How Do We Help People With Dyslexia?

Dyslexia is a phonological processing deficit.  That means that those with dyslexia have trouble isolating and manipulating the sounds (phonemes) in oral language.  

It turns out that this skill is crucial for reading.  Why?  In order to read the word “cat” I need to know that each of the little squiggles that we call letters actually represents a sound. I then need to connect the letters to their sounds and be able to blend those sounds into a big sound that we call a word.  I then need to connect that word to its meaning.  To be able to read I need to be able to do that process effortlessly and easily with every word I see (Sort of.  We go through this process with new words until they become familiar.  Then we actually use a faster process in the brain.  We need to use this process first to access the faster process).

What happens when people with dyslexia try to read is that they see the letters appropriately, but when they try to connect the letters to sounds, that pathway in the brain is not developed correctly.  As a result, since it’s difficult for people with dyslexia to access the pathway in the brain that “typical” readers use, they try to compensate with inefficient strategies. They try to memorize what the word looks like and use context clues to figure out what it says.  These strategies do not work well, and nobody can ultimately learn to read this way.

So how do we help kids with dyslexia? We explicitly teach them how to connect letters and groups of letters to sounds and how to manipulate sounds and letters in order to read and spell words.  It turns out that we can actually rewire the brain and repair the damaged pathway with proper instruction.  It isn’t that we can “cure” dyslexia (I hate using that term for dyslexia) but we can minimize the impact on reading and spelling.  Usually we see some spelling impact into adulthood in the form of slightly slower reading and poorer spelling, but nearly all people with dyslexia can become skilled readers.

How is this different from how we teach kids without dyslexia?  It ultimately isn’t.

Good instruction is good instruction.  That said, kids with dyslexia need that instruction to be far more explicit than kids without dyslexia.  In my experience, the more severe the dyslexia, the more explicit it needs to be.