Do We Need Sherlock Holmes to Find Our Dyslexic Children?

Assessing dyslexia in bilingual and multilingual children without confusing reading difficulties with language acquisition

Sometimes, identifying dyslexia in a multilingual child can feel like detective work.

Not because children are mysterious puzzles to be solved, but because the evidence is often layered, scattered, and easy to misread.

Especially when the child is multilingual.

When a bilingual or multilingual child struggles with reading, the problem is rarely visible from one angle only.

The difficulty may be somewhere between language development, schooling history, emotional context, access to instruction, and a possible learning disorder.

Assessing dyslexia in bilingual and multilingual children requires more than checking whether a child struggles with reading in the school language. Schools need to consider language exposure, literacy history, quality of instruction, response to intervention, social and emotional context, and signs of persistent reading difficulty over time.

When a multilingual child struggles with reading, the questions arising should be complex:

What does the evidence show across language history, literacy development, classroom performance, intervention, and response to support?

Or:

How do we gather enough evidence to tell the difference between language acquisition, lack of opportunity, emotional stress, and a possible learning disorder?

That distinction matters because multilingual children can be misread in both directions.

A child who needs more exposure, better instruction, or time to develop academic language may be pushed too quickly towards a learning-disorder explanation.

At the same time, a child with dyslexia may be told for too long that the problem is “just language” or “just catching up”.

Both mistakes delay the right support.

Structured approaches matter

There are structured ways schools can approach this more carefully.

• Steve Gill’s ELL Critical Data Process helps teams gather critical information before deciding whether a child needs more language support, targeted intervention, or a special education evaluation.

• Multi-Tiered System of Supports, MTSS, and Response to Intervention, RTI, are also useful because they do not rely only on a single moment of testing. They look at what happens when a child receives increasing levels of support over time. Does the child respond? Do the difficulties reduce? Do the same reading problems persist despite appropriate intervention?

• WIDA guidance for identifying multilingual learners with specific learning disabilities gives schools a way to organise referral data and avoid simplistic conclusions based only on language proficiency.

  
  

• Dynamic assessment adds another layer because it looks not only at what a child knows now, but how the child learns when taught. That matters because two children can perform poorly on the same task for very different reasons.

  
  

The key point is this:

No single test should write the whole script for the child.

What should schools look at when assessing a multilingual child for dyslexia?

A multilingual child’s reading difficulty needs to be understood through several layers:

• language history

• exposure and instruction

• classroom performance

• samples of reading and writing

• response to targeted support

• comparison with peers from similar language backgrounds

• social, emotional, and educational context

That last one I will unpack in more detail in my next post. The topic deserves it.

Social impacts on a child can significantly affect learning behaviours and performance.

In some cases, this can be mistaken for dyslexia or coexist with it.

If we ignore that, we may misread the child entirely.

A good assessment does not label fast.

It looks under every stone.

Magnifying glass optional.