Why children struggle with reading? 

Reading is not a natural process. For children to be able to read, their brains must undergo a process of "rewiring". For 80% of the population, this process of "tuning" neural connections occurs smoothly, however, for the remaining 20%, traditional methods of reading instruction do not work. About 3% of school-aged children are diagnosed with dyslexia; these kids encounter the same challenges that other struggling readers, but to a greater extent. 

Reading involves two phases: decoding, where the reader recognizes letters and connects them to sounds, and recognizing words, where the reader's brain stores a "vocabulary" of familiar words that can be recognized quickly. Struggling readers may have difficulty in both decoding letters and recognizing words.

The root of these challenges lies in an innate neurobiological condition: the brains of struggling readers process oral speech in a non-typical way. They process a spoken word as an indivisible whole. A struggling reader has difficulties with manipulating sounds, with dividing a word into syllables, with rhymes, with intonation.

There are lots of myths surrounding reading. Some people say that struggling learners see letters jumping in front of their eyes, that children read better through colored lenses, that text is more understandable when printed on special paper, that there is a font that dyslexic readers understand better, that reading can be improved through physical activity. However, in reality, none of these assumptions are true.

In order to read fluently, a struggling learner needs to be offered specialized reading intervention. It is efficient if based on 5 linguistic “pillars”: phonological awareness, phonics, morphology, syntax, vocabulary. An excellent reading program should include oral tasks, decoding exercises and tasks for reading comprehension.