Empirical Literature Review On Dyslexia

iii. Empirical literature review

Dyslexia is the result of a multitude of factors such as environmental, genetic, behavioral and biological. Twin studies have shown a high genetic influence in development of dyslexia. Mothers who are dyslexics were more likely to have children who will also be with dyslexia. Environment of the child will also have an impact on the development of this disorder. The amount of time children read at home and the availability of reading materials also plays a role in a child’s ability to read. Brain studies on dyslexic brain have shown differences in the areas that gets activated during reading activities. Dyslexic individuals seem to use more areas of the right brain when reading while those without dyslexia use

They are analytic skills and synthetic skills. Analytic skills involves the ability to break words into its phonemes while synthetic skills involves the ability to blend different phonemes to make words. A study done to identify the influence of alphabetic knowledge and oral vocabulary on phonemic awareness has found that oral vocabulary is an important predictor of analytical phoneme skills (Ouellette & Haley, 2013). This is an interesting finding as most would have assumed that alphabetic knowledge is a key aspect in teaching a child to read. However, according to the results of this research oral vocabulary plays a more significant role than alphabetic knowledge when learning to read. An efficacy study of two school-based reading intervention program has found that the Oral language program resulted in improved vocabulary and grammatical skills while the Phonology + Reading (P+R) program resulted in improved decoding skills (Bowyer-Crane, et al., 2007). This study demonstrates the use of phonology and reading improves decoding skills, which is one of the main deficits in the phonological deficit theory. As such, phonology and reading program should also be incorporated when implementing an intervention to improve reading. More recent research has introduced a self-teaching model to develop phonological decoding in children with dyslexia. It involves encounter with an unfamiliar word with each

The first step in phonemic instruction should include a stimulating activity which enables the child to understand the concept of rhyming. I spy, “What starts with the sound”, Guess the word I’m thinking, Stand-up when you hear silly sound name are some examples of such activities. The second step contain teaching letter-sound correspondents. The succeeding steps would include teaching frequent initial and ending sounds, short vowel sounds, blending, consonant diagraph, long vowel sounds, practice reading words, sight words, etc. (Torgesen,