Playtimes HK Magazine Winter Issue 2018/2019 | Page 60

D y i
education
Dilemmas:
Knowing How to Help
You have just been told your child may have dysgraphia
– what to do next? Jerome Barty-Taylor advises on how
to tackle a difficult learning difference head-on
D
ysgraphia is a difficult
diagnosis. It is best
understood as a condition
which causes trouble with
written expression. The label is usually
applied to seemingly neurotypical, or
ordinary, students who have serious
trouble putting words onto paper.
Frequently, dysgraphic students go
undiagnosed during the early years
or will be labelled work-shy or lazy by
teachers, since there does not seem to
be anything explicitly wrong with them.
Part of the trouble with diagnosis is
that dysgraphia presents in a number
of different ways. Its symptoms are
grouped under the DSM-5 manual of
psychiatric disorders as “an impairment
in written expression”. Understanding
these differences are essential for
parents who wish to help children
presenting with the condition.
Dysgraphic children often display
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high verbal articulacy and developed
debating skills, yet they struggle to
communicate precisely in writing. Poor
fine motor skills will produce problems
with pencil grip and irregular letter forms
while visual-spatial weaknesses may
lead to issues in letter discrimination
and spacing (i.e. words get bunched
together irregularly.) But by far the
biggest issues arise from weaknesses
in language processing and working
memory. Students with dysgraphia will
struggle to come up with what to write
in response to a creative or analytical
prompt, or else they will write in
generalities. Oral examination will almost
always reveal deeper understanding, but
there is a gap in how they process the
oral language and commit it to paper.
Dysgraphic students normally also
struggle with the conventions of written
language and may use homophones
incorrectly and repeat or miss words
in their sentences. When you read a
sentence like the following, it is easy to
understand why a child might be labelled
as careless within the classroom; it
also illustrates the real challenges for
conducting a literacy intervention:
“So I think that the reason William
the Conqueror beat Harold was
because his his army was better. And
he had better tactics. Harold was a
week ruler. So that is why William won.”
An intervention to support a
student with dysgraphia should be
approached from various angles. To
develop expressive language, models
for writing are essential. Work from an
assumption that a dysgraphic child
knows more language than they will
express and ask leading questions
which force them to substantiate their
ideas. Only by first expressing language
orally, and then using a thesaurus to
generate synonyms, will a student learn