Reading the word tree could be described as de-constructing the letters that make up the word 't r e e', re-combining them into a whole, 'tree', then recognising the 'sound' and associating with a concept 'tree' then comprehending it's context to give it meaning 'the tree of life', 'it was like climbing a tree', ' the tree was bending'.
During early years teaching it's apparently fairly trivial to identify the children who are recognizing shapes over the deconstruction technique, there's a test where they are shown lists of words with nonsense words thrown in, for those recognising shapes, when they see 'strom' they cannot help but unknowingly correct it to 'storm', their brain just fixes it for them, it's close enough and the word 'strom' has probably not been encountered, children implementing the deconstruction technique will have less of a problem.
Why teachers care is that it helps them identify children who may have issues identifying letter shapes but can pass other tests by recognising whole words, early diagnosis of dyslexia can have a very positive impact on a child's educational progress.
Interestingly, when you get proficient at reading, you stop deconstructing words. That is, you can do if you want/need to, e.g. to double-check if that weird pattern you see is a real word at all, but it's not generally what you do - instead, most of the reading is image patter-matching. That's why yuor brian will autocrroect "strom" to "storm" when you're reaidng fast.
During early years teaching it's apparently fairly trivial to identify the children who are recognizing shapes over the deconstruction technique, there's a test where they are shown lists of words with nonsense words thrown in, for those recognising shapes, when they see 'strom' they cannot help but unknowingly correct it to 'storm', their brain just fixes it for them, it's close enough and the word 'strom' has probably not been encountered, children implementing the deconstruction technique will have less of a problem.
Why teachers care is that it helps them identify children who may have issues identifying letter shapes but can pass other tests by recognising whole words, early diagnosis of dyslexia can have a very positive impact on a child's educational progress.