Dyslexia.

The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) definition is: “Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities….”

According to Dr. Robert Myers of the Child Development Institute, "True dyslexia affects about 3 to 6 percent of the population yet in some parts of the country up to 50% of the students are not reading at grade level. This means that the reason for most children not reading at grade level is ineffective reading instruction."

Dr. Reid Lyon, in his article "Reading Disabilities: Why Do Some Children Have Difficulty Learning to Read? What Can Be Done About It?" about the prevention of reading failure: “On the other hand, the early identification of children at-risk for reading failure coupled with the provision of comprehensive early reading interventions can reduce the percentage of children reading below the basic level in the fourth grade (i.e., 38%) to six percent or less...." 

40L volunteers have helped countless students over the past three decades, and most didn't have dyslexia; they were victims of teaching approaches like sight words, 3 cueing, and balanced literacy, which can hinder reading. If your student is struggling, there's a chance it's not dyslexia. 

Poor teaching methods like using sight words can mimic dyslexia by disrupting left-to-right reading. Recent brain research confirms that even proficient adult readers analyze words letter by letter in parallel, contrary to earlier beliefs of whole word recognition.

The Miller Word Identification Assessment (MWIA) can help distinguish between organic dyslexia and reading issues from poor teaching. A slowdown in reading indicates problems from sight word methods, as well as more errors in phonetic words. Proper phonics teaching results in few errors and consistent speed on both sections of the MWIA.

Our free video based Syllables Spell Success lessons are designed to quickly remediate students who suffer from poor teaching. They are also helpful for many students with dyslexia, but dyslexic students not improve as fast and usually need to repeat the lessons.

Emily Hanford’s Article “Hard to Read: How American schools fail kids with dyslexia” explains, “There are proven ways to help people with dyslexia learn to read, and a federal law that's supposed to ensure schools provide kids with help. But across the country, public schools are denying children proper treatment and often failing to identify them with dyslexia in the first place.”

Cognitive Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene explains in his article, The Massive Impact of Literacy on the Brain and its Consequences for Education,

Phonemic Awareness and Phonics

Students with true organic dyslexia usually have phonemic awareness problems. If you can't hear or manipulate the sounds in words, learning to read is especially challenging. This skill, which some pick up naturally, often needs to be taught explicitly before you can start phonics.

As Stanislas Dehaene explains in a study of Portuguese adult volunteers, "Illiterates systematically failed whenever a game required attention to the phoneme level."  (2)

In his article "Literate to Illiterate," Dahaene explores brain changes that occur after learning to read. He states, "Literacy also modifies phonological coding and strengthens the functional and anatomical link between phonemic and graphemic representations." (3)

A free phonemic awareness test is available from Spelfabet. Students who have just a bit of a phonemic awareness problem can be helped with simple explanations of how speech sounds are made and how they combine, but more extensive remediation often requires a specialized program such as Barton's Foundation in Sounds or Lindamood's Phoneme Sequencing Program.

Once phonemic awareness remediation is complete, you can begin phonics remediation. You may be able to begin phonics work after the first few steps of phonemic awareness are complete, and you can work on spelling rules and spelling simple words until phonemic awareness is developed enough to support blending sounds.

Retraining the Brain

The brains of dyslexic students can be retrained with phonics. While this is easier with young children, it is even possible with adult dyslexic students. (4)

Noah Webster's "Blue Backed Speller" method, starting with syllables, may help retrain dyslexic students' brains by focusing on spelling and sounding out syllables before reading words.

The atomic nature of syllables

In her latest book, "The Case for the Prosecution," Geraldine E. Rodgers explains how syllables are the true "atoms" of reading instruction. Using these true "atoms" should help dyslexic students who are having trouble figuring out how to sound out words. 

40L's free video lessons, Syllables Spell Success, are based on syllables. They teach phonics to the 12th grade level and have 2+ syllable words from the first lesson, allowing older struggling students to experience success with high level words.

Geraldine Rodgers” The first flat earth "fact" of many reading experts, their first illusion, is on Level One, syllables, when they talk about using "letter sounds." Yet voice prints show clearly that there IS no such thing as a pure letter sound, except for vowels (and semi-vowels). What we produce instead when we speak (or read properly) are syllable sounds.” (5)

The syllabic nature of speech sounds can be seen in the following waveforms and spectrograms of the words, syllables, and letter sound approximations of the words "edit" & "duty" made using a free phonetics program called Praat.