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Overcoming Dyslexia: Second Edition, Completely Revised and Updated Hardcover – Illustrated, March 24, 2020
by
Sally Shaywitz M.D.
(Author),
Jonathan Shaywitz MD
(Author)
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Print length608 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherKnopf
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Publication dateMarch 24, 2020
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Dimensions6.45 x 1.5 x 9.6 inches
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ISBN-100385350325
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ISBN-13978-0385350327
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Sally Shaywitz is an amazing woman, and no one has a better understanding of dyslexia and how it affects young children. Her work in this field is unmatched. One in five children of all classes, genders, and races have dyslexia, and it must be recognized early. These children think fast but read slow, through no fault of their own. Some of them are brilliant, but their brilliance often goes unrecognized. Sally’s tireless advocacy for those who have this learning disability has to be an inspiration for anyone who values early learning, systems of intelligence, and how to combat the many false perceptions of dyslexia. Her constant fight to change public policy as it relates to the way dyslexia functions and is understood in the nation’s schools should be deeply meaningful to anyone who cares about children in today’s world.” —Bob Dylan
“In this gem of a book, Dr. Sally Shaywitz uses her voice, her images, her brain–and yes, her heart–to shine a piercing and clarifying light on what we so inadequately call ‘dyslexia.’ What is more, she shows how almost everyone can overcome it.” —Daniel D. Federman, M.D.,
“Fascinating. . . . Shaywitz has illuminated the inner workings of dyslexic minds.” —Time
“An important book.... For the first time, scientists are understanding how the brain works...in the act of reading. Front and center now is Sally Shaywitz.” –The Baltimore Sun
“In this gem of a book, Dr. Sally Shaywitz uses her voice, her images, her brain–and yes, her heart–to shine a piercing and clarifying light on what we so inadequately call ‘dyslexia.’ What is more, she shows how almost everyone can overcome it.” —Daniel D. Federman, M.D.,
“Fascinating. . . . Shaywitz has illuminated the inner workings of dyslexic minds.” —Time
“An important book.... For the first time, scientists are understanding how the brain works...in the act of reading. Front and center now is Sally Shaywitz.” –The Baltimore Sun
About the Author
SALLY E. SHAYWITZ, M.D., is the Audrey G. Ratner Professor in Learning Development at Yale University and co-founder and co-director of the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. She is the author of more than 350 scientific articles and book chapters, and the creator of the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreenTM, a tool used by teachers to reliably screen young children for dyslexia. Overcoming Dyslexia won the Margo Marek Book Award and the NAMI Book Award. Dr. Shaywitz is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and is regularly selected as one of the "Best Doctors in America." She has testified before committees in both the Senate and the House. She lives in Woodbridge, CT.
JONATHAN SHAYWITZ, M.D., is a board-certified psychiatrist. He was the director of the Anxiety Disorders Program at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles, and more recently the Medical Director of Behavioral Health at Mission Hospital Laguna Beach and Mission Hospital Mission Viejo.
JONATHAN SHAYWITZ, M.D., is a board-certified psychiatrist. He was the director of the Anxiety Disorders Program at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles, and more recently the Medical Director of Behavioral Health at Mission Hospital Laguna Beach and Mission Hospital Mission Viejo.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I now want to gather together all the clues that combined will serve as an early-warning system for recognizing dyslexia. The clues will help you answer the question: Should my son or daughter (or I) be evaluated for dyslexia?
No one wants to be an “alarmist” and put her child through an evaluation for trivial or transient bumps along the road to reading. Evaluations can take time, and those carried out privately can be expensive. But I think we have to remind ourselves that our children are precious, oneof-a-kind individuals and have only one life to live. If we elect not to evaluate a child and that child later proves to have dyslexia, we cannot give those lost years back to him. The human brain is resilient, but there is no question that early intervention and treatment bring about more positive change at a faster pace than an intervention provided to an older child. And then there is the erosion of self-esteem that accrues over the years as a child struggles to read.
Childhood is a time for learning. A child who delays breaking the phonetic code will miss much of the reading practice that is essential to building fluency and vocabulary; as a consequence, he will fall further and further behind in acquiring comprehension skills and knowledge of the world around him. To see this happen to a child is sad, all the more because it is preventable.
Joseph Torgesen, a reading researcher at Florida State University who has carried out many of the critical studies on intervention, has this to say about the need to identify children early on and the cost of waiting: To the extent that we allow children to fall seriously behind at any point during early elementary school, we are moving to a “remedial” rather than a “preventive” model of intervention. Once children fall behind in the growth of critical word reading skills, it may require very intensive interventions to bring them back up to adequate levels of reading accuracy, and reading fluency may be even more difficult to restore because of the large amount of reading practice that is lost by children each month and year that they remain poor readers.
Most parents and teachers delay evaluating a child with reading difficulties because they believe the problems are just temporary, that they wll be outgrown. This is simply not true. Reading poblems are notoutgrown, they are persistent. As the participants in the Connecticut Longitudinal Study have demonstrated, at least three out of four children who read poorly in third grade continue to have reading problems in high school and beyond. What may seem to be tolerable and overlooked in a third grader certainly won’t be in a high schooler or young adult. Without identification and proven interventions, virtually all children who have reading difficulties early on will still struggle with reading when they are adults.
Luckily, parents can play an active role in the early identification of a reading problem. All that is required is an observant parent who knows what she is looking for and who is willing to spend time with her child listening to him speak and read.
The specific signs of dyslexia, both weaknesses and strengths, in any one individual will vary according to the age and educational level of that person. The five-year-old who can’t quite learn his letters becomes the six-year-old who can’t match sounds to letters and the fourteen-year-old who dreads reading out loud and the twenty-four-year-old who reads excruciatingly slowly. The threads persist throughout a person’s life. The key is knowing how to recognize them at different periods during development. Therefore, I have gathered the clues together to provide three distinct portraits of dyslexia: first, in early childhood from preschool through first grade; next, in school-age children from second grade on; and, last, in young adults and adults.
Clues to Dyslexia in Early Childhood
The earliest clues involve mostly spoken language. The very first clue to a language (and reading) problem may be delayed language. Once the child begins to speak, look for the following problems:
The Preschool Years
• Trouble learning common nursery rhymes such as “Jack and Jill” and “Humpty Dumpty”
• A lack of appreciation of rhymes
• Mispronounced words; persistent baby talk
• Difficulty in learning (and remembering) names of letters
• Failure to know the letters in his own name
Kindergarten and First Grade
• Failure to understand that words come apart; for example, that batboy can be pulled apart into bat and boy, and, later on, that the word bat can be broken down still further and sounded out as: “b” “aaaa” “t”
• Inability to learn to associate letters with sounds, such as being unable to connect the letter b with the “b” sound
• Reading errors that show no connection to the sounds of the letters; for example, the word big is read as goat
• The inability to read common one-syllable words or to sound out even the simplest of words, such as mat, cat, hop, nap
• Complaints about how hard reading is, or running and hiding when it is time to read
• A history of reading problems in parents or siblings
In addition to the problems of speaking and reading, you should be looking for these indications of strengths in higher-level thinking processes:
• Curiosity
• A great imagination
• The ability to figure things out
• Eager embrace of new ideas
• Getting the gist of things
• A good understanding of new concepts
• Surprising maturity
• A large vocabulary for the age group
• Enjoyment in solving puzzles
• Talent at building models
• Excellent comprehension of stories read or told to him
Clues to Dyslexia From Second Grade On
Problems in Speaking
• Mispronunciation of long, unfamiliar, or complicated words; the fracturing of words–leaving out parts of words or confusing the order of the parts of words; for example, aluminum becomes amulium
• Speech that is not fluent–pausing or hesitating often when speaking, lots of um’s during speech, no glibness
• The use of imprecise language, such as vague references to stuff or things instead of the proper name of an object
• Not being able to find the exact word, such as confusing words that sound alike: saying tornado instead of volcano, substituting lotion for ocean, or humanity for humidity
• The need for time to summon an oral response or the inability to come up with a verbal response quickly when questioned
• Difficulty in remembering isolated pieces of verbal information (rote memory)–trouble remembering dates, names, telephone numbers, random lists
Problems in Reading
• Very slow progress in acquiring reading skills
• The lack of a strategy to read new words
• Trouble reading unknown (new, unfamiliar) words that must be sounded out; making wild stabs or guesses at reading a word; failure to systematically sound out words
• The inability to read small “function” words such as that, an, in
• Stumbling on reading multisyllable words, or the failure to come close to sounding out the full word
• Omitting parts of words when reading; the failure to decode parts within a word, as if someone had chewed a hole in the middle of the word, such as conible for convertible
• A terrific fear of reading out loud; the avoidance of oral reading
• Oral reading filled with substitutions, omissions, and mispronunciations
• Oral reading that is choppy and labored, not smooth or fluent
• Oral reading that lacks inflection and sounds like the reading of a foreign language
• A reliance on context to discern the meaning of what is read
• A better ability to understand words in context than to read isolated single words
• Disproportionately poor performance on multiple choice tests
• The inability to finish tests on time
• The substitution of words with the same meaning for words in the text he can’t pronounce, such as car for automobile
• Disastrous spelling, with words not resembling true spelling; some spellings may be missed by spell check
• Trouble reading mathematics word problems
• Reading that is very slow and tiring
• Homework that never seems to end, or with parents often recruited as readers
• Messy handwriting despite what may be an excellent facility at word processing–nimble fingers
• Extreme difficulty learning a foreign language
• A lack of enjoyment in reading, and the avoidance of reading books or even a sentence
• The avoidance of reading for pleasure, which seems too exhausting
• Reading whose accuracy improves over time, though it continues to lack fluency and is laborious
• Lowered self-esteem, with pain that is not always visible to others
• A history of reading, spelling, and foreign language problems in family members
In addition to signs of a phonologic weakness, there are signs of strengths in higher-level thinking processes:
• Excellent thinking skills: conceptualization, reasoning, imagination, abstraction
• Learning that is accomplished best through meaning rather than rote memorization
• Ability to get the “big picture”
• A high level of understanding of what is read to him
• The ability to read and to understand at a high level overlearned (that is, highly practiced) words in a special area of interest; for example, if his hobby is restoring cars, he may be able to read auto mechanics magazines
• Improvement as an area of interest becomes more specialized and focused, when he develops a miniature vocabulary that he can read
• A surprisingly sophisticated listening vocabulary
• Excellence in areas not dependent on reading, such as math, computers, and visual arts, or excellence in more conceptual (versus factoid-driven) subjects such as philosophy, biology, social studies, neuroscience, and creative writing
Clues to Dyslexia in Young Adults and Adults
Problems in Speaking
• Persistence of earlier oral language difficulties
• The mispronunciation of the names of people and places, and tripping over parts of words
• Difficulty remembering names of people and places and the confusion of names that sound alike
• A struggle to retrieve words: “It was on the tip of my tongue”
• Lack of glibness, especially if put on the spot
• Spoken vocabulary that is smaller than listening vocabulary, and hesitation to say aloud words that might be mispronounced
Problems in Reading
• A childhood history of reading and spelling difficulties
• Word reading becomes more accurate over time but continues to require great effort
• Lack of fluency
Should My Child Be Evaluated for Dyslexia?
• Embarrassment caused by oral reading: the avoidance of Bible study groups, reading at Passover seders, or delivering a written speech
• Trouble reading and pronouncing uncommon, strange, or unique words such as people’s names, street or location names, food dishes on a menu (often resorting to asking the waiter about the special of the day or resorting to saying, “I’ll have what he’s having,” to avoid the embarrassment f not being able to read the menu)
• Persistent reading problems
• The substitution of made-up words during reading for words that cannot be pronounced–for example, metropolitan becomes mitan–and a failure to recognize the word metropolitan when it is seen again or heard in a lecture the next day
• Extreme fatigue from reading
• Slow reading of most materials: books, manuals, subtitles in foreign films
• Penalized by multiple-choice tests
• Unusually long hours spent reading school or work-related materials
• Frequent sacrifice of social life for studying
• A preference for books with figures, charts, or graphics
• A preference for books with fewer words per page or with lots of white showing on a page
• Disinclination to read for pleasure
• Spelling that remains disastrous and a preference for less complicated words in writing that are easier to spell
• Particularly poor performance on rote clerical tasks
Signs of Strengths in Higher-Level Thinking Processes
• The maintenance of strengths noted in the school-age period
• A high learning capability
• A noticeable improvement when given additional time on
multiple-choice examinations
• Noticeable excellence when focused on a highly specialized area
such as medicine, law, public policy, finance, architecture, or basic
science
• Excellence in writing if content and not spelling is important
• A noticeable articulateness in the expression of ideas and feelings
• Exceptional empathy and warmth, and feeling for others
• Success in areas not dependent on rote memory
• A talent for high-level conceptualization and the ability to come
up with original insights
• Big-picture thinking
• Inclination to think out of the box
• A noticeable resilience and ability to adapt
These clues across the life span offer a portrait of dyslexia. Examine them carefully, think about them, and determine if any of these clues fit your child, you, or someone else you are close to. Look for clues in the weaknesses and strengths. Identifying the weaknesses makes it possible to spot dyslexia in children before they are expected to read and in adults after they have developed some degree of reading accuracy but are continuing to show the remnants of earlier problems, reading slowly and with great effort.
If you think you or your child has some of these problems, it is important to note how frequent they are and how many there are. You don’t need to worry about isolated clues or ones that appear very rarely. For you to be concerned, the symptoms must be persistent; anyone can mispronounce a word now and then, or confuse similar-sounding words occasionally. What you are looking for is a persistent pattern–the occurrence of a number of these symptoms over a prolonged period of time. That represents a likelihood of dyslexia.
No one wants to be an “alarmist” and put her child through an evaluation for trivial or transient bumps along the road to reading. Evaluations can take time, and those carried out privately can be expensive. But I think we have to remind ourselves that our children are precious, oneof-a-kind individuals and have only one life to live. If we elect not to evaluate a child and that child later proves to have dyslexia, we cannot give those lost years back to him. The human brain is resilient, but there is no question that early intervention and treatment bring about more positive change at a faster pace than an intervention provided to an older child. And then there is the erosion of self-esteem that accrues over the years as a child struggles to read.
Childhood is a time for learning. A child who delays breaking the phonetic code will miss much of the reading practice that is essential to building fluency and vocabulary; as a consequence, he will fall further and further behind in acquiring comprehension skills and knowledge of the world around him. To see this happen to a child is sad, all the more because it is preventable.
Joseph Torgesen, a reading researcher at Florida State University who has carried out many of the critical studies on intervention, has this to say about the need to identify children early on and the cost of waiting: To the extent that we allow children to fall seriously behind at any point during early elementary school, we are moving to a “remedial” rather than a “preventive” model of intervention. Once children fall behind in the growth of critical word reading skills, it may require very intensive interventions to bring them back up to adequate levels of reading accuracy, and reading fluency may be even more difficult to restore because of the large amount of reading practice that is lost by children each month and year that they remain poor readers.
Most parents and teachers delay evaluating a child with reading difficulties because they believe the problems are just temporary, that they wll be outgrown. This is simply not true. Reading poblems are notoutgrown, they are persistent. As the participants in the Connecticut Longitudinal Study have demonstrated, at least three out of four children who read poorly in third grade continue to have reading problems in high school and beyond. What may seem to be tolerable and overlooked in a third grader certainly won’t be in a high schooler or young adult. Without identification and proven interventions, virtually all children who have reading difficulties early on will still struggle with reading when they are adults.
Luckily, parents can play an active role in the early identification of a reading problem. All that is required is an observant parent who knows what she is looking for and who is willing to spend time with her child listening to him speak and read.
The specific signs of dyslexia, both weaknesses and strengths, in any one individual will vary according to the age and educational level of that person. The five-year-old who can’t quite learn his letters becomes the six-year-old who can’t match sounds to letters and the fourteen-year-old who dreads reading out loud and the twenty-four-year-old who reads excruciatingly slowly. The threads persist throughout a person’s life. The key is knowing how to recognize them at different periods during development. Therefore, I have gathered the clues together to provide three distinct portraits of dyslexia: first, in early childhood from preschool through first grade; next, in school-age children from second grade on; and, last, in young adults and adults.
Clues to Dyslexia in Early Childhood
The earliest clues involve mostly spoken language. The very first clue to a language (and reading) problem may be delayed language. Once the child begins to speak, look for the following problems:
The Preschool Years
• Trouble learning common nursery rhymes such as “Jack and Jill” and “Humpty Dumpty”
• A lack of appreciation of rhymes
• Mispronounced words; persistent baby talk
• Difficulty in learning (and remembering) names of letters
• Failure to know the letters in his own name
Kindergarten and First Grade
• Failure to understand that words come apart; for example, that batboy can be pulled apart into bat and boy, and, later on, that the word bat can be broken down still further and sounded out as: “b” “aaaa” “t”
• Inability to learn to associate letters with sounds, such as being unable to connect the letter b with the “b” sound
• Reading errors that show no connection to the sounds of the letters; for example, the word big is read as goat
• The inability to read common one-syllable words or to sound out even the simplest of words, such as mat, cat, hop, nap
• Complaints about how hard reading is, or running and hiding when it is time to read
• A history of reading problems in parents or siblings
In addition to the problems of speaking and reading, you should be looking for these indications of strengths in higher-level thinking processes:
• Curiosity
• A great imagination
• The ability to figure things out
• Eager embrace of new ideas
• Getting the gist of things
• A good understanding of new concepts
• Surprising maturity
• A large vocabulary for the age group
• Enjoyment in solving puzzles
• Talent at building models
• Excellent comprehension of stories read or told to him
Clues to Dyslexia From Second Grade On
Problems in Speaking
• Mispronunciation of long, unfamiliar, or complicated words; the fracturing of words–leaving out parts of words or confusing the order of the parts of words; for example, aluminum becomes amulium
• Speech that is not fluent–pausing or hesitating often when speaking, lots of um’s during speech, no glibness
• The use of imprecise language, such as vague references to stuff or things instead of the proper name of an object
• Not being able to find the exact word, such as confusing words that sound alike: saying tornado instead of volcano, substituting lotion for ocean, or humanity for humidity
• The need for time to summon an oral response or the inability to come up with a verbal response quickly when questioned
• Difficulty in remembering isolated pieces of verbal information (rote memory)–trouble remembering dates, names, telephone numbers, random lists
Problems in Reading
• Very slow progress in acquiring reading skills
• The lack of a strategy to read new words
• Trouble reading unknown (new, unfamiliar) words that must be sounded out; making wild stabs or guesses at reading a word; failure to systematically sound out words
• The inability to read small “function” words such as that, an, in
• Stumbling on reading multisyllable words, or the failure to come close to sounding out the full word
• Omitting parts of words when reading; the failure to decode parts within a word, as if someone had chewed a hole in the middle of the word, such as conible for convertible
• A terrific fear of reading out loud; the avoidance of oral reading
• Oral reading filled with substitutions, omissions, and mispronunciations
• Oral reading that is choppy and labored, not smooth or fluent
• Oral reading that lacks inflection and sounds like the reading of a foreign language
• A reliance on context to discern the meaning of what is read
• A better ability to understand words in context than to read isolated single words
• Disproportionately poor performance on multiple choice tests
• The inability to finish tests on time
• The substitution of words with the same meaning for words in the text he can’t pronounce, such as car for automobile
• Disastrous spelling, with words not resembling true spelling; some spellings may be missed by spell check
• Trouble reading mathematics word problems
• Reading that is very slow and tiring
• Homework that never seems to end, or with parents often recruited as readers
• Messy handwriting despite what may be an excellent facility at word processing–nimble fingers
• Extreme difficulty learning a foreign language
• A lack of enjoyment in reading, and the avoidance of reading books or even a sentence
• The avoidance of reading for pleasure, which seems too exhausting
• Reading whose accuracy improves over time, though it continues to lack fluency and is laborious
• Lowered self-esteem, with pain that is not always visible to others
• A history of reading, spelling, and foreign language problems in family members
In addition to signs of a phonologic weakness, there are signs of strengths in higher-level thinking processes:
• Excellent thinking skills: conceptualization, reasoning, imagination, abstraction
• Learning that is accomplished best through meaning rather than rote memorization
• Ability to get the “big picture”
• A high level of understanding of what is read to him
• The ability to read and to understand at a high level overlearned (that is, highly practiced) words in a special area of interest; for example, if his hobby is restoring cars, he may be able to read auto mechanics magazines
• Improvement as an area of interest becomes more specialized and focused, when he develops a miniature vocabulary that he can read
• A surprisingly sophisticated listening vocabulary
• Excellence in areas not dependent on reading, such as math, computers, and visual arts, or excellence in more conceptual (versus factoid-driven) subjects such as philosophy, biology, social studies, neuroscience, and creative writing
Clues to Dyslexia in Young Adults and Adults
Problems in Speaking
• Persistence of earlier oral language difficulties
• The mispronunciation of the names of people and places, and tripping over parts of words
• Difficulty remembering names of people and places and the confusion of names that sound alike
• A struggle to retrieve words: “It was on the tip of my tongue”
• Lack of glibness, especially if put on the spot
• Spoken vocabulary that is smaller than listening vocabulary, and hesitation to say aloud words that might be mispronounced
Problems in Reading
• A childhood history of reading and spelling difficulties
• Word reading becomes more accurate over time but continues to require great effort
• Lack of fluency
Should My Child Be Evaluated for Dyslexia?
• Embarrassment caused by oral reading: the avoidance of Bible study groups, reading at Passover seders, or delivering a written speech
• Trouble reading and pronouncing uncommon, strange, or unique words such as people’s names, street or location names, food dishes on a menu (often resorting to asking the waiter about the special of the day or resorting to saying, “I’ll have what he’s having,” to avoid the embarrassment f not being able to read the menu)
• Persistent reading problems
• The substitution of made-up words during reading for words that cannot be pronounced–for example, metropolitan becomes mitan–and a failure to recognize the word metropolitan when it is seen again or heard in a lecture the next day
• Extreme fatigue from reading
• Slow reading of most materials: books, manuals, subtitles in foreign films
• Penalized by multiple-choice tests
• Unusually long hours spent reading school or work-related materials
• Frequent sacrifice of social life for studying
• A preference for books with figures, charts, or graphics
• A preference for books with fewer words per page or with lots of white showing on a page
• Disinclination to read for pleasure
• Spelling that remains disastrous and a preference for less complicated words in writing that are easier to spell
• Particularly poor performance on rote clerical tasks
Signs of Strengths in Higher-Level Thinking Processes
• The maintenance of strengths noted in the school-age period
• A high learning capability
• A noticeable improvement when given additional time on
multiple-choice examinations
• Noticeable excellence when focused on a highly specialized area
such as medicine, law, public policy, finance, architecture, or basic
science
• Excellence in writing if content and not spelling is important
• A noticeable articulateness in the expression of ideas and feelings
• Exceptional empathy and warmth, and feeling for others
• Success in areas not dependent on rote memory
• A talent for high-level conceptualization and the ability to come
up with original insights
• Big-picture thinking
• Inclination to think out of the box
• A noticeable resilience and ability to adapt
These clues across the life span offer a portrait of dyslexia. Examine them carefully, think about them, and determine if any of these clues fit your child, you, or someone else you are close to. Look for clues in the weaknesses and strengths. Identifying the weaknesses makes it possible to spot dyslexia in children before they are expected to read and in adults after they have developed some degree of reading accuracy but are continuing to show the remnants of earlier problems, reading slowly and with great effort.
If you think you or your child has some of these problems, it is important to note how frequent they are and how many there are. You don’t need to worry about isolated clues or ones that appear very rarely. For you to be concerned, the symptoms must be persistent; anyone can mispronounce a word now and then, or confuse similar-sounding words occasionally. What you are looking for is a persistent pattern–the occurrence of a number of these symptoms over a prolonged period of time. That represents a likelihood of dyslexia.
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Product details
- Publisher : Knopf; Illustrated edition (March 24, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 608 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385350325
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385350327
- Item Weight : 1.95 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.45 x 1.5 x 9.6 inches
-
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Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2018
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This is the most important book you can purchase to understand dyslexia. My husband and I both listened to the book in our automobiles within months of hearing our daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia. I quickly purchased the hard copy, and completely highlighted important points, and took notes! notes! notes!!! I refer to these notes and this book almost every week to make sure I stay on target for her reading and writing education. One thing that I refer to all of the time is about 15 techniques/exercises this book mentions to use. Our school already has used this book as the foundation of it's special reading program for a number of years. It is an award-winning school. As suggested in this book, we had our daughter tutored last summer 3 times a week by an experienced tutor who uses a dyslexia-approved curriculum listed in this book. We continued to follow this book's recommendations all year. Results will absolutely vary, but my daughter has gone from the bottom 5% in reading at her grade level (in other words, she couldn't read) to the 60th percentile of her grade level (she can now read signs, menus, directions, books). She still has a way to go, but she can now read and write! This is the foundational book to help! A friend of mine also used the book's suggestions without hiring a tutor, (she tutored him herself as best she could) but switched her son to a school that used dyslexia-approved curriculum, with an experienced teacher (as suggested by this book) and her son's reading jumped two grade levels, from a pre-1st grade level to entry third grade level in one year.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2019
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For all of the hype over this book, I’ve found several websites and videos to be more helpful. Perhaps due to the age of this edition. It was written when NCLB was a shining light of hope instead of the relic it’s now seen as. As a parent, the first 1/4 was helpful, but the rest clearly put a tremendous amount of faith in school system reading programs. The moral of the remaining 3/4 seemed to be: If you simply screen the children early enough and teach them systemic phonics instruction from an early enough age, you won’t have a dyslexia issue. This seems counterintuitive to the earlier point that it’s a processing issue, and therefore reading is going to be more difficult for these kids, full stop. Perhaps I misread, but my overall impression was the author saying that kids who struggle are doing so because they simply didn’t receive early enough intervention. However just because someone is taught phonics, doesn’t mean that the depth or the pacing is correct, especially since dyslexia occurs on a continuum.
In short, this book left me wanting a LOT more info- it did not teach me anything I didn’t already know. I feel like it’s a good general book to hand a parent with no teaching experience, who wants someone else to solve their child’s dyslexia issue in a relatively hands off fashion and simply wants an overview. It’s not a great book for parents who are already familiar with phonics instruction, OG methods, and wants to be the primary driver in addressing and teaching their dyslexic child. It’s clear the author does not believe the parent is in the best position to be their child’s instructor (which is ironic considering how little faith is given to public school dyslexia resources in the same book). I’ll be seeking out additional resources.
If you are reading this review and want to read this book I suggest buying the newer version. Hopefully its been significantly revised.
In short, this book left me wanting a LOT more info- it did not teach me anything I didn’t already know. I feel like it’s a good general book to hand a parent with no teaching experience, who wants someone else to solve their child’s dyslexia issue in a relatively hands off fashion and simply wants an overview. It’s not a great book for parents who are already familiar with phonics instruction, OG methods, and wants to be the primary driver in addressing and teaching their dyslexic child. It’s clear the author does not believe the parent is in the best position to be their child’s instructor (which is ironic considering how little faith is given to public school dyslexia resources in the same book). I’ll be seeking out additional resources.
If you are reading this review and want to read this book I suggest buying the newer version. Hopefully its been significantly revised.
49 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2018
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I'm not sure whether or not my 7 year old granddaughter is dyslexic, but in the middle of 1st grade, she began to receive help from a reading specialist at her school 3 times per week. When she was younger, she loved books. Starting 1st grade, she did not want to read at all. She excels in math and loves school in general, but I was afraid she would become so frustrated by her difficulty with reading that she would "turn off" to school. I found this book to be thorough. Although my granddaughter doesn't demonstrate all the symptoms described, she does exhibit some. I
have been implementing suggestions offered and purchased several of the book series recommended. My granddaughter is improving her reading fluency and is increasing her self-confidence. I would heartily recommend this book to anyone who has a child that is finding reading a chore!
have been implementing suggestions offered and purchased several of the book series recommended. My granddaughter is improving her reading fluency and is increasing her self-confidence. I would heartily recommend this book to anyone who has a child that is finding reading a chore!
9 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2019
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I'm reading this book as recommend by many, so I expect it to be an amazing read! But it was a little disappointing to see the errors on the pages. Something got mixed up and it's like the paragraphs got switched around or something....not sure what happened or why. A paragraph ends but the next begins mid-sentence a few times right around page 47-49. I'll update as I finish reading.

3.0 out of 5 stars
Publisher/Proof reading errors
By Stephanie Arndt on March 6, 2019
I'm reading this book as recommend by many, so I expect it to be an amazing read! But it was a little disappointing to see the errors on the pages. Something got mixed up and it's like the paragraphs got switched around or something....not sure what happened or why. A paragraph ends but the next begins mid-sentence a few times right around page 47-49. I'll update as I finish reading.
By Stephanie Arndt on March 6, 2019
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10 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2021
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I have dyslexia and have been looking for a good self help book. Didn't know I had it until I was 55.
Knowing you have it and admitting it, takes you from about a 5 to a 7 but you still struggle. The first thing I see is that this book has 579 pages. Hey, we have reading problems! The book points this out very well. So in about 6 months I'll be able to finish it. This book is for someone that cares for someone else with dyslexia and will guide them in helping that person. It does not give the dyslexic person tips and tricks to help deal with the short comings. My father had dyslexia and never knew it. Also other family members have it and don't even know it. The sky would be the limit if I could just over come this disability. The title is deceptive.
Knowing you have it and admitting it, takes you from about a 5 to a 7 but you still struggle. The first thing I see is that this book has 579 pages. Hey, we have reading problems! The book points this out very well. So in about 6 months I'll be able to finish it. This book is for someone that cares for someone else with dyslexia and will guide them in helping that person. It does not give the dyslexic person tips and tricks to help deal with the short comings. My father had dyslexia and never knew it. Also other family members have it and don't even know it. The sky would be the limit if I could just over come this disability. The title is deceptive.
3 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2017
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Must read for every teacher and parent. Just a must read. Our brains are not hard wired to read, and while most people pick it up over time with patience and support, there are some kids for whom this approach does not work, and that is who this book was written to help.Even if you are an adult who struggled with reading, it can help you. Please read, share, and encourage.
15 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

trina hatchett
5.0 out of 5 stars
... bought this and I simply can't tell you how amazing it is
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 8, 2015Verified Purchase
I just started a job as my school's dyslexia expert and I bought this and I simply can't tell you how amazing it is. Absolutely brilliant. It's theoretical and practical and full of information! Great great book for teachers or parents!
3 people found this helpful
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Stephanie
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very good book this was a real help to a family ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 7, 2014Verified Purchase
Very good book this was a real help to a family member struggling with this problem Well written and a good lay our thank you
2 people found this helpful
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CS
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well researched
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 27, 2015Verified Purchase
This book has some very good helpful strategies for dyslexia.
One person found this helpful
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high5
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, pragmatic, with scientific explanation in easy language
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 30, 2012Verified Purchase
I have used the guidance in the book to improve my daughter's challenges with dyslexia and I have a success story to tell. She excelled in her exams after having been below the average over the last 2 years. Time (and money) really well spent.
4 people found this helpful
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Mr B L Sleeman
5.0 out of 5 stars
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 4, 2014Verified Purchase
good book if a little long winded!
One person found this helpful
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