Dyslexia & Learning Disabilities
What is Dyslexia?
"Dyslexia is an unexpected difficulty in learning to read. Dyslexia takes away an individual’s ability to read quickly and automatically, and to retrieve spoken words easily, but it does not dampen one’s creativity and ingenuity."
The Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity also reports:
"Dyslexia is an unexpected difficulty in reading for an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader. It is most commonly due to a difficulty in phonological processing (the appreciation of the individual sounds of spoken language), which affects an individual’s ability to speak, read, spell, and often, learn a second language. Dyslexia is highly prevalent, affecting 20% of population. Dyslexia represents 80-90 percent of all learning disabilities and differs from the others in its specificity and scientific validation. While those with dyslexia are slow readers, they also, paradoxically, often are very fast and creative thinkers with excellent reasoning skills."
Dyslexia can be accompanied by other Learning Disabilities, including:
- Auditory Processing Disorder - Affects how sound is processed by the brain
- Language Processing Disorder - Affects a person's ability to attach meaning to words, sentences, stories
- Non-verbal Learning Disability - Affects a person's ability to understand non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and body language
- Dysgraphia - Affects handwriting/fine motor skills
- Dyscalculia - Affects a person's ability to learn numbers and math facts
- Visual Perceptual/Visual Motor Deficit - Affects the understanding of information a person sees - the ability to draw or copy
For more information, please go to the Resources page of this website.
How can Lighthouse Speech & Language help individuals with Dyslexia/Learning Disabilities?
Assessment/Evaluation
Speech and language assessment in the following areas will provide information on weaknesses that are impacting reading and writing abilities:
- Phonological awareness (letter/sound skills)
- Sight-word vocabulary
- Speech articulation
- Listening comprehension
- Vocabulary
- Grammar
- Semantics (meaning of a word, sentence or text)
- Narratives
- Reading fluency
- Reading comprehension
- Written expression
- Problem-solving and inferencing/metalinguistics (higher order language skills)
- Social learning/pragmatic language
Lighthouse Speech & Language understands that phonological skills are central to the development of reading. Therefore, assessment of a child with reading difficulties looks closely at these skills.
Therapy
Once weaknesses have been identified, a therapeutic intervention program is guided by specific speech/language goals to improve reading and writing abilities.
assistive Technology for Dyslexia and Learning Disabilities
Assistive technology (AT) is described as any item, piece of equipment, software program, or product system that is used to increase, maintain, or improve the functional capabilities of persons with disabilities. There are many apps, extensions, and tools available to help individuals with dyslexia or learning disabilities to academically keep pace with their peers.
These assistive-technology tools allow students to have grade-level text read to them (text-to-speech), since their independent reading skills may be lower than their grade-level. Students can independently access the same science, social studies, history, literacy, etc., texts as their peers by using text-to-speech (read aloud) tools. They can read the same fun books as their friends. In addition, students can use voice typing to write assignments, allowing them to focus their energy on developing their story or thoughts, rather than paying attention to the spelling of words or to finding the correct keys for typing.
Recommendations for assistive technology are based on the students abilities and needs as well as on the technology available in their school. These tools will provide support for the student to be successful with grade-level work. Jackie Hughes, MACCC-SLP has extensive experience with Read&Write for Google Chrome. Read&Write literacy support software makes the web and documents more accessible for reluctant readers, and for individuals with dyslexia and other learning difficulties.