What Is The Ultimate Dyslexia Remedy?

Have you been searching for the ultimate dyslexia remedy? Special Education experts unanimously agree that the silver bullet has to be phonological awareness. This article will try and demonstrate the importance of this skill. 

Phonological Awareness is a listening and oral language skill. Essentially it is your child’s capability ‘to listen within a word’ i.e to hear and identify the individual sounds within a word. Phonological awareness enables your child to attend to, discriminate, remember and manipulate sounds at the level of phonemes, syllables, words and sentences thus making it is an essential component for dyslexia remedy.

Dr. G. Reid Lyon, former Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch at the National Institute of Health (NIH) found that "the best predictor of reading difficulty in kindergarten or first grade is the inability to segment words and syllables into constituent sound units" (Lyon 1995, Toward a Definition of Dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 45, 3-27.)

The example below shows what your child should be able to do with phonological awareness skills at different structural levels of language:

a) Phoneme level- What is the first sound in the word ‘bell?’ Your child will be able to identify various sounds in a word. 

b) Syllable level- How many syllables does the word ‘furniture’ have? He/she will be able to separate a word into its constituent syllables i.e the building blocks of words.

c) Word level- Do the words ‘bell’ and ‘shell’ rhyme? Awareness of whole words will emerge i.e. the capacity to recognise and group similar words together.

d) Sentence level- How many words are in the sentence ‘She sells sea shells by the sea shore?’ Your child will be able to track the constituent words in a sentence.

Phonological awareness should be a key component of an effective plan to remedy dyslexia. Your understanding of the skills that influence reading fluency will help you to work with the strengths he/she has and also help to overcome the problems which hinder progress. By doing this you will be able to contribute to your child’s life-long success.

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