Education: Journey Into Dyslexia

Dyslexia is the most common cause of reading, spelling, and writing difficulty. It has nothing to do with intelligence, birth defects, mental illness, home environment, level of education or economic status. A 2010 Roper poll of Americans showed that eighty percent wrongly associate dyslexia with mental retardation.

Seventy to eighty percent of all people with poor reading skills are likely to be dyslexic. One in five  students or approximately fifteen to twenty percent of the population have a language-based learning disability and dyslexia is the most common of these disabilities.

Internationally adopted children already deal with subtractive bilingualism . Dyslexia is often overlooked as a possible additional language issue. Frustration and self-esteem issues sometimes parrot common behavioral issues. Word-finding and other academic issues sometimes mimic FASD. ADHD is often associated with children with dyslexia.  Dyslexia falls into the category of Specific Learning Disability of the 13 IDEA categories.

HBO2 debuts Journey into Dyslexia on May 11, 2011. It shows that the majority of students are not getting the help that they need.

Getting all the necessary services in public schools often is practically impossible for dyslexics as one-on-one and small group instruction in a very specific manner yields the best results. Not that many teachers are trained about dyslexia to begin with. Even fewer understand the Orton-Gillingham Approach.  The Orton-Gillingham approach  addresses five major aspects of dyslexia:

• Phonemic Awareness
• Phonics
• Vocabulary Development
• Fluency
• Comprehension Strategies

The Orton-Gillingham Approach is most often associated with a one-on-one teacher-student instructional model. Its use in small group instruction is not uncommon. A successful adaptation of the approach has demonstrated its value for class-room instruction. Reading, spelling and writing difficulties have been the dominant focus of the approach although it has been successfully adapted for use with students who exhibit difficulty with mathematics.

The Orton-Gillingham Approach always is focused upon the learning needs of the individual student. Students with dyslexia need to master the same basic knowledge about language and its relationship to our writing system as any who seek to become competent readers and writers. However, because of their dyslexia, they need more help than most people in sorting, recognizing, and organizing the raw materials of language for thinking and use. Language elements that non-dyslexic learners acquire easily must be taught directly and systematically.”

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