Introduction
In this week’s blog, we will discuss the potentials and possibilities that learners with dyslexia can achieve through identification, intervention, accommodations, and support. Students living with dyslexia require certain steps that build a foundation for climbing their way to success. Identification for students with dyslexia is an important first step in understanding what interventions are required to reinforce the letter-sound knowledge and decoding skills necessary to read text. Along with effective interventions, certain accommodations may be required for students with dyslexia in order for them to achieve their potential. Finally, the continued social and emotional support for students with dyslexia provided by different members of their lives are essential in ensuring their continued progress and potential.
Identification
The very first step in building a foundation of success for students with dyslexia is early and efficient identification of their reading difficulties. This responsibility may fall on the classroom teacher. These individuals are able to observe and assess through informal and formal assessments the abilities and difficulties that their students present in the classroom. However, when it comes to the identification of a reading difficulty as complex as dyslexia, teacher education and self-efficacy in identification may need to be reinforced.
Gonzalez and Brown (2019) conducted a case study on head start teachers' perceptions and abilities in early identification of risk factors for students with dyslexia. Some of the key findings included the misconceptions of dyslexia such as seeing letters backwards, misunderstandings of the differentiation of phonemic awareness versus phonological awareness, and misconceptions and misunderstandings of developmental milestones in young children. The misperceptions discovered in the study point out the need for teacher education and advocacy in being able to identify students who may be at risk for dyslexia in the earliest years of education. By understanding student’s early reading difficulties and delays, a teacher can develop an awareness of how to target instruction to fit that child’s needs. Students with dyslexia can benefit from early identification that allows them to receive effective instruction in order to promote their literacy development growth.
Intervention
Once a child has been determined to be either at-risk for having dyslexia or diagnosed with dyslexia, it is important to understand the interventions that may be required in order to help these students to develop their literacy skills with targeted strategies that allow them to continue their steps to successful reading development. The strategies and interventions that take place should also be carefully considered given the students’ individual needs and placement on the continuum of reading development.
One meta-analysis by Goodwin and Ahn (2010) evaluated the effectiveness of morphological instruction interventions in students with reading difficulties, including dyslexia. Morphological instruction includes the understanding of morphemes, or units of meaning, in order to decode and understand text. An example of this would be the teaching of inflectional endings such as “-ed” to show that something has already happened (jumped = jump + ed). In students with dyslexia, the understanding and recognition of these morphemes can help them to understand the phonological (letter-sound) components of words in order to decode and make meaning. The study found that students with phonological processing difficulties, such as dyslexia, showed that interventions with morphological instructional goals helped them to achieve improvement in phonological awareness as well as morphological awareness.
In another study by O’Brien, et al. (2011), the researchers explored the efficiency of interventions that focused on orthographic recognition for different age groups and intensity levels for students who may have dyslexia. Orthographic recognition involves the understanding of graphemes, or the letters that represent sounds, that come together to make up the words that we read in text. It was found that student’s “orthographic recognition performance developed early on, with the greatest gains in search speed shown by first-graders.” (p. 127) This information tells us that interventions and instruction with understanding of graphemes should begin early in order to help students who may have dyslexia reinforce the letter-sound connections in order to reach their potential in decoding text.
Overall, in order to help students with dyslexia make gains in their literacy development and reach their potential for success, interventions are best when they take place early and focus on improving the recognition and understanding of literacy aspects such as morphemes and graphemes. These skills can reinforce the letter-sound connections required for decoding and making meaning with text that students with dyslexia who have phonological processing difficulties need.
Accommodations
Students with dyslexia who have been identified as being at risk or diagnosed with dyslexia may need additional forms of support that can help them to experience the possibilities of successful development in literacy. These kinds of supports can be identified as accommodations in the classroom. A simple accommodation that can be provided for students with dyslexia is time. Increased and extended time limits in literacy activities and tasks may allow them to practice the skills and strategies they have learned through interventions to show their growth and possibilities in literacy development.
One such study by Sumner, Connelly, and Barnett (2013) describes the assumption that students with dyslexia have slower handwriting fluency speed than that of their peers who do not have dyslexia. In fact, the researchers expose that the evidence behind this assumption varies. Instead, because students with dyslexia have phonological processing difficulties that require a higher cognitive load going towards the association of letters and sounds rather than actually writing the letters down, that students with dyslexia may benefit from more time to pause and recall their letter-sound knowledge in writing tasks. Accommodations such as this are fairly easy to implement and can provide opportunities for success for these students. 
Support
Support for students with dyslexia goes beyond the identification, interventions, and accommodations that can be provided. Meaning, that parents, teachers, and other advocates for students with dyslexia can support students in ways that help them to understand their reading difficulties and allow them to experience their potential and possible positive outcomes. Nalavany and Carawan’s (2011) study on family support and supporting the self-esteem of students with dyslexia have implications and influences in early childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. They discuss that although there is a seemingly increased awareness for the impacts of familial and educator emotional support for early childhood students with dyslexia, this support should not decrease or stop once the student reaches adolescence and young adulthood. They point out that young adults with dyslexia transitioning into adulthood can experience vulnerability as they are faced with not only living with a reading difficulty, but also navigating early adult expectations such as secondary and post-secondary education, social relationships, and career development. This means that educators in all stages of schooling must understand that outreach to families must be established for students with reading difficulties and extend throughout their child’s schooling. Educating parents and families about the impacts that they can have on understanding their child’s difficulties and social-emotional development can help students with dyslexia to be successful and experience continued success into adulthood.
Conclusion
As educators, it is important for us to realize our role in how we can help our students to be experience the possibilities for success and to reach their potential. This goes for all learners, especially those who experience reading difficulties like our students with dyslexia. Early and effective identification, appropriate and efficient interventions, simple accommodations, and emotional supports are all ways that educators can achieve these goals. Students with dyslexia may have steep steps on their journey to literacy success, but with a foundation of good educational support it is possible for them to reach their potential.
References
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