Which area is identified as a focus for fostering skills in students with dyslexia?

• A. Receptive language
• B. Expressive language
• C. Metacognition
• D. Semantic

Answer: (C)

Metacognition is the focus. It centers on a student’s ability to think about their own thinking while reading—planning a plan before tackling a text, monitoring understanding as they go, and deciding what to do when comprehension or decoding stalls. For students with dyslexia, building these self-regulation skills helps them choose and apply strategies (such as re-reading, sounding out tricky words, or using context clues) and to judge whether those strategies are helping.

This isn’t just about knowing vocabulary or grammar (receptive or expressive language) or just grasping word meanings (semantic skills). Those areas are important for reading, but metacognition adds the layer of self-awareness and deliberate strategy use that helps students persist, adjust approaches, and transfer what they learn to new passages. A practical classroom application is coaching students to verbalize their thinking as they read a difficult sentence, ask themselves what they know about the word, decide on a strategy, and evaluate whether understanding improved after trying it.