Dyslexia Therapy vs. Tutoring
What’s the Difference and Why Does it Matter?
Dyslexia therapy vs. tutoring…Does it matter? The short answer – YES.
Tutoring is typically based on an academic need and useful for students requiring a refresher of previously taught concepts, or just need a bit more time to sit with a newer concept to understand it fully.
On the other hand, dyslexia treatment at the therapy level is designed to effect a cognitive change in a learning process. In the case of dyselxia, therapy lessons are designed to remediate the underlying language processing skills needed to automatically decode (sound out) and encode (spelling) written languge patterns.
It’s important to know which one your child needs when looking into private services, as there are many cirriculums, programs, books, etc. on the market that claim to help dyslexia and say they are based on the Orton-Gillingham method (OG). OG is the gold standard in the dyselxia world, as it is the only researched based, evidence proven method to provide lasting results for students with characteristics of dyselxia. https://dyslexiaida.org/effective-reading-instruction/
Tutoring based on the OG method is useful if your student has been through a dyselxia therapy program in the past and needs extension work on fluency/comprehension, spelling, or writing. OG based tutoring can also be effective for early intervention with pre-readers who are showing signs of dyselxia in PreK, K or 1st grade.
Dyslexia therapy, also known as Structured Literacy Therapy, is for students with identified characteristics of dyslexia. Based on OG concepts, it goes deeper than a surface-level cirriculum to provide dynamic, intensensive lessons along with targeted mastery/repetition portions to effect the deeper cognitive change in the language process. The therapy process is also “disagnostic and prescriptive,” meaning that lessons are not driven by a cirriculum’s set scope and sequence, but by a student’s mastery level and data collected through the lessons and practice sessions. https://dyslexiaida.org/what-is-structured-literacy/
Schedule a free consultation if you want to know more about what might be the right choice for you! https://dyslexiasite.com/free-consultation