I want to pull a few important points from a scholarly paper that has crossed my path called:

30 Years of Research: What We Now Know About How Children Learn to Read

A synthesis of research on reading from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development commissioned by The Center for the Future of Teaching an Learning with funding support from the Pacific Bell Foundation.

This starts out, as many scholarly writings do, as something that is a bit overly complicated for the average reader.  But digging a little deeper and staying with this paper was worth it.  Here are points I feel like pertain to our story and dyslexia in general.

• ...phonological awareness appears to be the most prevalent linguistic deficit in disabled readers.

• Longitudinal studies show that of the children who are diagnosed as reading disabled in third grade, 74% remain disabled in ninth grade.  (Fletcher, et al., 1994; Shaywitz, Escobar, Shaywitz, Fletcher & Makuch, 1992; Stanovich & Siegal, 1994)

• Adults with reading problems exhibit the same characteristics that are exhibited by children with reading problems. (My note- this is good to know).

• About two in five children have some level of difficulty with phonemic awareness. 

• Kindergarten children with explicit instruction in phonemic awareness did better than a group of first graders who had no instruction, indicating that this crucial pre-skill for reading can be taught at least by age five and is not developmental (Cunningham 1990).

• In a study by Ball and Blackman (1991) seven weeks of explicit instruction in phonemic awareness combined with explicit instruction in sound-spelling correspondences for kindergarten children was more powerful than instruction in sound-spelling correspondences alone and more powerful than language activities in improving reading skills.

So for a moment I'm letting it settle in that a fast number of educators in the University setting know that this is going on.