Dyslexia Signs: Difficulties with the
Little Words

A frequent comment made by parents of children struggling with their reading is, ‘He is so careless, he gets the big difficult words, but keeps making silly mistakes on all the little ones.’ Certainly, the poor reader gets stuck on difficult words, but many do seem to make things worse by making mistakes on simple words they should be able to manage — like if, to, and.

The following are indications of problems with the little words:

• Misreads little words, such as a for and, the for a, from for for, then for there, were for with.

• Omits or reads twice little words like the, and, but, in.
• Adds little words which do not appear in the text.

It is important to note that this is extremely common, and not a sign that a child is particularly careless or lazy. There are three likely reasons for this, says Dr. Roger Morgan in his book Helping Children Read. Firstly, big words are not actually more difficult to remember once they’ve been seen once, than the common little words. Aeroplane is not much like other words and is fairly easy to recognize (or to guess correctly when you come across a long word starting with ‘ae’ in a book with aeroplanes in it!) — but telling the difference between if and of needs much closer inspection.

Secondly, when a difficult word is spotted coming up in a sentence, there is a natural tendency to look ahead to it and pay less attention to the smaller words leading up to it — increasing the risk of ‘careless’ mistakes. This is like a mountaineer setting his eyes on the mountain ahead and tripping over a molehill on the way.

Thirdly, getting the small ‘linking words’ in a sentence right (like to, and, so) relies very much on knowing the meaning of the whole sentence. If you are a child spending so much time on fighting with each word that you’ve lost the meaning of the sentence, then you’ve also lost your major clue to the smaller words in it.

As an illustration of how a child’s reading can suffer if he hasn’t grasped the meaning of the sentence as a whole, consider the following sentence with a word missing. ‘His mother put his dinner down — the kitchen table.’ Knowing the meaning of the sentence, you know that the missing word must be on. But a child who has spent perhaps half a minute struggling to get to that point in the sentence after getting stuck on mother and dinner (and noticing kitchen coming up as the next unknown) quite literally won’t have a clue what should go in the gap. If the word on is there instead of the gap, he may well confuse it with no if he has difficulties recognizing the order of letters, because he doesn’t have the meaning at his fingertips to guide him as a good reader does. This is like the learner driver who expends so much concentration on just making the car go that he has no idea where he is in town, says Dr. Morgan.