacher needs to decide whether it is dyslexia. The only question at this stage is whether the difficulty is persistent enough to raise with a professional. If it has lasted through a year of good teaching, it is.

A child with a reading difficulty is often working harder than anyone else in the class and getting less for it. A page that takes a classmate two minutes takes them ten, and by the end they have understood less. Children in this position start to avoid the task, fool around, leave the book at school or complain of a stomach ache on dictation day. From outside, that looks like laziness. From inside, it is a sensible way to avoid failing in public every day.

Careless is the other word that follows these children. A child who spells a word correctly on Monday and wrongly on Tuesday is not being careless; the skill has not become automatic, and it breaks down under time pressure or tiredness. Words like lazy, careless and weak in reading get repeated in front of the child until the child uses them about themselves.

Try a different sentence at home: reading is hard for you right now, and we are going to find out why and what helps. It is true, it blames nobody, and it tells the child that the adults are on their side.

Families are often told to give it time, or that things will settle by class 4. Some children do catch up, but the IAP’s advice is not to wait for children to fail. Waiting costs a child the years in which reading is built, and by the time the gap is undeniable it is usually wider and the child’s confidence lower.

Repeating a year is sometimes offered as a fresh start. The IAP notes that the evidence shows holding a child back a year does not improve academic performance. The child sits through the same teaching that did not work the first time, now with younger classmates. More tuition of the usual kind has a similar problem: covering the syllabus again, faster, does not teach the skill underneath it.

Most children in Indian schools learn to read and write in more than one language, often in two or three scripts: English, Hindi and the state’s language, such as Marathi, Kannada, Tamil or Telugu. English spelling is irregular; Indian scripts are built from aksharas, with maatras and conjunct letters to learn. That is a heavy load for any child, and a child with a reading difficulty feels it in every script.

This is why the IAP includes difficulty in all the languages a child is taught among the signs. A child who struggles only in English may be dealing with something else, such as hearing little English outside school. Even so, a reading difficulty can look different from one script to another, so do not rule anything in or out yourself. Tell whoever assesses your child which languages are spoken at home, which the school teaches in, and when each was started. Dyslexia in Hindi and other Indian languages looks at this in more detail.

If the difficulty has lasted through a year of ordinary teaching, these steps, roughly in this order, turn a worry into a plan.

1. Talk to the class teacher. Ask what they see in reading, spelling and writing, in each language and in maths, and write it down in their words.
2. Collect the evidence: this year’s notebooks, dictation and test papers, and report cards from earlier years with the teachers’ remarks.
3. See the paediatrician. The IAP recommends that paediatricians screen for learning difficulties at about age 7, two to three years after a child starts school, and refer for evaluation when there are concerns in two or more areas.
4. Have vision and hearing checked, which the IAP treats as a required part of evaluating a learning difficulty.
5. Ask for a referral for a learning disability assessment. Because a learning disability can only be diagnosed once formal schooling has started, this step belongs to the school years, not to pre-primary.
6. Ask the school what it will do in class while you wait, and agree a date to review it together.

How a learning disability assessment works in India explains who assesses, what to bring and how to read the report.

Nothing on this list needs a report, and all of it helps whatever an assessment later finds.

• Read aloud to your child every day, in any language the family enjoys, from books they could not yet read alone.
• Use audiobooks for stories and, where the school allows, for set reading.
• Keep home reading short and successful: ten minutes with an easy book, stopped while it is still going well.
• Ask the school for small changes: a seat near the board, printed notes instead of long copying, warning before being asked to read aloud, and credit for ideas as well as spelling in class work.
• Arrange structured teaching from a trained remedial teacher, rather than more tuition on the syllabus.
• Notice and name what your child is good at, out loud, every week.

Structured teaching is the part that most needs a specialist. What is remedial teaching? explains how it differs from tuition, and structured literacy and multisensory teaching shows what a good lesson looks like. Special Minds does not assess or diagnose. It introduces vetted remedial tutors, at home in eight cities and online across India, who work from the school’s observations now and from the assessment report once there is one.