Dyslexia Treatment and Solutions

Before we go over dyslexia treatment, let’s understand how dyslexia impacts one’s learning. Watch the following video to discover what dyslexia is and the impact it has.

Now that you’ve watched what it is like to go through the journey of dyslexia, what do you do to address it? Kids as well as adults, can improve their skills when you use best practices.

Best Practices for Dyslexia Treatment, Learning Disabilities, and Reading Problems

Best practices for improving reading skills also improve thinking and writing skills. Attention needs to be given to multiple areas to improve reading skills of those with dyslexia, learning disabilities, or those that have reading problems.

Additionally, there is a hierarchy of instruction for improving reading skills. You will want to start with improving phonemic awareness and then incorporate phonics and fluency. As fluency starts to improve, you will add in the vocabulary and comprehension piece. Writing is the doing part of thinking. You cannot write without thinking. The vocabulary and text comprehension component encompasses this.

Prominent National Institute of Health (NIH) researchers state:

• “The lack of phonemic awareness is the most powerful determinant of the likelihood of failure to learn to read.”
• “Phonemic awareness is more highly related to learning to read… than tests of general intelligence, reading readiness, and listening comprehension.”
• “Phonemic awareness is the most important core and causal factor separating normal and disabled readers.”

Sally Shawitz states, “I urge parents of dyslexic children to make fluency training their number one priority.”

Implementing dyslexia treatment with all five aspects can be done is a relatively painless manner. There is no magic pill. Work does have to be done, however, progress can be made within a few days and weeks. We do this in a matter of a few weeks in our ASW Reading, Writing, and Study Skills Program combined with our ASW Spelling and Phonics Program. The Spelling and Phonics Program focuses on the phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency pieces. This includes encoding, decoding, spelling, and fluency.

As you start putting one piece in place and have success, you add in the next piece. Within several weeks you are addressing and incorporating all of this in about 20 to 25 minutes a day. Our ASW Programs guide you with this by providing daily to do’s or calendars to make it easy for you. Video and audio lessons are provided.

Effective Dyslexia and/or Reading Intervention Components

• Phonemic Awareness
  • The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds – phonemes – in spoken words.
  • A part of phonological awareness.
•  Phonics
  • This is the ability to accurately relate an auditory sound with a visual symbol.
  • This is also known as the alphabetic principle
•  Fluency
  • Reading fluency is the ability to retrieve words automatically.
  • When you read fluently, you do so without thinking of the reading process. Reading automatically gives you the ability to comprehend what you have read.
•  Vocabulary
  • Vocabulary is a strong indicator of student success. When students fail, it is often due to a lack of word knowledge, vocabulary.
  • Using keywords or highlighted words and defining them increased comprehension of textbooks. Playing with words also increases vocabulary.
• Text Comprehension
  • Comprehension is the ability to understand, analyze, synthesize, and use what you have read.
  • Evidence-based practices conclude that reading comprehension strategies need to include a variety of strategies such as using graphic organizers to manipulate what you have read into a graphical display.