It doesn't replace early identification, remediation, and support, but reading at home supported the long term reading success of children with a positive family history of dyslexia. The study is interesting one because it followed children for 13 years! The youngest...
Stealth or Compensated Dyslexia [Premium]
There are a variety of terms used to described individuals with dyslexia who have challenges decoding text but then evolve over time to those who can read silently with good compensation. These people can succeed in the highest levels of education and work, but still have non-reading-related challenges (for instance spelling and writing fluency, tip of the tongue word retrieval issues) that persist. We coined the term stealth dyslexia some years ago because in this setting dyslexia could fly under the radar of detection, but others have used terms like compensated or resilient dyslexia to characterize many of these individuals. IS THIS THE GOAL? If you have a student who is still in the throes of learning effective decoding, getting to the the compensated or […]
Getting Your Phone to Read Your Screens and Books Without Audio Versions [Premium]
Maybe you know how to use your Siri or Google’s digital assistant, but do you know how to get all your screens including e-books read to you? For iPhones: Depending on your latest update, some of these settings may look a little different – but Accessibility from your General Settings should lead you to the right area. Some earlier version may just list “Speech”. You can choose to show the controller or hide it and also choose whether you would like text highlighted as it is spoken. The controller overlays any screen. Click on it to open. You can scroll horizontally on the button with numbers to increase or decrease speed. Other commands are listed on the page for Reading all content, speaking on touch. […]
Strengthening Executive Function Skills [Premium]
“Reading isn’t the most challenging part of dyslexia. It’s the executive function…” Executive function consists of different sets of processes in the brain that act like executives in business. Executives supervise all the activities and resources – organizing and prioritizing activities, developing plans, and making sure actions are properly executed. CHALLENGES AMONG CHILDREN AND ADULTS Executive function challenges that are commonly reported among dyslexic children and adults include limitations in working memory, task monitoring, inhibitory control, set-shifting, and organization (read more here). What that pattern also often means is that learning and working efficiency is at its best when information and tasks can be processed in smaller bits, a system is developed for checking and double-checking work, non-distracting learning and work environments are essential, and […]
Text-to-Speech is Getting Better [Premium]
If you haven’t been using text-to-speech lately, you’ll be in for quite a treat. Innovations in voice generation and cloning have made many free and premium (pay) voices better than ever. If you haven’t visited our Dyslexic Advantage online library lately (HERE), you may not know that we’re adding audio players to all our articles. After 160 issues (newsletter and premium combined), we have a tremendous library that we’ll be converting to playlists for those of you who prefer to listen. If you access the audio on our web pages, you can also adjust the speed. If you or your student had trouble with listening to text-to-speech in the past, you might want to retry text-to-speech apps or programs. They have improved dramatically and if […]
Where Classroom Reading Fluency Practice Can Go Wrong
Reading fluency is defined as an ability to read texts with accuracy, a good rate, and good expression (sometimes the latter two are referred to as automaticity and prosody). Strong reading fluency is a goal that all children should have on their path to becoming...
Question: Keeping Up with Wilson at School [Premium]
Question: I have a third grade student who attends a school that used Wilson Fundations in the earlier grades. The problem is that even though my daughter did some summer work, she’s been having trouble keeping up. She’s dropped down a level from her peers so that she’s just repeating what she had been taught before. There is less stress in the lower group, but would changing her to a different curriculum be a better option? Answer: This is a difficult question to answer specifically. Ideally, someone who really knows your student could give you specific guidance on whether repetition or a new curriculum might be a better move. The Wilson Fundations program is designed for general education classrooms. It (as well as other programs […]
Reading Beyond Level
Don't restrict students to decodable readers. It's a little like trying to feed an elephant one blade of grass at a time. Reading decodable books has an important place in structured literacy programs for dyslexic students, but recently some in the reading...
Readers Who Don’t Write
Brock and I were recently talking with our friend, Dr. Nicole Swedberg about how she came to focus in writing for dyslexic students when so many focus almost exclusively on helping students with reading. It was after finishing her advanced degree and training in...
Question: What about Dyslexia and Reading Comprehension? [Premium]
Q: WHAT ABOUT DYSLEXIA AND READING COMPREHENSION? Answer: For many older and certainly remediated dyslexic people silent reading comprehension may be strong and unimpaired. Students who still struggle significantly with decoding will obviously have trouble with reading comprehension, as might be expected. But after the intensive work of decoding is overcome, reading comprehension weaknesses may become more difficult to understand. Dyslexic students who are partially or perhaps fully remediated may have difficulty with certain types of text, especially if they involve long and uncommon words. Sometimes these readers may only have trouble with college-prep or college-level reading due to additional challenges like the need to understand complex grammar. But students with dyslexia plus some other factor – whether its ADHD, low working memory, and a […]
Beyond Reading Aloud
Question: How can I tell that students are dyslexic if they're not reading aloud? Last week a high school teacher in my course asked how she might be able to tell that a student may be dyslexic if they don't read out loud in her class. Once a student moves into upper...
Teaching Punctuation [Premium]
Learning punctuation can be difficult for many reasons – the challenges of reading, auditory and visual processing problems, symbol confusion, and working memory overload; but usually teaching punctuation explicitly and in manageable bits using multisensory and memory associations can help students master the rules and patterns. The symbols involved in punctuation are simpler than the range of marks found in math. When students are still learning, use color coding and allow students to work with a cheat sheet that has examples when they carry out their punctuation exercises. Holly at Teachstarter has a number of cute ideas for teaching punctuation. Giving the markers personalities personalizes the symbols making it easier to remember in what contexts the symbols are used and to distinguish them from each […]