Can Adults Have Dyslexia?

Absolutely!  Approximately 20% of the population has dyslexia, and that includes both adults and kids.  Just because an adult can read (and there are many who can’t read or can’t read well, but hide it) does not mean they don’t have dyslexia.  Dyslexia is a different way of processing information that doesn’t disappear, even after learning to read.  A lot of time and energy is devoted to helping kids with dyslexia, and rightly so.  But don’t forget that many adults also have dyslexia and if they haven’t been identified or had specific help to develop the necessary skills, it is still affecting them every single day.

Many adults with dyslexia don’t know they are dyslexic.  Some comments I’ve heard from adults with dyslexia include:

• I can read fine, but it takes a long time
• Reading is tiring/boring
• I’m too busy to read/I don’t have time to read
• I’m not a book person
• I’m just not very smart
• School wasn’t for me

and many other variations.  Many adults with dyslexia have learned to read, but struggled through school. Others never mastered reading, but went on to find other ways around needing to read.  One thing I have learned about dyslexia is that the stigma of not being able to read, or finding reading difficult, is huge.  Adults with dyslexia can, and do, go to great lengths to hide their challenges, which also means that they often don’t seek out help to overcome them.

An area of the brain associated with word form (integrating what a word looks like, sounds like, and means) is under active in people with dyslexia. This particular region (occipital-temporal region) is integral to fast, proficient reading.  This is the reason why adults with dyslexia are often identified by their slow reading.  They have mastered the slower mental pathways used when learning to read, but have not been able to transition from those slow learning pathways to the faster skilled reader pathways.  If you look above at the majority of reasons adults give for not reading, slow reading pathways makes a lot of sense.

So how can an adult improve these skills?  It depends on where their challenge lies.  If the difficulty is with decoding words (being able to read words that haven’t been seen before, or mixing up similar words like conscious and conscience), then going back to phonics is key to ensure the development of effective decoding skills.  This can be done alone, but will be easier with a tutor who is familiar with systematic methods of developing those key skills.

If decoding isn’t an issue, but boredom, fatigue, or slow reading speed is the problem, then overlearning is what is needed.  Overlearning is a term coined by Sally Shaywitz and is essentially a lot of practice in being able to accurately recognize and read words until they become automatic. It is repetition, drill, and practice.  These are often words of doom in educational circles today, but nevertheless, essential to mastering any skill including reading.

An adult with dyslexia can improve their reading skills, but first they must overcome the embarrassment of admitting that they don’t read well.  This is incredibly difficult.  The same techniques that work for teaching reading to dyslexic children also work for adults, but the determination and courage it takes for an adult to seek out that help is enormous. The other challenge for adults is committing the time and energy necessary to make progress.  Often progress is slow and gradual and it is easy to give up because it doesn’t seem like you’re gaining any ground, and there are many other demands on your time.  Just as we need to encourage and reward kids for making the effort and consistently working on their reading, adults are no different.  They need just as much, if not more, support, encouragement, and short term rewards for consistently working on developing their reading skills.  Working with a skilled tutor and setting realistic goals can be key to maintaining motivation.

Adults should also look to technology to help them.  Most computers now have text to speech software embedded in them that will allow electronic documents to be read to right from the desktop.  Also, there are a variety of pen-style readers that can be scanned across a line of text on paper and will read it out loud or through a headset.  Assistive technology can be a great way to bridge a skills gap!

Photo by Craig Adderley from Pexels