We believe that most of the children who are labelled dyslexic are just trying to read the wrong way. With the right guidance and support the vast majority of them can learn to read and write perfectly well.
Here is a new report by Nadine Gaab with lots of fMRI evidence for what we are saying:
Effectively she found that the group of children she scanned with dyslexia showed less acute auditory processing than the group without dyslexia.
The key thing here is that their auditory cortex does work! They can hear and speak. It is just a little less good than average.
For that reason they choose to take up a sight-reading strategy when they started reading, just because it seemed the easier option. That choice then routinely leads them to a poor performance relative to their peers once they are 7+ years old. It is not that they cannot read by decoding. It is just that they haven’t been trying to because they have been relying on a method which feels easier or more natural to them. We call this pattern of sight-reading Optilexia.
Once you give these children the right support to their reading, so that they can learn to decode confidently, they become normal readers. That is what Guided Phonetic Reading is designed to achieve.