"WHAT IS EFFECTIVE INSTRUCTION?"
Margaret Byrd Rawson, a former President of The Orton Dyslexia Society ( the precursor to IDA) is quoted in IDA Fact Sheet "Multisensory Teaching": "Dyslexic students need a different approach to learning language from that employed in most classrooms. They need to be taught, slowly and thoroughly, the basic elements of their language - the sounds and the letters which represent them - and how to put these together and take them apart. They have to have lots of practice in having their writing hands ,eyes, ears, and voices working together for conscious organization and retention of their learning."
Multisensory teaching provides a curriculum in which the student uses all three pathways - visual, auditory, tactile / kinesthetic - to link the form of the letter, the sound of the letter, and the feel of the letter. This linkage, in turn, helps to enhance learning and memory.
The Curriculum is
Multisensory
Direct
Systematic
Sequential
The Curriculum Focuses on
Phonological awareness
Decoding
Accuracy
Fluency
Spelling
Handwriting
Comprehension
The National Reading Panel in 2000 spoke to the effectiveness of this type of instruction: "Teaching phonological awareness (PA) to children significantly improves their reading... PA was the cause of improvement in the students' phonemic awareness, reading and spelling following training."