As the child develops and continues to have difficulties with literacy skills, it becomes easier to observe the specific indicators which point to dyslexia, particularly if the child appears to cope with oral language when reading, writing and spelling are poor in comparison.

Such indicators might be:

• performance in reading, writing and spelling is lower than expected;
• variable performance (good days and bad days);
• oral language better than written language;
• rate of reading slow;
• accuracy of reading poor;
• reading lacks fluency;
• phonic decoding and encoding for reading are problematic;
• common words not retained in memory for reading and spelling;
• bizarre spelling;
• attempted spelling shows strange combinations of letters;
• lack of consistency in spelling;
• inability to retain facts, concepts, new learning in memory;
• organisation of work on a page;
• poor use of punctuation in rush to get ideas down on paper;
• mispronouncing multi-syllabic words;
• poor self-esteem which may also lead to bad behaviour;
• left-right awareness and directionality problems;
• handwriting if fine motor skills are affected but poor handwriting may be used to disguise poor spelling;
• persistent b/d confusion – some children write capital B and D inappropriately in words to counter the confusion with lower case b/d;
• motor skills problems;
• poor spatial awareness;
• following instructions when there are several together.