What Is Academic Language Therapy?

Academic language therapy helps students who need primary instruction or remediation with the English code. Since the educational experience of American students is conducted primarily in the English language, adequate language skills are essential for school success. Academic language therapy, therefore, serves as a foundation for lifelong learning.

Utilizing the multisensory strategies that are the cornerstone of the Orton-Gillingham approach, academic language therapy programs are designed to meet the needs of students who are struggling with reading, writing, and spelling due to auditory and visual processing deficits or language-based learning disorders such as dyslexia.

Academic language therapy services may include, but are not limited to:

· Phonology

· Decoding (word attack skills)

· Morphology

· Handwriting

· Composition

· Reading Fluency and Comprehension

· Writing Mechanics

· Spelling

· Learning Strategies

· Study Skills

· Exam Preparation

Students are taught not only the phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters or groups of letters) associated with the language, but also the spelling rules governing usage and application. In addition to spelling rules, a thorough exploration of Latinate, Anglo-Saxon and Greek word construction is provided. This is an essential element of any English language training because the preponderance of the English language is composed of Latinate word construction (55%), Anglo-Saxon word construction (25%), and Greek word construction (11%). Therefore, it is vital to the development and strengthening of visual and auditory processing abilities that the student is able to recognize and manipulate:

1. Latinate prefixes, roots, connectives, and suffixes

2. Greek combining forms and the connective "o"

3. Anglo-Saxon prefixes, base words, and suffixes