12/3/2024

Reading With Dyslexia: How It Impacts Student Literacy

Imagine if Diego received a dollar every time his teacher told him to try harder. He'd be wealthy by now! This scenario resonates with many students with dyslexia, often called “the hidden disability.” Despite their challenges, Diego and his peers put tremendous effort into their schoolwork. Their struggle to read proficiently isn't due to a lack of effort but to the innate processing difficulties accompanying dyslexia. 

This article aims to help educators identify the common characteristics of dyslexia and understand effective instructional interventions that can help students like Diego become confident readers and enthusiastic learners. 

What is Dyslexia?

According to the International Dyslexia Association®, dyslexia is a prevalent specific learning disorder, affecting between 15% and 20% of the population. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and poor spelling and decoding abilities. This is why it’s so critical for educators to understand and support students with dyslexia, because it is one of the most common learning disabilities affecting children. 

Students with dyslexia typically have a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to their other cognitive abilities—even when they receive effective classroom literacy instruction. Phonemic awareness is directly linked to a student’s ability to learn phonics, or the associations between letters and sounds, a skill necessary to decode unfamiliar words. That’s why students with dyslexia often have trouble reading and understanding texts—they lack the skills to properly decode what they’re reading.

What Are Dyslexia’s Characteristics?

Students are typically born with dyslexia, caused by differences in brain structure or functioning at birth, but it only becomes evident as they learn to read. These neurobiological differences may cause students difficulty processing, storing, or producing information and should not be confused with developmental disabilities, autism, deafness, blindness, or behavioral disorders. 

Students with dyslexia may also struggle with reading comprehension and have a reduced reading experience that further impedes their vocabulary growth and background knowledge. Although it may appear these students struggle with reading comprehension, they may instead have difficulty “cracking the code,” which results in reduced fluency rather than language comprehension deficits. 

In turn, reduced reading efficiency can interfere with a student’s ability to acquire information typically learned through reading. It can also impact their comprehension of complex syntactic structures and understanding of academic vocabulary found primarily in written texts. 

Students with dyslexia often show difficulties with several other behaviors and skills, including:

• Attention span, organization, and executive function (e.g., beginning and completing homework assignments, maintaining focus on tasks, keeping track of supplies and materials)
• Left/right confusion
• Concepts related to time and space
• Mathematics (memorizing math facts and reading/understanding word problems)
• Handwriting 
• Learning foreign languages or English as a second language
• Social skills (making or keeping friends)

Students with dyslexia can experience challenges with listening and speaking that affect their reading comprehension, but these language comprehension issues are not directly related to their dyslexia. They may also have difficulty spelling and writing, but these difficulties are often referred to as dysgraphia rather than dyslexia. Although dyslexia and dysgraphia frequently occur together, spelling and writing challenges can occur alongside proficient reading.

It's important to remember that just because a student has dyslexia doesn't mean they lack other strengths or talents. Many students with dyslexia exhibit underlying oral language abilities (other than phonological awareness), unusual visual-spatial abilities (e.g., talents in landscape architecture), and notable entrepreneurial or mechanical abilities. They may excel in music, art, drama, sports, creative writing, math, and social skills (e.g., sales). This potential for excellence in other areas should give educators hope and optimism as they work to support students with dyslexia.

How Dyslexia Impacts the Reading Process

According to the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990), reading comprehension is the product of decoding and language comprehension. 

• Decoding refers to the ability to recognize words on a printed page. 
• Language comprehension involves the skills and processes needed to understand language, such as vocabulary, background knowledge, attention, and memory.

These two components of reading comprehension work together in an interdependent balance; both are necessary, and inefficiency in either can lead to overall reading failure. 

• A reader who has difficulty decoding words will not be able to derive meaning from a text.
• In contrast, a reader who has difficulty comprehending spoken language will receive little reward for their effortless decoding skills.

The good news is that we know more today about the essential elements of effective reading instruction than ever—how children learn to read, the causes of reading difficulties, and how to prevent them. 

Research shows 95% of students can read when they receive instruction based on the science of reading. This should give educators confidence that reading instruction based on Structured Literacy from the science of reading can help all students, including those with learning disabilities like dyslexia.

How Can Educators Support Students With Dyslexia?

Teachers may need to offer additional supplemental literacy support to students with adequate language comprehension skills but inadequate decoding skills—who may be diagnosed with dyslexia. In some cases, a student’s below-grade-level reading comprehension may be unexpected in relation to their oral language comprehension, which could be at or above grade level. The cause of their poor reading comprehension is most likely due to their slow and inaccurate recognition of words, making it difficult for them to pay attention to meaning. 

However, educators can support students with dyslexia by implementing proven strategies and interventions that target their specific learning needs. 

Teachers should use explicit and systematic instruction in reliable reading and spelling patterns to improve students' reading comprehension. The most commonly used interventions appropriate for students with dyslexia share four characteristics: 

• Explicit introduction of concepts
• A structured, sequential, and cumulative order of presentation
• Multisensory stimulation (visual, auditory, and tactile modalities)
• Intensive review and practice (Moats & Dakin, 2007) of written language

For example, Lexia® Core5® Reading provides students with a Structured Literacy approach to the six areas of reading: Phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, structured analysis, automaticity/fluency, and comprehension. 

Informed by the science of reading, Core5 creates individualized learning paths to support students of all ability levels, including students with dyslexia and other learning disabilities such as Developmental Language Disorders (DLD). After one year, users with dyslexia and other reading and language-based disabilities were two times more likely to be proficient readers than non-users. 

One size does not fit all when it comes to teaching reading to students with dyslexia. Educators must adjust the intensity of their reading instruction interventions to meet each student’s needs. Because students with dyslexia require more explicit and direct guidance, they often need more time-intensive instruction (Torgesen et al., 2001). As such, educators should adapt the intensity of their instruction depending on the student’s skill level and rate of progress. This requires teachers to engage in systematic progress monitoring to determine whether a student with dyslexia should remain at their current intensity level or move to a more or less intensive level.

Core5 determines a personalized learning path for each student based on their strengths and weaknesses and supports them continuously through an adaptive placement. For example, a second grade student with dyslexia may be placed at a kindergarten or low first grade level and begin working on activities appropriate for their personal skill set. Based on this data, the program prescribes the appropriate intensity of instruction to reach end-of-year benchmarks (adjusted monthly based on performance) and uses adaptive technology to include the explicit instruction needed to accelerate skills acquisition. 

As students work independently in the online activities, real-time performance data is collected through Lexia's patented embedded assessment tool, Assessment Without Testing®. These diagnostic data provide a continual assessment of students' retention and application of skills as learners work through the Scope and Sequence.

Children with dyslexia can’t change how their brains decode language—but teachers can adopt approaches that work for all students, including those with dyslexia. 

Professional learning grounded in the science of reading can ensure students with dyslexia get the explicit and systematic instruction required to successfully achieve literacy. Lexia® LETRS® (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) Suite empowers teachers with proven ways to teach people with dyslexia how to read. LETRS provides educators and administrators with the skills needed to master the fundamentals of reading instruction—Phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, writing, and language—and how to apply these skills to support students with dyslexia.

Dyslexia is a lifelong disorder that often occurs in families and affects an individual's ability to acquire reading skills, specifically automatic word identification. If not addressed, it can significantly affect self-esteem, achievement, and confidence. With the appropriate instructional interventions and literacy tools, students with dyslexia can grow to become proficient, engaged readers.

To learn how you can support the needs of students with dyslexia, read about Lexia’s professional learning and Structured Literacy instructional programs based on the science of reading.