Dyslexia and reading

  • 10 minutes

Learn more about how technology can support learners with dyslexia through multi-sensory practice.

Understand strengths and challenges

Learners with dyslexia often have difficulties recognizing and manipulating sounds, letters, and words. Reading fluency can become a challenge and learners can lose or miss meaning because so much energy is given to reading each individual word. While understanding the big picture is a dyslexic strength, learners with dyslexia may struggle with isolated skills required to access comprehension.

Provide solutions

Structured, multi-sensory practice and strategies can help learners with dyslexia improve reading fluency and comprehension. Providing opportunities to observe skills and processes that result in strong comprehension can help learners:

  • Make mental images of the text
  • Visualize characters
  • Connect ideas
  • Modify these images and relationships as new information is encountered

Multi-sensory practice with Reading Progress and Reading Coach

Reading Progress, a free tool built into Microsoft Teams for Education, supports and tracks learners’ reading fluency. Specifically, Reading Progress supports learners with opportunities to:

  • Practice their reading fluency skills independently
  • Self-assess as they watch and listen to themselves read texts
  • Get customized feedback that specifically targets their unique literacy needs
  • Use built-in Immersive Reader functionality to set their reading preferences and get support in over 100 languages

By including Reading Coach in a Reading Progress assignment, educators can extend independent learning to support learners with dyslexia. Reading Coach identifies the five words that were most challenging for each learner and gives them a supported opportunity to practice the words again.

This video shows how Reading Progress and Reading Coach can support learners.

Learn more about how Reading Progress and Reading Coach can support reading fluency and comprehension.

Actionable data with Reading Progress and Education Insights

Reading Progress allows you as an educator or parent to see a child's progress through real-time data with Education Insights. It measures a child's accuracy rate, most challenging words, and words per minute. Reading Progress works with Insights to provide support in differentiating instruction and documenting both whole class and individual learner progress.

This video shows how Reading Progress and Insights provide actionable data.

Reflection

  • What specific features of Reading Progress might support learners with dyslexia to strengthen their reading fluency and comprehension skills?
  • How might you use Reading Progress and Reading Coach to extend reading instruction in and out of the classroom?
  • What opportunities can using Reading Progress and Insights provide to inform your instructional practice?