The role of neuroscience in the remediation of students with dyslexia

(Excerpt)
Effective classroom-based programs that minimize reading failure in all but 2–5% of children include several components: structured phonemic awareness (orally identifying and manipulating syllables and speech sounds), phonics (making associations between sounds and letters), fluency (developing speed and automaticity in accurate letter, word and text reading), vocabulary expansion and text comprehension. When this is not sufficient, teachers and clinicians have at their disposal many commercial programs for dyslexic students23. Examples of commercial programs include the Orton-Gillingham Approach, Alphabetic Phonics, Slingerland Approach, Project Read, Wilson Language, LANGUAGE!, The Sonday System, and Lindamood-Bell. These are systematic, cumulative, explicit and sequential approaches that allow professionals to teach language structure at many levels (sounds, syllables, meaningful parts of words, sentence structure, paragraph and discourse organization). All emphasize the importance of multi-sensory engagement of the learner and teach the phonological features of spoken language using motor, visual, auditory and kinesthetic feedback combined with extensive, controlled practice in word recognition. One of the Lindamood-Bell techniques addresses concepts of the motor theory of speech perception20 by emphasizing oral–motor feedback and explicit, detailed instruction in labeling speech sounds. Phono-Graphix, on the other hand, minimizes the multisensory mediation techniques of Orton-Gillingham approaches.

Acknowledgements

The authors are supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).