Dyslexia 101

What is dyslexia?  We find this question difficult to answer because dyslexia is not a cookie-cutter condition. Every child looks very different. The severity of dyslexia varies from child to child. What one dyslexic child can’t do, another can, and vice versa. We love to define the word simply at first:

Dys = difficulty with

Lexia = language

Dyslexia = difficulty with language

While this may seem simplistic, I want you to ask yourself: Do I know someone who has difficulty with language? Most likely, you do, which is why you’ve sought out Lighthouse to Literacy in the first place.

Dyslexia Defined

The definition for dyslexia provided by the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) states that dyslexia is a “specific learning disability” which is “characterized by difficulties in word reading and/or spelling” (International Dyslexia Association, 2025).

Dyslexia involves the way the brain processes written information, specifically letters, numbers, and words. It affects a child’s ability to read, spell, and recognize words. Children can experience trouble reading accurately, reading quickly, spelling words, and comprehending what they have read.

While some children may exhibit a few dyslexia characteristics and be considered mildly dyslexic, others may find reading, spelling, and writing extremely difficult and show signs of profound dyslexia. It may impact other areas of their life, including math (dyscalculia) and handwriting (dysgraphia). For children who struggle in all of these areas, going to school becomes a place where they experience embarrassment, failure, fear, and shame. Without the right reading intervention, these students will often make few academic gains and fall further and further behind.

At the heart of dyslexia is a child’s inability to hear the sounds within a word. Please understand there is nothing wrong with the child’s hearing. Most likely, their hearing is perfect. Instead, it relates to how the brain processes the sounds we hear, known as auditory processing. Words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes. For example, the word cat has three phonemes: /c/ /a/ /t/. Children with dyslexia often have a hard time hearing those three sounds or keeping them in order. In time, they memorize the word cat, and it looks like they are reading the word when, in fact, they have merely memorized that the letters c-a-t spell cat.

Not Related to Intelligence

Dyslexic children are smart regardless of how they feel. Dyslexia is not related to intelligence. We will be the first to admit that it can be confusing at first. Here is a bright child who has difficulty reading a book or completing a homework assignment. Children often report feeling stuck in their own bodies. They feel smart but can’t seem to will their brains to read the simplest words on a page. Just know that when they are taught in a way that aligns with how their brain learns, they make great strides and can overcome these reading obstacles.

Number of Children Impacted

Additionally, it’s important to point out that dyslexia is not rare and affects about 20 percent of the population (Shaywitz, 2021, p. 29). This means that one in five children has dyslexia. If a teacher has 20 students in their classroom, they can expect four of them to have dyslexia.

Identifying which students may be difficult because of those four students, one might be mildly dyslexic, while one might be moderately dyslexic, one severely, and one profoundly. The severely to profoundly dyslexic children are easier to spot, but all four of these children deserve to be identified and deserve to receive help. Dyslexia represents 80 to 90 percent of all individuals with a learning disability (The Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity, 2022).

Hereditary Roots

Dyslexia is also a hereditary condition passed down from parent to child. Keep in mind, though, that a parent may not realize they have dyslexia because their symptoms are mild. It's only after discovering that their child has dyslexia that they realize they share some similarities. While a parent may show few signs of dyslexia, they may have a child who is deemed profoundly dyslexic.

History of Dyslexia

It might surprise you to know that in America, we’ve known about dyslexia for 100 years. Samuel T. Orton (1879-1948), a neuropsychiatrist and pathologist, was a pioneer in the field of dyslexia (Kirby & Snowling, 2022, p. 41). A professor at Columbia University, he was a pioneer in his day, drawing attention to reading failure and language-processing difficulties. We’ve also had a method for remediating it—the Orton-Gillingham approach—since the early 1930s, when educational psychologists Anna Gillingham (1878-1963) and Bessie Stillman (1871-1947) joined forces with Orton to develop instructional materials to help children learn to read.

It seems sad to us that we’ve known about dyslexia for more than a century and had a proven way to remediate it for a little over 95 years, and still have children who are undiagnosed, sitting in classrooms across America. Why is this acceptable? Why are American schools filled with children who do not know how to read? We think that’s a reasonable and poignant question. If we understand how to help these children, why aren’t we utilizing the Orton-Gillingham method in every preschool, elementary school, and classroom across America? It seems there are three reasons.

Why Dyslexic Children Are Not Being Helped

First, there has been a dispute about how best to teach people to read. You may have heard about The Reading Wars, pitting meaning-based instruction against code-based instruction. Meaning-based instruction encourages children to guess using 3-cueing, balanced literacy, and whole language learning programs. On the other hand, code-based instruction is grounded in the science of reading, a body of research that explains how we learn to read, spell, and write (Moats, 2020, p. 4). Based on the science of reading research, structured literacy is a systematic approach to teaching reading, spelling, and writing. It focuses on phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension (The Reading League, 2022).

The second reason we have failed to utilize Orton-Gillingham in every school and classroom across America is that it’s primarily seen as a one-on-one instructional model. However, the truth is that children can be explicitly taught structured literacy using multisensory techniques individually, in small groups, or to the whole class. This is the very reason Lighthouse to Literacy exists. We want to equip teachers to use the Orton-Gillingham approach in every preschool and elementary classroom across America.

Finally, we are not doing an adequate job of identifying children with dyslexia. With one in five children having dyslexia, it’s important that we have a way of identifying them as early as preschool but no later than kindergarten. Because these children are bright and creative individuals, it can be hard to spot them. You have to know what you are looking for. It may be easy to identify a child who struggles to learn their letter sounds in kindergarten, but it may be more difficult to spot a child who appears to be reading just a little below their peers. We need to look at the whole child. How is their spelling? Do they hate being asked to put their thoughts on paper? Can they hear the individual sounds in words? It’s not just their weaknesses that set them apart; it's their strengths, too. Are they excellent problem solvers (no, we don’t mean math problems — real-life scenarios)? Are they artistic, creative, and imaginative? Do they like to work with blocks, Legos, and magnetic tiles? Do they like to build things, such as forts, outside in the backyard? For an exhaustive list, visit our Identify Dyslexia page. Every day we put off identifying students with dyslexia, they fall further and further behind. They need explicit reading instruction.

We Welcome Dyslexia

We at Lighthouse to Literacy welcome dyslexia. Come on in. Our doors are open. You can sit anywhere you like. We have worked with 17-year-olds reading at a first-grade level, and often see 15-year-olds reading at a kindergarten level. No case is too profound. No child is too far behind. We know it will take hard work and determination from both the educator and the student. We’re here to help you. We want to be a light of hope to those students drowning in a sea of reading failure. We want to help you get these students on track to reading success. Thank you for taking up the banner to help us do just that.

References

International Dyslexia Association. (2025). IDA releases 2025 revised definition of dyslexia. https://dyslexiaida.org/idas-revised-2025-dyslexia-definition-now-open-for-public-comment/

Kirby, P. J. & Snowling, M.J. (2022). Dyslexia: A history. McGill-Queen’s University Press. https://research.ebsco.com/c/r3w5i4/ebook-viewer/pdf/y7ib2wqtfb

Moats, L. C. (2020). Teaching reading is rocket science, 2020. American Federation of Teachers. https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/moats.pdf

Shaywitz, S. & Shaywitz, J. (2020). Overcoming Dyslexia. Vintage Books.

The Reading League. (2022). Science of reading: Defining guide. https://www.thereadingleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Science-of-Reading-eBook-2022.pdf

The Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity. (2022). Dyslexia FAQ. https://dyslexia.yale.edu/dyslexia/dyslexia-faq/