Research
- Early identification and intervention is essential to maximizing treatment success in children who are at risk for reading failure.
- 17 to 20% of children have significant reading challenges. This means at least 10 million children or 1 child in 5 will experience significant difficulties learning to read well enough to succeed academically and for enjoyment.
- Studies show of the number of children who are reading challenged in the third grade, 74% remain disabled at the end of high school.
- The most frequent characteristic observation among children with reading challenges is a slow, labored approach to decoding or “sounding -out” unfamiliar words and frequently misidentification of familiar words.
- Public schools identify approximately 4 times as many boys as girls to be reading challenged, but research shows that as many girls as boys have difficulties learning to read.
- Because reading is so critical to success in our society, reading failure constitutes not only an educational problem but also rises to the level of a major public health problem.
- For the reader to begin to pay more attention developing memory retention to the text that is being read for comprehension to occur, phonological and decoding skills must be applied accurately.
- Reading requires explicit, systematic and direct instruction.
- The understanding that written spellings systematically represent the phonemes of spoken words is termed “the alphabetic principle” and is absolutely necessary for the development of accurate and rapid decoding and word reading skills.
- Developing reading skills requires the acquisition of phonemic awareness and other phonological processing skills. Dyslexic readers need to learn how to apply these skills.