The Science of Reading Simplified
Do you know The Silent Signs of Reading Struggles? Get the Guide!
Maya answers every question in complete sentences. She uses words like “reluctant” and “suspicious” in casual conversation. She is seven years old, and when you read aloud in class, she is the first hand in the air, the clearest reteller, the student other kids turn to when they want to know what happened in the chapter.
She is also, it turns out, two years behind in reading. And you almost missed it entirely.
If you’ve been typing “is my student dyslexic?” into Google at 9pm, you probably have a Maya on your mind — a child who seems too bright to be struggling but is clearly struggling, and who doesn’t fit neatly into the story you’ve been told about what a struggling reader looks like. This post is not going to tell you whether your student is dyslexic. What it is going to do is show you what you might actually be watching — and give you one thing to look for before you make that referral call.
Here’s what teachers say when they describe a Maya: “She’s so smart, I don’t understand why she can’t read.” Or: “He gets everything when we discuss it, but he falls apart on the page.” Or — the one that comes up the most — “I think there might be something else going on.”
That instinct is worth listening to. But the “something else” is often not what you expect.
What you’re watching is a child who has built an elaborate system for getting through reading without doing what reading technically requires. Maya’s listening comprehension is so strong, her vocabulary so rich, and her ability to predict meaning from context so sophisticated, that she has been substituting those skills for the foundational skill she was never explicitly taught. She has been doing this for two years. She has gotten very good at it.
Her running records look reasonable. Her comprehension responses are strong. She participates fully in discussion. The assessments you have been using — the ones you were trained on — measure meaning-making. Maya is an excellent meaning-maker. What they don’t measure is whether she can hear and manipulate the individual sounds in words. That question has never been asked. And so the gap has never been found.
This is not a failure of your attention. It is a design limitation of your assessment tools. They were built to catch one kind of reading struggle. They were not built to answer your question “Is my student dyslexic?”
Imagine someone hands you a page of text in a language you’ve never studied. You don’t know the letters or the sounds they represent. But you do know the topic — say, it’s a weather forecast, and you know it’s a weather forecast, and you know what weather forecasts contain. You could probably piece together a rough understanding of the page using logic, context, and everything you know about how weather forecasts work. You would not be reading. But from across the room, you might look like you were.
This is what a child like Maya is doing — every single day, in every reading moment. Her brain is not broken. Her brain is doing exactly what any intelligent person’s brain would do when the decoding tool is missing: it is using every other available tool instead. Context. Vocabulary. Syntax. Inference. Picture cues. Pattern recognition from repeated exposure to familiar texts.
The gap is at the most foundational level — the ability to hear the individual sounds inside words and connect them to print. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Maya’s intelligence is part of what has hidden the gap for so long. A less verbally sophisticated child would have struggled visibly much sooner. Maya’s comprehension has been carrying her reading for two years, and it has done a remarkable job.
Priya, a fourth grader with a nearly identical profile, is still being carried — until her teacher hands her a science article with unfamiliar technical vocabulary. No context to leverage. No familiar patterns to predict from. For the first time, the compensation system doesn’t have enough to work with, and the gap surfaces at nine years old. Same root. Four years later.
This student is in every classroom. Every grade band. The teachers who notice are the ones paying the closest attention — and if you’re here, you’re paying attention.
The child you are worried about is not a child who cannot learn to read. She is a child who learned to get through reading without the foundational layer she needed — and who has been doing it so well that neither her teachers nor her assessments have caught it.
What this pattern tells you is not that she has a disability. It tells you that there is a specific question that has not yet been asked about her reading, and that the answer to that question matters enormously for what she needs next.
The question is not: can she retell? Can she infer? Can she discuss? She has been showing you for two years that she can do all of those things. The question is: can she hear the sounds inside words? Can she take a spoken word apart and put it back together? That question lives in a completely different assessment than the ones that have been measuring her.
It also challenges something you may have quietly assumed: that a student this verbal, this engaged, this comprehension-strong simply has a reading disability that explains the gap between her oral language and her page-level performance. That may be true. But it also may not be. And the difference between those two things matters for what happens to her next.
Before the referral conversation — or alongside it — try this with Maya.
Say a simple word aloud. “Cat.” Ask her to tell you the sounds she hears inside it. Not the letters. The sounds. (/k/ /a/ /t/.) Then try a deletion: “Say ‘cat’ without the /k/ sound.”
Watch what happens. A child with strong phonemic awareness will do this automatically. A child who has been compensating for a foundational gap will often do something else — spell the word, name the letters, offer you a synonym, look at you with polite confusion that is very different from not understanding the question. Maya said “smaller cat” when asked to delete the /k/ from “cat.” She understood what was being asked. She had no access to the answer.
Five minutes. One question. What you learn will tell you more than the last year of running records. It’s not enough to answer to the question “Is my student dyslexic,” but it will point you in the right direction.
The students in this post are fictional composites — built from real patterns I’ve observed across twenty years in classrooms and reading intervention. The names and details are invented. The behaviors are real.
Give teachers the science-backed tools they need to help every student become a confident reader.
I’m so glad you’re here!
If Maya’s story sounds familiar, you’re probably already seeing the signs — you just may not have the language for them yet. My free guide, 5 Silent Signs Your Students Are Struggling to Read, walks you through exactly what to look for, so you can stop wondering and start knowing.
If you’re looking to dive deeper to better understand dyslexia, these are the books I find myself reaching for again and again in my own journey.
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
She reads every word correctly. Her fluency is solid — maybe even above benchmark. She doesn’t stumble, doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t ask for help. And then you ask her to tell you what the passage was about, and she stares at you like you’ve asked her to explain it in a language she doesn’t speak. Sound familiar?
It is read-aloud time, and the class is discussing a picture book about a child who moves to a new country. The conversation is rich. Students are connecting to the character, predicting what will happen, noticing the illustrator’s choices. Nadia is sitting quietly in the second row, looking at the pictures. Her teacher asks, “Why do you think Amelia feels nervous about her first day at school?”
Grab your free lesson plan!