What is Dyslexia?

I recently attended a conference in Australia on Dyslexia. The keynote speaker was Dr Craig Wright, a cognitive psychologist. He spoke about Dyslexia and what we can do as educators to help learners with this difficulty.  So what is Dyslexia?  'Dys' means poor and 'lexia' means words. So Dyslexia means poor with single words. To translate, I like to refer to Dyslexia as having difficulty reading words on a page. The main difficulty with Dyslexic students is that they have difficulty reading single words on a page. So, if you are going to test these types of students for automaticity using single word tests such as the BURT Word Test, then don't be surprised when they perform poorly.  It's actually easier for Dyslexics to read words in context.