Decodification for dyslexia and broader reading difficulties

Abstract

Dyslexia is often addressed through specialised intervention, yet growing scholarship in literacy and educational psychology also underscores the importance of contextualised and meaningful literacy experiences for students with reading difficulties. In this article, I argue the relevance of Paulo Freire’s concept of decodification for reading instruction for students with dyslexia and broader reading difficulties. Drawing on the literature on dyslexia, background knowledge, culturally relevant text selection and experiences of emergent bilingual learners, I argue that decodified texts may support engagement, meaning-making, vocabulary integration, inferential reasoning and retention. The discussion extends the framework beyond dyslexia to other reading difficulties and illustrates its instructional relevance through three practice-oriented suggestions: recognising the student’s context, talking with the student and evaluating current texts.
Clinical Implications: A pedagogical example further shows how decodification may inform text selection and assessment within existing reading instruction, rather than constitute a new intervention. Overall, in this article, I position decodification as a literature-grounded and practice-relevant framework for rethinking reading instruction in ways that better reflect students’ lived realities.