Curriculum » MSL



(Multisensory Structured Language)

MSL is a methodology that utilizes multisensory presentations whereby the child simultaneously “sees the letter,” “hears its sound”, and “feels the letter/sound association” via tracing with their fingers or the movements of their mouth.

Structured and sequential presentation of information is a characteristic of this approach.  All learning is cumulative and there is a necessity for repetition to attain mastery or automaticity.

It proceeds from the simple to the complex, where children are taught to recognize the letters and its sound(s), blend the sounds into words and later to divide words into syllables; they hear speech sounds in isolation, write them, or listen to a dictated word and identify the speech sounds with the spelling of the phonemes.  

As students develop mastery of the “sound” and “syllable” levels of decoding/encoding, they are introduced to the smallest meaningful units of language, the morphemes.  Prefixes, suffixes, and Latin/Greek roots are taught to provide strategies for reading/spelling “higher” level words to expand receptive/expressive vocabulary and its inherent relationship to reading comprehension.