Students with dyslexia and related reading difficulties can benefit from explicit, systematic morphology instruction for decoding and understanding multisyllabic words. When studying morphemes, students learn to identify, spell, and define prefixes, suffixes, and roots, simultaneously addressing both word recognition and language comprehension.…

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are increasingly called upon to help assess students with word-recognition difficulties, including dyslexia. Although SLPs tend to have comparatively strong knowledge regarding the phonological awareness skills that support word reading, findings from survey research indicate that many SLPs report limited…

The simple view of reading is commonly presented to educators in professional development about the science of reading. The simple view is a useful tool for conveying the undeniable importance--in fact, the necessity--of both decoding and linguistic comprehension for reading. Research in the 35 years since the theory was proposed has revealed…

For many English Learners (ELs), access to post-secondary education has been limited. Of particular concern to post-secondary educators is that lack of access has been attributed in part to deficits in reading proficiency. Many postsecondary education programs do not adequately differentiate and scaffold instruction, suggesting that these are…

Developmental dyslexia, or specific reading disorder, is a reading impairment characterized by persistent difficulty in word recognition, decoding, and spelling skills in children despite having average or above academic performance in other areas. To increase an understanding of the nature of dyslexia and its relationship to music, this article…

A substantial number of students read significantly below grade level, and students with disabilities perform far below their non-disabled peers. Reading achievement data indicate that many students with and at-risk for reading disabilities require more intensive reading interventions. This chapter utilizes the theoretical model of the Simple View…

Learning to read is an expectation rather than an exception in society today. Despite this, some children experience reading difficulties. The purpose of this article is to review recent and seminal research on reading difficulties through the lenses of three perspectives: cognitive, social and cultural and interactive. The three perspectives are…

Children with language impairment (LI) are at an elevated risk for reading difficulties, particularly if their language difficulties are present at the time of formal schooling entry. Learning to read is heavily dependent on linguistic knowledge, specifically phonological knowledge for word decoding and language comprehension for reading…

Current conversations about children's literacy have focused on the need for more phonics and decoding instruction and have sidelined the importance of children's language development, argues George Hruby. Language development involves more than the ability to decode written language. The ability to understand the meaning of those words is also…

Letter-sound knowledge is a strong predictor of a student's ability to decode words. Approximately 50% of English words can be decoded by following a sound-symbol correspondence rule alone and an additional 36% are spelled with only one error. Many students with reading disabilities or who struggle to learn to read have difficulty with phonology,…

Vowel teams such as vowel digraphs present a challenge to struggling readers. Some researchers assert that phonics generalizations such as the "two vowels go walking and the first one does the talking" rule do not hold often enough to be reliable for children. Others suggest that some vowel teams are highly regular and that children can…

By the time students enter the fourth grade, it is expected that they possess the basic literacy skills needed to read and learn content. It is the general belief that in the early grades, students are taught foundational literacy skills that make them proficient readers by the time they become adolescent learners. For many, this assumption is…

The prevalence of children with autism spectrum disorders appears to be on the increase and educators are becoming more aware of their educational and social needs. In particular, many students with high-functioning autism have a deficit in reading comprehension. As a consequence, there is now a greater determination by educators to design the…

Reading comprehension is a complex task which depends on a range of cognitive and linguistic processes. According to the Simple View of Reading, this complexity can be captured as the product of two sets of skills: decoding and linguistic comprehension. The Simple View explains variance in reading comprehension and provides a good framework to…

Reading is more than just decoding the letters on a page--although that is critically important. It is drawing meaning from text and making connections to the outside world. These are the critical thinking skills that determine success both in and outside the classroom. In past years, far too many of Tennessee's students have passed through…