Dyslexia
Dyslexia is an umbrella term that generally means that "the inability to read and write is not due to lack of schooling or experience with the language or to other disabilities such as mental retardation, emotional disturbance, or sensory impairments." (from How to Become a Better Reading Teacher, Strategies for Assessment and Intervention edited by Lillian R. Putnam). Recent findings suggest that dyslexia is linked to phonological processing difficulties and problems with written language acquisition. These deficits are linked to neurological problems — a short circuit, so to speak--instead of laziness, stupidity, or a poor home environment.
Phonological processing — the ability to connect visual symbols and their sounds and process them — is essential to reading. The phonemic development program that we use is the only specific program mentioned in the November 22, 1999 Newsweek article, "Dyslexia and the New Science of Reading" as an effective program to remediate dyslexia.
These characteristics describe the person with dyslexia and the person with poor phonemic awareness:
- Has problems learning letter sounds, especially vowel sounds
- Has difficulty sounding out and blending letters of words and syllables
- Reads slowly as if seeing each word for the first time
- Reads too fast making many mistakes
- Has difficulty remembering common words and sight words
- Relies too much on context clues to identify new words
- Tends to guess a word by using the first or first and last letters only
- Reverses letter order when reading
- Substitutes a word that is close in meaning such as “small”for “little”
- Misreads sight words such as “to”, “the”, ”some”, “was”
- Has difficulty remembering letter order when spelling
Adults and children do not need to spend their lives dealing with dyslexia. Call Stategic Education to begin lifelong changes now.