What is dyslexia?
Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction. Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede growth of vocabulary and background knowledge.
What Dyslexia Program is used in the school district?
JET: A Fast-Paced Reading Intervention
What is JET?
JET: A Fast-Paced Reading Intervention is a one-year curriculum written by the staff of the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia and Learning Disorders at Scottish Rite for Children. Jet builds on the success of the four previous dyslexia intervention programs developed by the Scottish Rite for Children staff: Alphabetic Phonics, the Dyslexia Training Program, the Scottish Rite for Children Literacy Program, and Take Flight Elementary.
JET was designed for:
- Individuals with dyslexia fourteen years and older
- One-on-one or small group instruction (no more than 6 students)
- Used by a Certified Academic Language Therapist
- Five days a week – forty-five minutes per day for one year
Five components of effective reading instruction:
JET contains the five components of effective reading instruction identified by research from the National Reading Panel. Jet addresses each component by:
- Phonemic Awareness – following established procedures for explicitly teaching the relationships between speech-sound production and spelling-sound patterns
- Phonics – providing a systematic approach for single-word decoding
- Fluency – using research-proven directed practice in the repeated reading of words, phrases, and passages to help individuals read the newly encountered text more fluently
- Vocabulary – featuring multiple word learning strategies (definitional, structural, contextual) and explicit teaching techniques with application in text
- Reading Comprehension – teaching individuals to explicitly use and articulate multiple comprehension strategies in narrative and expository text (i.e., cooperative learning, story structure, question generation and answering summarization, and comprehension monitoring)
Jet is designed around these key findings of Take Flight Elementary that include:
- Students that complete Jet instruction show significant growth in all areas of reading skill.
- Follow-up research on children who completed treatment indicates that students maintain the benefits of instruction on word reading skills and continue to improve in reading comprehension after one year.
- Jet is effective when used in schools by teachers with advanced training in treating learning disorders.
- Students with the lowest reading skills acquire the strongest gains from Jet instruction.
For details about the latest research, please view the Luke Waites Center for Dyslexia’s research summary of Take Flight: A Comprehensive Intervention for Students with Dyslexia online at scottishriteforchildren.org/dyslexia.