Your Child Needs Help With Dyslexia. Here’s Who Actually Treats It.
You got the diagnosis. Or maybe you don’t have one yet, but you know something is wrong, because your child is smart and working hard and still can’t read. Either way, you need help and you don’t know who to call.
This is where most families get stuck. There are tutors, specialists, therapists, clinicians, programs, and certifications, and nobody explains any of it in plain language. So let me do that.
I’m Rebecca Pearson, a licensed speech-language pathologist and the founder of The Literacy Loop in the western suburbs of Chicago. Dyslexia is at the center of my clinical work. Here’s what reading actually requires, what each provider is built to do, and where to start.
Dyslexia is the symptom. The question is why.
Reading is built on five pillars: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. This isn’t my framework; it’s the foundation of the science of reading, and every credible provider works from it. Dyslexia is a breakdown somewhere in the system that supports all five, and where that breakdown lives is different for every child. Which brings me to the thing almost nobody tells parents.
Think about how a doctor works. You walk in and say your back hurts. That’s the symptom. The cause could be a herniated disc, nerve damage, a muscle problem, or half a dozen other things. The doctor’s job is differential diagnosis: finding which cause is producing your symptom, because a herniated disc and a pulled muscle call for different treatment. A provider who can’t differentiate won’t be completely off base. Nobody hands you eye drops for back pain. But the most precise plan requires knowing exactly what you’re treating.
Reading struggles work the same way. “My child can’t read” is the symptom. The cause might be phonological processing, oral language comprehension, word retrieval, or several at once. Two children with the same dyslexia diagnosis can have different breakdowns driving it, and the most effective plan for each looks different.
Before anyone intervenes, someone has to find the why. That work is what my field is named for. I am a speech-language pathologist. Pathology is the study of what goes wrong and why it goes wrong. That’s the license, that’s the training, and that’s the job.
What each provider is built to do
First, because many families are told by a school or pediatrician to start with a neuropsychological evaluation: a neuropsych maps the widest terrain, cognition, attention, memory, processing across every domain, and it can diagnose dyslexia. That map is valuable, especially when questions reach beyond language and literacy. But a neuropsychologist doesn’t treat, and the language and literacy testing is broad rather than deep. Families typically leave with a diagnosis, a referral, and a need for the detailed speech-language testing that treatment planning actually requires, at several times the cost of getting that testing directly.
Reading specialists and CALTs (Certified Academic Language Therapists) deliver structured literacy intervention, most often through a specific program they are certified in. The training is real: coursework, a supervised practicum, a certification exam. A good CALT knows their program inside and out, and delivers it with fidelity, and for the child that program was designed for, that consistency is a strength. But the program’s placement assessment answers one question: where your child starts in the sequence. The plan is the program. A CALT’s certification is in delivering the intervention, so identifying why your child is struggling, and whether the struggle reaches beyond what the program targets, happens somewhere else, before your child enrolls.
Clinic-based speech-language pathologists are licensed clinicians who evaluate and treat speech and language. Most are generalists, and for articulation, language delays, fluency, and voice, a generalist is exactly who you want. But structured literacy is specialized training most clinicians add after graduate school, so many clinics evaluate spoken language thoroughly and leave the print side to schools and reading specialists. Insurance shapes this too: coverage rules influence which goals get written, and literacy goals are rarely covered.
An SLP who specializes in literacy puts the two halves together. Speech-language pathologists hold a master’s degree built on six years of study in how language develops in the brain, how it breaks down, and how to test for exactly where. That’s what makes differential diagnosis possible. Add certified structured literacy training, and one provider can test the full system, diagnose what the testing reveals, and treat all of it, from the spoken language underneath to the print on the page.
That is what I built The Literacy Loop to be. I am a licensed speech-language pathologist, certified in Orton-Gillingham structured literacy, and my entire practice is the connection between spoken language and print. My evaluations cover speech sound production, phonological processing, oral language, vocabulary, and literacy across decoding, encoding, fluency, and written expression, along with how your child’s brain manages the learning itself: how much they hold in working memory, how quickly they process what they hear, how they organize and sustain attention through a task. The treatment plan gets built after the testing, from the testing.
The data also decides how I teach. Two kids can share the same decoding goal and need completely different sessions, because one holds four sounds in working memory comfortably while the other loses the first sound by the time the third arrives. A child whose executive functioning is stretched thin needs structure delivered differently than a child whose bottleneck is processing speed. That’s a plan precise to the way your child’s brain takes in, holds, and retrieves information, adjusted in real time as the data comes in.
Because here is what this work actually is. Reading is not natural to the human brain. Spoken language is. Print is an invention, and every child who learns to read has to physically build the brain circuitry that connects the two. That construction is what my therapy does. I don’t deliver a scripted program. I work through the language system itself, explicitly and systematically, and wire it to print, so the change happens where reading actually lives: in how your child’s brain processes language. The structure comes from the science. The sequence comes from your child.
If your child’s story includes speech
Some histories tell me, before testing even begins, that reading is unlikely to be the whole story.
Your child had speech therapy as a preschooler. Maybe the errors resolved and everyone moved on. But speech and reading draw on the same phonological system, the brain’s machinery for perceiving and organizing sounds. Speech is where a weakness shows up first, because speaking comes years before reading. Print is where it shows up second. Children with early speech sound errors carry a substantially elevated risk for later reading and spelling difficulty for exactly this reason. The speech got better. The system that produced the errors is still doing the reading.
Your child was a late talker, or early language came in slowly. Reading comprehension is built on oral language. A child can decode every word on the page and still lose the meaning if the spoken foundation underneath is thin.
Your child still tangles multisyllabic words. Spaghetti, hospital, animal come out scrambled at an age when peers manage them easily. Sequencing sounds across syllables is a motor and phonological skill, and when it’s shaky in speech, spelling and reading long words is usually shaky on paper too. This points to motor speech involvement, and it changes what treatment should look like.
If any of this sounds like your child, the reading struggle has company under the surface, and the provider needs to treat all of it: the speech, the language, and the print. That is precisely what a speech-language pathologist is for. I wrote more about this connection in an earlier post, because it’s the foundation of my practice: your child doesn’t have two problems. They have one. And if you’re reading this thinking that’s my kid, this is exactly what the free consultation is for. Bring me the history. I’ll tell you what I’d want to look at.
Where to start
Evaluation first, always. Once you know exactly what’s driving your child’s struggle, every path gets clearer, including whether a structured literacy program is the right fit, whether the language system needs treatment directly, or both.
If you carry one question out of this post, make it this one. Ask any provider: is the treatment plan built from my child’s evaluation, or does the program come with a set sequence? Neither answer is automatically wrong. But you should know which one you’re buying, and a set sequence works best when thorough testing has already confirmed it’s the right match.
That first step is what I do. If you’re in the western suburbs of Chicago and trying to figure out where to begin, the starting point is a free 20-minute consultation where we talk through what you’re seeing, what’s already been done, and whether an evaluation makes sense.
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Rebecca Pearson, M.S., CCC-SLP/L is a licensed speech-language pathologist and the founder of The Literacy Loop, PLLC, a mobile practice serving families in Wheaton, Glen Ellyn, Naperville, Downers Grove, and the surrounding western suburbs of Chicago. She is IMSE Orton-Gillingham certified and specializes in language-based literacy disorders, dyslexia, and phonological processing.
By Rebecca Pearson, M.S., CCC-SLP/L
