Seek Testing: If your child is receiving their education in a public school you have the right to request a Dyslexia evaluation. The school will then research your child’s academic history in an effort to see if there has been a continual struggle. If their data warrants further investigation they will most often proceed with testing. However, it is important to keep in mind that if your child shows no academic need (e.g.- failing grades) obtaining an evaluation through your child’s school will be more challenging. This is often seen with Gifted Dyslexics.
If the public school sector will not evaluate your child, or you wish to seek professional assistance outside of the public school system, there are numerous private practices that offer academic evaluations specifically for Dyslexia. See resources.
Once your child has been evaluated and diagnosed the next step is to begin their academic remediation. There are a lot of different programs available on the market today. You will want to find someone either in your child’s school or in the private sector that offers a research based Orton-Gillingham multisensory program that is systematic, explicit and has direct instruction. It will be essential that the program offers support that address the five components of effective reading instruction identified by the National Reading Panel’s research and is a comprehensive Tier III intervention for students with dyslexia.
- Phonemic Awareness – following established procedures for explicitly teaching the relationships between speech-sound production and spelling-sound patterns
- Phonics – providing a systematic approach for single word decoding
- Fluency – using research-proven directed practice in repeated reading of words, phrases and passages to help students read newly encountered text more fluently
- Vocabulary – featuring multiple word learning strategies (definitional, structural, contextual) and explicit teaching techniques with application in text
- Reading Comprehension – teaching students to explicitly use and articulate multiple comprehension strategies (i.e., cooperative learning, story structure, question generation and answering, summarization and comprehension monitoring)
Orton and Gillingham were pioneering psychologists who first diagnosed, studied and developed treatment for dyslexia in the early 20th century. Orton-Gillingham refers to a particular approach to teaching children with dyslexia and reading difficulties related to decoding. There is no “Orton-Gillingham” curriculum, but rather several reading programs based on this methodology. Examples include
Alphabetic Phonic
Association Method
Barton
Herman Method
Lindamood-Bell
Slingerland
Take Flight
Wilson Reading
These programs differ slightly, but all are research-based and proven to be highly effective at treating dyslexia and related reading disorders. Orton-Gillingham approaches are multisensory, meaning they use a variety of sensory inputs to help children master language. Additionally, they are “part-to-whole,” which means that children are taught individual phonemes (the smallest chunks of language, such as c, th, ea, etc.) and spelling rules one at a time, with lots of opportunity to practice, repeat and review. In addition, these programs are designed to meet the unique learning needs of the child with dyslexia through provisions of instruction in the domains of language such as Phonology, Pragmatics, Orthography, Semantics, Syntax, and Morphology.
The English Language is 85% predictable when one knows the rules.
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