How Can SLPs Support Students with Dyslexia?

DyslexiaSLP

Jan 1

SLPs play a CRITICAL role in supporting students with dyslexia and often they don’t even know it. Keep reading to learn exactly how SLPs can support students with dyslexia and why they are uniquely qualified to do so!

When we talk about literacy intervention for students with dyslexia, the question often comes up: who should be providing this support?

Traditionally, the task has fallen to literacy specialists and special educators. That makes sense on the surface — reading is an academic skill, after all. But here’s the challenge:

Dyslexia is not just an academic problem. It’s a language-based learning disability.

Why SLPs Are Critical for Dyslexia Intervention

For many students, dyslexia is really the continuation of an oral language disorder that shows up more clearly once they begin learning to read and write. That’s where SLPs have a unique advantage:

Oral language expertise: Phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and vocabulary are the building blocks of reading and writing.
Clinical background: Unlike many literacy specialists, SLPs are trained to recognize and treat oral language struggles that underlie reading difficulties.
Early identification: Many students with dyslexia present with speech or language concerns before reading problems are even noticed.

This means that SLPs aren’t just “adjacent” to dyslexia intervention. You are often the missing link.

The Literacy Processing Triangle

We often reference the literacy processing triangle — the interconnected relationship between:

Orthography (letters and written word forms)
Phonology (sounds and sound structures)
Semantics (meaning and vocabulary)

While literacy specialists may focus heavily on orthography, SLPs already have deep expertise in phonology and semantics. That makes you especially well-positioned to close the gap for students who struggle to bridge these domains.

Three Key Roles for SLPs in Dyslexia Support

1. Build oral language foundations.
Students can’t be strong readers or writers without strong oral skills. Differentiating sounds, understanding sentence structure, and monitoring decoding with vocabulary knowledge all fall within an SLP’s expertise.

We know the scope of an SLP is incredibly broad, no questions asked but when we begin to think about the overlap here we start to see how well suited SLPs are in supporting literacy deficits. The shaded area of this representation shows the necessar…

2. Identify students at risk.
Many students with dyslexia start with oral language or speech challenges. A history of speech-language delays combined with a family history of reading difficulty is a major red flag. Research confirms the overlap:

A child with a parent who has dyslexia has a 40–60% risk of developing it themselves (Journal of Medical Genetics, 2007).
Bishop & Snowling (2004) argued that developmental language disorder can progress into dyslexia as children grow older.

SLPs are on the front lines of spotting these early warning signs.

3. Provide direct intervention.
With expertise in phonology and semantics, SLPs can easily layer in orthographic instruction. The only addition is using a structured, systematic, cumulative literacy approach — which is simply an extension of the work you already do at the oral language level.