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There are three dominant theories right now that might account for the specific difficulty
that the student has that interferes with learning to read because of the way the brain
is formed. The first one has to do with phonological awareness or the ability to consciously recognize
that there are breaks between words in spoken language that words may be made up of syllables
and all words and made up of sounds. To address that problem the theorists have looked at
the term segmentation, and here is an example of the increasing complexity of tasks when
we think about the ability to segment spoken language and how that relates to the ability
to think about letters and sounds and words and sentences. Now another dominant theory
has to do with the speed of processing, not just can you process language into its component
parts, but at what speed can you use language and can you recall language. Here is a graph
of children who are normal readers from grades three through eight, and this is their average
rate of reading in a passage or paragraph. These children in the green line are dyslexics,
and you see that from the very beginning they are much slower in their ability not that
they cannot read the words but they are much slower in their recall of their words, even
when they know them. A third prominent theory about dyslexia has to do with the orthography
of the language, the way in which letters and sounds come together in patterns. In this
- on this page of this book the child's task would be to try to distinguish the short I
from the long I sound, grin has a short I sound, white has a long I sound, but so does
right, right. And so what we see here is there are different ways to spell the same sound,
the orthography or knowledge of the orthography is what is being developed in this exercise,
to help children recognize and become more fluent in their ability to decode as well
as spell this long I sound in different ways.