Teaching Students with Dyslexia

Teaching students with dyslexia can be a very challenging task. They do not often respond to traditional methods of instruction. Alternatives are needed. Here and there a school for kids with dyslexia pops up, but with very expensive tuition! Private tutoring can also be cost prohibitive. The answer? Computer software is very well suited to instruct those with learning disabilities or dyslexia. Which is the best way of teaching students with dyslexia? Sight words? Vocabulary development? Phonics? Good readers use elements of all three, so the Ultimate Phonics program incorporates them all. After all, the very words he uses in everyday speech go unrecognized when he begins to read. And sometimes he reads a word correctly, yet when it occurs again on the same page, he misses it! Parents and teachers who have strong reading abilities themselves have difficulty teaching students with dyslexia.

Because a student with learning disabilities or dyslexia is able to pronounce words correctly when speaking, it is often thought that he is just plain lazy when it comes to reading printed words. The problem, however, is that Johnny is not able to tell if he makes an error. He does not know if what he reads with his mouth matches what he sees with his eyes. He cannot accurately tell which speech sounds are contained in a word, how many sounds that word has, what the order of those sounds is, and which sounds are alike and different. For some students the weakness is severe, and they struggle with single-syllable words, making errors such as "stay" instead of "stray"; "back" instead of "black"; etc. For others this weakness does not create difficulty until they read multisyllable words and make mistakes like “scared" for "sacred"; "interpreted" instead of "interrupted"; etc. Johnny needs someone to stand over his shoulder to tell him when he makes an error. Instead of mom being that person, the computer can carry the burden of correcting errors and giving immediate feedback. And computers don't become frustrated when the student needs more feedback that the average child!

In addition to the Ultimate Phonics reading software, Academic Support also carries math software and writing software for students with learning difficulties.