According to Margaret Byrd Rawson, a former President of the International Dyslexia Association (I.D.A.),
"Dyslexic students need a different approach to learning language from that employed in most classrooms. They need to be taught, slowly and thoroughly, the basic elements of their language—the sounds and the letters which represent them—and how to put these together and take them apart. They have to have lots of practice in having their writing hands, eyes, ears, and voices working together for conscious organization and retention of their learning."
Shelly Hatch, director of the Dyslexia Center of Utah, puts it this way:
"When taught by a multisensory approach, students have the advantage of learning alphabetic patterns and words with engagement of all learning modalities. Dr. Samuel Terry Orton, one of the first to recognize the syndrome of dyslexia in students, suggested that teaching the "fundamentals of phonic association with letter forms, both visually presented and reproduced in writing until the correct associations were built up" would benefit students of all ages. Simultaneous, Multisensory (V A.K.T.): Teaching uses all learning pathways in the brain (i.e., visual, auditory, kinesthetic-tactile) simultaneously or sequentially in order to enhance memory and learning."
Research continues to demonstrate that multisensory learning that engages multiple neural pathways is the most effective way of teaching students with dyslexia.
The Academic Gym at ScholarSkills (T.A.G.)®️describes its multisensory approach as V.I.T.A.L. Skills Therapy™️, with V.I.T.A.L. representing Visual Interactive Tactile Auditory Learning.™
T.A.G. engages multiple modalities with tactile tools such as color-coded buttons that enable students to press, hear, and say their vowel and syllabic sounds, scannable phonemic flashcards to help students master phonemes and phonograms, and letter lights that glow, equipping teachers to target phonemes and c-v-c words. T.A.G. also uses the rhythmic repetition of athletic skills to help students develop the rapid recognition needed for reading skills: students sing, box, chant, and run until learning, fitness, and fun become one. Our goal is to immerse students in a multisensory sea of sounds.