The original definition was from World War I, and referred to adults who had lost their ability to read following a stroke or injury. Its present usage is more generic, referring to reading disorders known or unknown, frequently resulting in letter or word reversals. However, it has been my experience in thirty years of tutoring that some students who had been labeled dyslexic no longer reversed letters or words after having been taught explicit phonics. Our students are trained to do the very thing that medical journals define as dyslexic. A compelling hypothesis is that those students who no longer had dyslexic symptoms after having been taught explicit phonics were not really dyslexic to begin with, but only suffering from a lack in their educational training.
Current research shows early reversals to be a normal developmental stage for many children.
Just as crawling prepares a child for walking, incorporating blending skills when teaching beginning reading will train eyes to move smoothly across the page from left to right. Students who are truly dyslexic need more time and practice to develop good reading skills, but the end result will be ease and fluency of reading with excellent comprehension. The idea behind invented spelling is that students will remain free and creative, and grow into correct spelling later. Recent research has revealed that accurate spelling is critical to the reading process. Skillful readers have internalized detailed and precise spellings of words, and in a fraction of a second map them to the speech patterns they represent.