Linguistic Awareness

a number of linguistic skills must be mastered in order to read and write skillfully. For any individual to be an efficient learner/speaker of a language, they must acquire different types of linguistic awareness, be it morphological, orthographic, phonological or semantic awareness. An understanding of phonemes, in this study, can be seen as an essential requirement for the acquisition of decoding abilities in developmental dyslexics. Therefore, dyslexics with problems in phonological skills have difficulties with reading, which in turn, leads to lack of comprehension. However, we could see a much larger scale of morphologically and orthographically motivated deficits which are not connected to phonological impairments, occurring both at

However, there is still the presence of significant lack of awareness about this learning disability among the general public and sadly, also among our educators. An understanding of learning disabilities in India is quite recent in origin though over the decade there has been an increase in awareness about children with dyslexia in India but we still have a long way to go. Despite the growing awareness, India still lacks national level research studies and statistical reports about the incidence of the wide spectrum of learning disabilities. Most of the ground level research work, intervention programs, remedial teaching, treatment and related expenses, are handled by NGOs and private organizations. A majority of the dyslexic cases either go undiagnosed or untreated with children dropping out of the traditional education system since not everyone would have the material resources or the financial capacity and also the much needed intellectual capabilities to cautiously and effectively deal with this disability. Often our local district schools do not even recognize dyslexia as a specific learning disability because they may not have the necessary resources to cater according to the needs of dyslexic students. There are still social stigmas attached to these learning disabilities, with children being labelled as suffering from mental conditions because of parents often end up ignoring the crucial issues. Also prevails a common assumption that the child will eventually grow out of the problem which does not happen on its own. These misperceptions and lack of necessary knowledge about dyslexia lead to failure in early diagnosis and effective