Video from 2005 still current

The purpose of workshops such as A Taste of Dyslexia was to allow non-dyslexic people to understand some of the impacts of dyslexia for themselves, i.e. to see in their own minds while doing activities.  There is still a need for non-dyslexic people to gain such experience, so it is worth making this video available on the web.

Dyslexic people themselves also found it valuable to watch the video or be present at a workshop: it helps to put their own experience into a wider context; it gives confidence; and then enables them to take agency over how they work their way through being dyslexic.

The field of specific learning difficulties has grown since 2005 but very little needs to be changed in this video.  The only comments worth making relate to the definition of dyslexia, the expansion beyond dyslexia and the wider range of options for discussing motivation.

Definition of dyslexia

You can’t look at a person and know whether they are dyslexic or not.  Exactly how to describe or define dyslexia has involved many studies and papers.  The latest being commissioned by the SpLD Assessment Standards Committee (SASC ) (Carroll, et al., 2025; Holden, et al., 2025), some 19 years after the one discussed in A Taste of Dyslexia 2005.  The SASC definition is:

• Dyslexia is primarily a set of processing difficulties that affect the acquisition of reading and spelling.
• In dyslexia, some or all aspects of literacy attainment are weak in relation to age, standard teaching and instruction, and level of other attainments.
• Across languages and age groups, difficulties in reading and spelling fluency are a key marker of dyslexia.
• The nature and developmental trajectory of dyslexia depends on multiple genetic and environmental influences.
• Dyslexic difficulties exist on a continuum and can be experienced to various degrees of severity.
• Dyslexia can affect the acquisition of other skills, such as mathematics, reading comprehension or learning another language.
• The most commonly observed cognitive impairment in dyslexia is a difficulty in phonological processing (i.e. in phonological awareness, phonemic decoding skill or phonological memory).  However, phonological difficulties do not fully explain the variability that is observed.
• Working memory, orthographic skills and processing speed problems can contribute to the impact of dyslexia and therefore should be assessed.
• Dyslexia frequently co-occurs with one or more other developmental difficulty, including developmental language disorder, dyscalculia, ADHD, and developmental coordination disorder.

The video has a list of commonly recognised problems and the discussion is based on the list rather than the definition of dyslexia at the time.

Expansion of SpLDs

Dyslexia was the first specific learning difficulty (SpLD) to cause worry in education settings.  As more data was gathered and research done, it became obvious that there were clusters of similar problems without any problem with underlying language skills and a collection of dys- syndromes were identified.  At the time of the 2005 video, these syndromes had not been formulated into the ones recognised now, so the discussion is all about dyslexia.  In later workshops, these and similar activities have been used to show the impacts of the other syndromes.

The current umbrella term SpLD covers dyslexia, dyspraxia developmental coordination disorder) AD(H)D and dyscalculia.  I use the phrase ‘dyslexia/ SpLD’ because ‘dyslexia’ is the most familia and ‘SpLD’ widens the context.

Motivation

A key element to managing dyslexia/ SpLD is knowing how your mind works and being able to keep it working well.  One ingredient is a person recognising what motivates them and being able to use that knowledge to deal with unsympathetic tasks.  In a video of 1¼ hours, it is not possible to cover all the options; there are several others than the Myers-Briggs Personality Type system and whether a person is a Right-brain (holistic) or Left-brain (linear) thinker.  These issues will be covered in future videos on this website.