“Academic Language Therapy is the diagnostic and prescriptive application of Multisensory Structured Language to mitigate or remediate written-language disorders, including dyslexia.”  The Academic Language Therapy Association® (ALTA)

Academic language means that instruction offered to individuals is educational and emphasizes the teaching of reading, spelling, handwriting, and written expression. Therapy indicates that the instruction is intensive and therapeutic rather than tutorial.

Students receiving academic language therapy are taught the structure of the English language from its simplest to its most complex form. Structured Literacy or Multisensory Structured Language (terms which are often used interchangeably) includes the teaching of phonology, phonics, orthography, morphology-etymology, semantics and syntax.  These components are taught through an explicit, systematic, sequential, cumulative and repetitive manner.