AVReading Newsletter October: Growing Our Understanding of Dyslexia
As mentioned in the September newsletter, we will focus our attention this year on some of the earlier pillars of reading instruction to help understand the current interventions being employed within our curriculum and to potentially play with some of their elements in our own classrooms. To establish some common language, I am going to begin by defining three important terms of reading: dyslexia, phonemic awareness, and phonics. The first, dyslexia, is an often used, and largely misused term. Depending on who you ask, you are likely to get a different answer. In a general sense, people use it to indicate someone struggling with reading. Perhaps they have observed that the reader or writer transposes letters backwards or flips the order of the letters as they decode. Perhaps the reader struggles with multisyllabic or unique words. Or perhaps they read very slowly and deliberately. While all of these are ...