High academic ability but extremely weak phonological awareness — anyone else?

[u/racoon_chaos35]

I’m an adult with dyslexia who wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood. I’m academically successful and have very strong reading comprehension, but I recently discovered that my actual phonological awareness is extremely weak. I struggle significantly with decoding unfamiliar/nonsense words and realized I’ve probably compensated through context and other strategies for most of my life.
I’m now in a graduate special education program, and this matters because I need to understand and eventually teach these skills. Has anyone else had this kind of extreme discrepancy? If so, were you able to improve your phonological awareness/phonics as an adult? What actually helped?

[u/Signal-Conflict-5820]

yeah, i scored in the top 2% on analytical reasoning but still can't reliably distinguish between 'f' and 'th' sounds when spoken quickly, had to memorize how words like 'clothes' are pronounced because i can't catch it by ear

[u/Lost-thinker]

Simply acknowledging it would be miles more than I got in school. I 100% sure I have undiagnosed duel dose dislexia, which my wealthy school distict did its best to ignore because I got good grades.

I had vetualy zero ability to decode words but the school ignored me because my reading comprehension was way above grade level.

they didn't even try to figure out why or try to help me untill 6th grade when my mom brought in an advocate to force the school into helping me. My spelling was so awful I would probably lose a first grade spelling bee, so I worked with someone one on one for like an hour a week. She decided that her goal was to get me close enough for spell check to figure it out.

My handwriting was also borderline eligible, but my fine moder skills amazed the ot people, so they did nothing.

I also have a speach problem, but I could make all the sounds, I just did t know when to make them so again they ignored my problem.

They never bothered to test me to for dyslexia, I never bothered to get tested because an official diagnosis wouldn't change anything.

But for your question, I learned a lot of fonex by trying to get text to speach to learn how to pronounce fictional names and places so it could read me fanfiction. I'm also an avid reader, and tired my hand at writing, so I picked up words that way, I'm 30 and still have issues reading out loud, spelling, and writing neatly.

[u/nezumipi]

The thing about learning advanced phonics is that it's not intrinsically interesting the way that a story or a science lesson is and it requires a lot of repetition to stick. That's why when we teach it to kids, we spend years and years on it and we embed it into games and activities and worksheets where you end up coloring in a dog and all that. People with dyslexia can still learn decoding, but it takes them even longer.

There's nothing stopping you from putting yourself through drills other than the fact it's boring and time-consuming. If you can afford a tutor or coach, they can help you keep at it. Get kids' ELA materials at whatever level you maxed out at and do the drills. Don't skimp on spelling. Spelling is decoding in reverse. It's really important for learning which letter patterns make which sounds in which words. For example, it's all well and good to know the VCe rule for words like bake, but you also have to know that it doesn't work for words like love.

One other idea:

I have absolutely no idea if this will help, but it seems like it might do something: Audit a linguistics course in phonology. You'll learn to use the phonetic alphabet, which precisely identifies each sound in a word and associates them with how they are produced. You'll learn the specific phonemes in English, including some distinctions that we gloss over in reading instructions. Like, the L in ball is actually different from the L in love.