What is Basic Language Skills?

Basic Language Skills (BLS) is a comprehensive, structured literacy curriculum designed to teach reading, spelling, and writing to students, especially those with dyslexia or other reading difficulties. Grounded in the principles of Orton-Gillingham, BLS follows a systematic, explicit, and multisensory approach, which means students learn through sight, sound, and touch to help strengthen connections in the brain.

The program teaches foundational skills such as phonemic awareness (the ability to hear and work with sounds in spoken words), phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. It also emphasizes morphology—understanding prefixes, suffixes, and root words—which is especially helpful for older students.

Basic Language Skills supports struggling readers by helping them decode and spell words accurately, read with confidence, and understand what they read. It is often implemented in small groups or one-on-one settings and is part of a broader effort to provide evidence-based literacy instruction for all learners.