How Dyslexia Changes at Different Ages [Premium]

With all of the advances in our understanding of early intervention, dyslexia in older students and young adults often gets short shrift. The paper by Dr. Kathleen Niesen and colleagues has some interesting findings that have important points for identification, accommodations, and understanding of both the challenges and strengths of adolescents and young adults with dyslexia. Importantly, the authors made this point: “…if dyslexia was not diagnosed earlier in schooling, young adults do not qualify for accommodations even if as adolescents and adults they meet research criteria for dyslexia on evidence-based assessment. Such assessment practices do not seem fair or sensible or consistent with the spirit of the Americas for Disabilities legislation.” The point made was that dyslexia missed in the early grades usually meant dyslexia […]

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Breaking Research : Dyslexia in Adolescents and Adults [Premium]

An important paper was published this month from the University of Washington, entitled “Evidence-Based Reading and Writing Assessment for Dyslexia in Adolescents and Young Adults.” The paper is especially important guiding testing professionals who assess teens and adults for dyslexia or see gifted or twice-exceptional students. This paper also takes a more systematic look at the roles of individual factors like working memory and executive function on dyslexia and reading and spelling performance. The data will be helpful in targeting educational interventions and can also guide requests for testing accommodations. There are interesting observations too in that paper that will help with characterizing the strengths that occur among adolescent and adult dyslexics, with implications for twice-exceptional or gifted students with dyslexia. In several areas, adolescent / adult […]

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Multimedia Learning Best for Dyslexics But How to Introduce Audio? [Premium]

“To optimize learning, it is more efficient to provide children with dyslexia with extra audio.” In a recent multimedia learning test of 11 year olds and typically-reading peers, dyslexic students were found to learn most efficiently if they were provided with text + audio or audio only, rather than text-only. How often is this happening over the course of every school day? To smoothly integrate audio in classroom learning and boost a child’s efficiency of learning preparation it’s necessary and audio should already be a friend. Summer is a great time to introduce audiobooks if your kids haven’t tried them before. 1. START WITH A FAMILIAR BOOK – Start with a familiar book or book series to smooth the entry of audiobooks. It’ll be much […]

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[PREMIUM] Resources for Auditory Processing and ELLS

Pronunciation errors are often a clue that the sounds for certain words aren’t being processed accurately. Middle sounds and certain blends may be especially challenging to hear. Students who don’t hear the sounds correctly are less likely to be accurately filing different sounds associated with words, leading to inaccurate reading aloud and problematic spelling. Many students who successfully get past the basic decoding stage, flounder in this middle stage, never quite making it to fluent reading or accurate spelling. Dyslexic adults who say that their spellcheck can’t find their misspellings often have auditory processing challenges that haven’t been recognized. English Language Learners have a harder time learning sounds that don’t occur or are different in their own language (language interference). Certain curricula such as Lindamood […]

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Sight Words / Tricky Words [Premium]

Sight words are words that must be memorized by sight, rather than being sounded out phonetically. Sight words are important to learn because once children are able to read the most common 100 sight words, they can read up to 50% of most children’s literature. Mastery of the top 300 words, gives students access to 75% of what is printed in most children’s literature. It’s especially important for dyslexic students to learn their sight words with multisensory strategies because sight words account for many of the most commonly misspelled words in writing. You may hear sight words referred to by many names, such as Dolch words, Fry words, high frequency, or even Orton-Gillingham red words. The most important thing to know is that these words […]

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A Home Run Hit with Humorous Poetry [Premium]

Education Prof Benita Bruster was invited to work with five 4th grade boys identified as struggling readers. When she asked them to suggest a favorite poet, the response was not unexpected “Poetry is dumb”, “Girls like poetry”, etc. When she asked about a favorite musician, she got a rousing response – but then she countered with, “I hate to break it to you, but you all like poetry…lyrics are just poems set to music.” Drawing on some cutting edge academic research (see Turn Your Boys to Readers on page 14), Benita predicted that boys would enjoy poems that were “silly, bizarre, gross, or absurd”. She chose her start with the poem, A Wild Turkey Comments on His Portrait. “Rather than passing out copies of the […]

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Could it be GRAMMAR? [Premium]

Hidden grammar difficulties can be common reason why older students with dyslexia hit a plateau with reading, writing, and even testing. The problem is so subtle at times that many difficulties may be missed for years if not for their entire academic careers. One of the reasons that the problem is difficult to detect is that even many standardized tests that are commonly used for assessing the possibility of dyslexia either don’t test for it or they don’t pinpoint the problems that cause the student to struggle. In the early grades, students who have “overcome dyslexia” by the mastery of decoding, may find they hit a plateau as sentences become longer and more complex. In the middle and high school years, unrecognized grammar problems may […]

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The Best Fonts for Dyslexia

  With increasing awareness of the visual differences associated with dyslexia and the high incidence of dyslexia in the general population (15-20%), the world seems poised to change how they present print to dyslexic readers. What fonts are best for dyslexic...

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The Remediated Student – WHAT TO EXPECT [PREMIUM]

For the overwhelming majority of dyslexics, early intervention helps with the decoding step of reading. Usually 2-3 months of intervention is enough to see a measurable  difference, and at least in our experience, 1-3 years to bring most children from failing their grade to being able to keep up in diverse subjects at grade-level with appropriate accommodations and sometimes modifications in place. What Should a Teacher Expect with a Remediated Student? Remediated students can vary a great deal depending on whether they are gifted, dysgraphic, dyspraxic, dyscalculic, have attention or working memory difficulties, or English as a Second Language. In general, though, students who have successfully been remediated are able to decode text on grade-level, but may still have slow and inaccurate reading, difficulty reading aloud, […]

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