A plain-language glossary of the terms you will meet around dyslexia and Barton tutoring, with links between related entries and the sources they come from.
These entries are summaries of the two sources listed at the bottom of the page, prepared for Cottonwood Learning. Sentences in quotation marks are copied exactly from the Barton Reading & Spelling System’s own site and link to the page they come from. This is background reading, not a diagnosis or a plan for a particular student.
Dyslexia
A learning difference, usually running in families, that makes reading, spelling and often writing much harder than a person’s other abilities would predict. Bright Solutions describes it as neurological in origin: the difficulty lies in recognising and working out written words, and it is tied to the sound structure of language rather than to eyesight, effort or intelligence. Barton’s FAQ similarly says dyslexia commonly explains why a student with at least average intelligence struggles with spelling, reading or writing. Barton, FAQs
Severity varies and no two people show exactly the same profile. It does not go away on its own, but the sources agree that people respond to timely, appropriate instruction.
Signs can change as the demands of reading and writing change. Bright Solutions groups them by age, while stressing that each person’s profile is different.
Preschool and early years: late talking, trouble with rhymes, mixing up the order of sounds in long words, difficulty learning letter names and sounds, and a close family history of dyslexia.
School age: slow or effortful reading, trouble sounding out unfamiliar words, guessing from pictures or context, skipping or substituting words, and spelling that remains much harder than expected. A student may explain ideas clearly aloud but struggle to put the same ideas on paper. Word finding, left and right, sequences of steps, rote facts and reading an analogue clock may also be difficult.
Teen years: the earlier difficulties may remain as reading and writing assignments become longer. Written work may still show much less than the student understands or can explain aloud.
Adulthood: reading may remain slow, a page may need to be read more than once, and spelling or putting thoughts into writing may still take unusual effort. Direction and word-finding difficulties can continue too.
Frustration can sometimes appear as avoiding school, headaches, stomach aches or worry about school. Those experiences deserve attention, but they are not specific to dyslexia. No checklist or number of signs can diagnose it; a list like this is only a reason to look further. Profiles vary, and other conditions can change how dyslexia shows up.
Bright Solutions addresses several persistent misunderstandings. Dyslexia is not rare, and it is not made up. People with dyslexia do not literally see letters backwards. Students do not simply outgrow it. It has nothing to do with intelligence. And ordinary exposure to phonics, on its own, is not usually enough; the teaching has to be explicit, systematic and multisensory.
Difficulty with print says nothing about ability elsewhere. The sources describe strengths that many people with dyslexia report: creativity, visual and spatial reasoning, mechanical and artistic ability, people skills, intuition and big-picture thinking. These vary from person to person, so they are a reason for confidence rather than a promise about any one student.
How the brain handles the sound structure of language: hearing, holding onto and working with the sounds and syllables inside words. The definitions Bright Solutions cites place the core difficulty in dyslexia here. Barton’s screening checks two parts of it before tutoring begins: telling similar sounds apart, and holding a short sequence of sounds in mind.
The ability to notice, separate and rearrange the individual sounds in spoken words, entirely by ear. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate each sound in a word – in your head, without letters.Barton, FAQs It is a listening skill, not a print skill, which is what sets it apart from phonics. Bright Solutions makes the point that many students need it taught directly before phonics instruction can take hold.
Two sides of the same skill. Blending pushes separate sounds together into a word: /m/ /a/ /p/ becomes map. Segmenting pulls a spoken word apart into its sounds: ship becomes /sh/ /i/ /p/. Both are practised first without letters, as phonemic awareness, and then with letters, where blending becomes decoding and segmenting becomes encoding.
The links between sounds and the letters that spell them, and the use of those links to read and spell. Phonics starts where phonemic awareness leaves off: once a student can hear the sounds in a word, phonics gives them the letters. For a dyslexic student the pairings need to be taught in a planned order, with plenty of practice, rather than picked up along the way.
A specific pairing between a sound and the letter or letter group that represents it. English has more sounds than letters, so one sound can have several spellings and one spelling can stand for several sounds. A structured programme introduces these pairings one at a time, most reliable first, and keeps reviewing them. Bright Solutions lists this as one of the building blocks of an Orton-Gillingham lesson.
Working out an unfamiliar written word by turning its letters into sounds and blending them, rather than guessing from the first letter, the picture or the sentence around it. Slow or effortful decoding is one of the clearest signs of dyslexia. It also uses up attention that should go to meaning, which is why a student can understand a passage read aloud to them and still struggle with the same passage on the page.
Spelling, seen as the reverse of decoding: hearing the sounds in a spoken word and choosing letters for each. Bright Solutions notes that spelling is often the weakest area for a dyslexic student, weaker than their reading, with practised words that fail to stick. Barton teaches reading and spelling together because they draw on the same knowledge of sounds and letters.
English syllables come in a small number of recognisable shapes, and the shape tells a reader how the vowel is likely to sound and where a long word can be split. Knowing the patterns turns a word like napkin from a guess into two manageable pieces. They are taught explicitly, one at a time, as part of the Orton-Gillingham sequence.
The meaningful parts of words: base words, prefixes and suffixes. Knowing that -ed marks the past tense explains why jumped is not spelt jumpt, and knowing a prefix like un- unlocks a whole family of words at once. Morphology comes later in a structured sequence, after the sound and syllable work is secure.
Difficulty with the physical and organisational act of writing: an awkward grip, slow or laboured handwriting, unusual letter formation, uneven spacing and trouble copying from the board or a book. Bright Solutions discusses it alongside dyslexia because the two often appear together, but they are distinct and a student can have one without the other.
Dyslexia can appear alongside other differences, most often attention difficulties (ADD or ADHD) and dysgraphia. Bright Solutions treats attention difficulties as separate from dyslexia even when they occur together, and each needs its own attention. It also states that problems with vision are not the cause of dyslexia.
A formal dyslexia evaluation is a multi-part assessment interpreted by a qualified professional; Bright Solutions is clear that no single test settles it. It is a different thing from Barton’s short screening, and it is not a prerequisite for tutoring: A formal diagnosis of dyslexia is not required. If dyslexia is suspected, Barton may still be appropriate.Barton, home page I provide tutoring; I do not diagnose dyslexia.
Adjustments at school or work that let a person show what they know while their reading is still catching up: extra time, text read aloud or audiobooks, answering orally, notes provided rather than copied. In United States schools they are usually arranged through a formal plan; the rules differ by state and change over time, so the school is the place to ask. Accommodations support the student; instruction is what changes the reading. Both have a place.
An approach to teaching reading and spelling, rather than a single product, that underlies many structured literacy programmes. Bright Solutions describes its elements as phonemic awareness, sound–symbol correspondence, syllable patterns, spelling rules, morphology, multisensory teaching, extensive practice and a cumulative sequence. The Barton Reading & Spelling System is one of seven well-known Orton-Gillingham-based systems.Barton, Levels
Three words that describe how effective instruction for dyslexia is organised. Explicit: each skill is taught directly and named, with nothing left for the student to infer. Systematic: skills come in a planned order, simplest first. Cumulative: every lesson builds on the last, and earlier material keeps being reviewed so it stays secure. Bright Solutions adds intensive and multisensory to the list. In Barton’s words: Our system is a multi-sensory, direct, explicit, structured and sequential program designed for intense intervention.Barton, Overview
Teaching that engages seeing, hearing, saying and doing at the same time: for example, moving coloured tiles to build a word while saying each sound aloud. The idea is that a pattern learned through several senses at once is held more firmly than one met on a worksheet. Barton describes itself as An Orton-Gillingham Influenced Simultaneously Multisensory Explicit and Systematic Phonics Program. Barton, home page
The programme I tutor with. Barton describes it as a tutoring system for students of different ages who struggle with reading, writing and spelling due to dyslexia or a learning disability. Barton, home page It is built for one-to-one work: It was designed for intense intervention, which if possible, should be done one-on-one.Barton, FAQs Tutors qualify by ear rather than by degree: Anyone who passes the Tutor Screening can become a Barton tutor.Barton, home page
The system is divided into ten clear levels, allowing you to learn and teach one level at a time.Barton, Levels The numbers are a sequence, not a measure of the student: Our level numbers do NOT equate to grade level. They simply indicate the sequence in which the material must be taught.Barton, Levels Level 1 covers the foundational sound skills everything else rests on, so Most students, no matter how old they are, must start with Level 1.Barton, Levels There is a placement route for students who have had Orton-Gillingham tutoring recently.
Barton uses two short screenings, and neither is a test of intelligence or reading level. The Tutor Screening checks the tutor’s ears: You must hear sounds extremely well, because strong auditory skills are essential to catch and correct mistakes.Barton, Tutors The Student Screening checks whether the student is ready for the programme: First we evaluate whether a student’s auditory skills support starting the Barton System.Barton, home page Only a screened tutor may give it: You cannot give or score the Student Screening if you have not passed our Tutor Screening.Barton, Students Barton is candid that not every student with dyslexia is ready for the Barton System; Barton, FAQs a student who does not pass usually needs work on those listening skills first. I have passed the Tutor Screening and use the Student Screening before we begin.
Barton’s recommendation is specific: To make meaningful progress, students should receive at least two hours of one-on-one tutoring each week, year-round, with sessions no longer than one hour.Barton, home page Its FAQ is blunter still: Once a week is not enough.Barton, FAQs The reason is cumulative teaching: each lesson relies on the last one being fresh. How that fits a particular family’s week is something we work out together.
The creator of the programme and the publisher of both sources on this page. Her official profile describes a career devoted to helping people with dyslexia unlock their potential. Barton, Susan Barton The profile describes her training in several Orton-Gillingham approaches before she began tutoring and later wrote the system.
Every entry on this page is drawn from the sources below, all published by Susan Barton. The information was gathered on ; the wording on those sites may have changed since, and the warning-sign handout dates from 2002. Sentences in quotation marks are copied word for word from bartonreading.com and each links to the page it was taken from. Everything else is paraphrase, prepared for Cottonwood Learning, and any error in it belongs to this page rather than to the sources.
Barton Reading & Spelling System, bartonreading.com: the home page and its Overview, Levels, Students, Tutors, FAQs and Susan Barton pages. Read 24 September 2026.
Bright Solutions for Dyslexia, “What is Dyslexia?”, dys-add.com, and the pages it links to (How to Get Help, More Info, Free Videos). Read 24 September 2026. Bright Solutions cites the International Dyslexia Association and the National Institutes of Health for its definitions; those are paraphrased rather than quoted here, because their authors revise them from time to time.
Bright Solutions for Dyslexia, Susan Barton, Warning Signs of Dyslexia, copyright 2002. Handout supplied by the owner and read 24 September 2026. Its age-grouped signs are paraphrased here as background for further conversation, not as a diagnostic checklist.
I use the Barton system and hold its Beginning Level certification. This page has not been reviewed by Bright Solutions or Barton. Nothing here is medical or legal advice, and none of it diagnoses dyslexia. If you are unsure about your student, ask me or talk to their school.
