Is it dyslexia, or is it the second language?
The question that keeps parents and teachers guessing, and children waiting
A child who grows up with two languages, or learns in a language that is not spoken at home, and struggles with reading and spelling, presents adults with a puzzle.
Teachers hesitate to raise the alarm: maybe the second language just needs time.
Parents hesitate to push: maybe the school is right.
Assessments are built for monolingual children, so the results never quite settle the question. Meanwhile the child does what children do: draws a conclusion about themselves. The wrong one.
Here is what two decades of working with these children taught me: the question "dyslexia or second language" matters less than everyone thinks. Because the answer to both is the same:
Strengthen the foundation
Reading and spelling stand on two underlying skills. Phonological awareness: hearing, separating and blending the sounds inside words. And morphological awareness: recognising the meaningful parts that words are built from.
Here is the crucial fact:
these skills transfer from one language to the other
A child who has learned to take words apart in Greek or Dutch does not start from zero in English. The awareness itself travels; only the material is new. That is why the Lexilogy route is always: the strongest language first, then the second. Repair the foundation where the child stands firmest. Then walk the same path, with the same method and the same structure, in the second language.
One child. One method. Two languages. No other programme is built this way, because no other programme was built in parallel across languages to begin with.
Lexilogy exists in English, Dutch and Greek. Not as translations of each other, but as three programmes built on the same scientific foundation, each shaped to the nature of its own language: Greek with its transparent structure, English with its deep orthography and sight words, Dutch in between. In practice, your child works in one pair at a time:
English-Dutch, or English-Greek.
For families: you choose the language your child needs now, and can add the second later.
For schools: every subscription includes all three languages, and switching a student from one language to the next happens on the same login.
This is what no other programme can offer: the same intervention, with the same structure, for English-Dutch, or English-Greek. Every school subscription includes all three languages, at no extra cost. The didactic route is clear: the strongest language first, then the second. A student repairs the underlying processes in the language they're strongest in, often the school language, sometimes the home language, and then walks the same path in the other.
Phonological and morphological awareness are skills that transfer from one language to the other: what is built in the first language carries into the second
Your administrator simply assigns the next language version to the same login. The student keeps their seat a little longer, and you pay nothing extra. That makes Lexilogy a natural fit for:
International schools. Students who learn to read in a language that is not spoken at home benefit from an approach that works at the level of sounds and word structure, and that treats the home language as a foundation rather than an obstacle.
Bilingual programmes. Students with reading and spelling difficulties carry a double load in bilingual education. With Lexi-PRO they strengthen the foundation in one language first, then complete the second, with the same didactics, within the same subscription.
Greek community and heritage schools. Lexilogy is the only validated Greek reading and spelling intervention available online, built in parallel with an English version. For Greek-English school communities, that combination exists nowhere else.
Dutch schools abroad and in the Caribbean. Where Dutch and English live side by side, Lexilogy lays the same foundation in both, in the order that suits the student.
A school subscription gives you an admin environment of your own. You place a student on a seat, follow their progress, and remove them once the programme is complete. That seat is immediately available for the next student. You pay per year for a number of seats, not per student. Because a student completes the programme in roughly six months to a year, one seat serves multiple students per year.
If a student continues into a second language version, the seat stays occupied longer, at no extra cost: the language switch happens on the same login.
Students work largely independently, in sessions of 20 to 30 minutes, three to four times a week. At school, at home, or both.
The fixed structure of the programme means your support staff prepare nothing: the method leads, your team follows and encourages.
Subscriptions renew automatically. One month before the renewal date you receive a reminder by email: the moment to cancel, continue, or scale up to a larger plan if your seats are full.