Dyslexia Institute of Indiana

Have DII come to your school, or ask your school to contact DII at 545-5451 for training. Invite DII to your PTO meetings. We can help!

Keep these tips in mind when assisting dyslexic students.

Dyslexics thrive on structure. They need to know:

Where to begin a letter
Where to put their name and date
Where to write their answers
How many letters are missing
Where one set of directions ends and another begins
How many pages to do and which ones
How many sentences to write
Where to put their papers
What to study for a test
Where to find a pencil, a ruler, paper, etc.
When special events and holidays are coming
When it is time to work, play, change clothes, eat, etc.
How many books they should read
How long their report should be
Where they are going during holidays
Where the quotient begins
Where to start subtraction, addition, and multiplication
How far over to the right of the page to write

Terms You May Hear With the Orton-Gillingham Approach:

Multi-sensory: A multi-sensory approach must involve all pathways to learning: auditory, visual, tactile, and most importantly, the kinesthetic pathway involving both the hand and the arm and the muscles of the mouth. Students have to be actively involved in their own learning.

Alphabetic: Phonetic: Many students need to understand the nature of our form of written language in order to learn it. They need to understand: 1) that a letter is both name and a sound; 2) that a spoken word is made up of a sequence of individual sound, and 3) that letters that match visually, left to right across a page, match spoken/speech sounds from their mouths that sequence in time.

Synthetic: Analytic: In reading, decoding is synthetic. Letters are sounded and blended into words. Syllables are built around vowel patterns and blended into longer words. In spelling, words are analyzed by the information from a student’s ears and the feel of the mouth. Words are divided into a sequence of sounds, and the symbols representing those sounds are written. Many students need to learn how to go in both directions. Synthetic reading helps build logical spelling. Analytic spelling helps build automatic retrieval in reading.

Structured: For many students, the teaching of the English language has to be carefully structured and directly taught. A student is helped by learning logical language categories and is taught how to organize them

Sequential: Many students have difficulty with sequencing. They need help to improve their auditory sequencing of spoken language sounds. Students need to learn to read print from left to right. They need to learn language, going from simple to complex language patterns.

Cumulative: Each piece of new learning needs to be securely learned and connected to what is already known, so that it becomes a part of what is known and can be used. A teacher needs to teach a student where the new information fits with what has already been learned.

Repetitive: Merely understanding language logic is not sufficient for many students. They need to over learn so that dealing with the written language becomes automatic. A teacher need to circle back often for review. The amount of repetition needed depends upon the severity of the student’s language-learning problem.

Cognitive: Multi-sensory, structured, language teaching is geared to training logical, independent thinking about language. It teaches students to use language as they think about language. Many students need to discover that they can use reasoning to build mastery. Also, they need to understand why they are having difficulty with written language, and why they need to learn in this particular way.

Diagnostic: A teacher must be able to observe a student’s confusions with letters, sound/symbol associations, sequencing, etc., and to understand what elements of the language need to be taught or reviewed to eliminate that student’s specific uncertainties.

Prescriptive: A teacher needs to know what teaching steps to prescribe for a student and how to implement those steps into an appropriate instructional plan to assure that the student makes progress.