The continuing saga of my sons reading….I know I’ve discussed this before but I’m frustrated. Just got back from the vision therapist. She feels my son is doing well visually and any continuing problems with reading have some other cause.(he was treated for convergence insufficiency) I am not totally convinced because I have, in her words, the same muscular problem as my son. She says I have good control over my problem. I can read fluently, but ask me to read words not in common usage either late at night or with my weaker eye alone and suddenly I’m having major problems doing all the fine eye motions that we normally take for granted for fluent reading. The eye movements become jerky and out comes the pencil under each and every letter to help me hold my place. Unlike the experienced reader, my son is continually encountering unknown words. Anyway, she felt that on some of the tests she could see his eye scan and focus on the proper letters but there was a split second delay in his verbal response and that it might be that his eyes are going too fast for his mouth and he can read silently normally, or we could be dealing with some sort of auditory processing problem. The kid hates reading which makes me suspect his silent reading is not going well. I had elaborate auditory processing tests done on the kid as a preschooler due to early speech problems. A university level specialist found no underlying auditory processing problems afer 3 hours of testing. Actually he scored quite high and she was able to do a number of tests normally reserved for older children. There was one test of the frontal lobe that could not be performed due to his young age but she was skeptical of a problem. His reading is very inconsistent. It tends to be much worse in the afternoon after a long day of school. Would an auditory processing problem tend to be worse later in the day? Along with the slow jerky nature of his oral reading, he misreads words and automaticlly corrects himself, reads words twice, skips words and frequently misreads small function words while getting the larger ones right . If he uses a book marker to slowly uncover unknown multisyllable words he reads them noticably better. Is it helping him to visually track, forcing him to pay attention to the whole word, or helping him somehow with an auditory problem? Also, I still keep seeing another strange problems thrown into the mix from time to time. The other night he read 1945 as 1954. He immediately knew he had read it wrong, stopped and tried to correct himself. He misread it 3 times before he could get his mouth to say 1945. I could see he was confused and frustrated. I have the oposite problem. My eye sometimes reverses numbers but my mouth will say the number correctly causing the same bewildered reaction. (I have a frequent problem with word substitution in oral speech and frequently have to correct myself or find an alternative word). He got straight 99’s on all of his nationally normed math computation tests last year so, at least with numbers, I don’t think there are visual substitutions going on, although I reolize letter sounds may be processed in a different part of the brain. Now that I think of it, if I say what letters do you see, when he reads a word incorrectly, he reads them off properly but may not do as well with letter sounds which I know he knows. One exception. I have heard him call the letter “G” a “J” many times- there again- g and j are related. I’ve seen errors in word substitution before with him. Like reading mitten as glove, errors like reading would as could are common. However, I wonder if most people have a few “brain glitches” once in a while and I may, in my desire to find his problem, be focusing too much concerned on something that maybe unrelated to the main problem at hand and be withing the range or normal. Anyone know what kind of specific tests are left out there to be done? So many of the things that were done for auditory processing testing are simple things that can be done at home if you know what you’re doing.Could it be a motor problem related to brain- mouth? Can anyone recomend some books for me to read? I have access to university library. I hate to raid the kids college account and drag him out to yet another specialist. He’s in 4th grade now. The poor kid has been tested to death.
Re: Opinions please
Hi again Victoria…and Scriabin,
Victoria…you wrote: “In the US at present, kids are generally taught to guess for a year or two before someone lets on the big secret that words are represented by the phonetic code. The habit becomes ingrained and is very hard to get out. If we taught phonics from the ground up, we could save two or three years on teaching reading.”
I agree with you completely on this. I even think that many of the vision issues I post about might be avoided if we taught kids to read appropriately in the first place, but this is just speculation on my part.
Scriabin,
I’ve worked recently with a child who had undergone vision therapy and who had gone through the code thoroughly in reading therapy. However, for some time, I failed to pick up on the fact that he was refusing to dump his old guessing strategy.
I agree with Victoria that the word substitution is a dead giveaway that he is still clinging to his old strategy.
The test that revealed my client’s situation to me was the code knowledge test. He simply wasn’t retaining the sounds (and options) of many of the vowel digraphs. This should have been a clear indication to me that he wasn’t using them. Your son may show the same result, as I know you’ve used a popular reading method with him, in which case it’s a clear sign that he’s not actually using the code knowledge he’s been taught. Or, he may score very well and still not be using it.
In the case of my client, once I realized what was happening, I started banging away at the code concept. I compared the two strategies every at every chance he offered. When he misread a word because he’d ignored the code I kept pointing out how his old strategy was failing him miserably. However, I also pointed out that his old strategy had developed in him a strong desire to follow the storyline which would serve him well even if he switched strategies.
It took about four sessions. Gradually, he began to change his approach. He will still revert to guessing occassionally, but his code knowledge score has improved significantly and he is finally becoming more confident with multisyllable words as he practices his new decoding approach.
In the event none of this is relevant to your son’s situation, I would recommend that you get another competent vision therapist to take a look, just to rule out the possibility that vision is still an issue…..Good luck…Rod
Re: Opinions please
This seems like a classic example of therapy opening the door but appropriate teaching methods are needed to help him walk through it.
He learned to compensate for his deficits using an inefficient system. Now that the barrier is removed, he needs to be taught.
Re: Opinions please
I had much the same experience as this with my son and vision therapy. The therapist insisted he was fine, could track fine, but in real life he couldn’t. I then took him to another therapist who told me he couldn’t track with cognitive demands. Well, with his auditory processing problems, reading had tons of cognitive demands.
My son has tons of different issues but fundamental problem is integration. The first vision therapist did not get at that with his “flat” approach. We now are doing a series of exercises with our Neuronet provider which are finally translating into not as much skipping lines, words, ect. We could have gone to a different vision therapist who she refers people to but opted not to in interest of one shop therapy.
It may be your son is in a similar situation. At this point, my son’s auditory processing problems are really pretty much resolved, although he never will be strong. Vision though has continued to plague us and has proven more difficult to resolve.
Beth
You’ve got mixed things going on here:
(1) Yes, eye fatigue sounds likely. Ask Rod (posts here now and then) for referral to a good developmental optometrist. Apparently it’s a field where the right person is important.
(2) Lots of us have verbal reversals. I have them myself. It’s more common when fatigued. I have no idea what to do about it except to reduce stress and self-correct. Since you say he already does this, good! Reduce stress — and see below on that.
(3) Replacing words with similar meaning and skipping/mistaking small common words is the *prime* indicator of a guesser.
In the US at present, kids are generally taught to guess for a year or two before someone lets on the big secret that words are represented by the phonetic code. The habit becomes ingrained and is very hard to get out. If we taught phonics from the ground up, we could save two or three years on teaching reading.
Even if he has been taught phonics, his poor brain ius trying to cope with two different and self-contradictory sets of rules: (A) Look at the word. Run your eyes all over it. Try to guess at it from context. Think if you know any word it looks like. Look at the ending and then the beginning and then the middle. Try to guess it from the picture. Try to imagine if it is any one of the three or four hundred or more words you’ve been told to memorize by sight. (B) Scan the word from left to right and try to sound it out. Look for left to right vowel patterns. Divide (chunk) it into syllable with one vowel sound each. If the most common vowel sound doesn’t work, try the other one. Use context to check the meaning after you have the sound of the word.
And people ask why kids are confused and frustrated with reading??
You cannot possibly use both of these systems together with any degree of efficiency! A) is never efficient and falls down worse and worse as vocabulary increases. B) works and works well, but *not* when the kid is conflicted trying to use both at once, stiopping and contradicting himself on every word.
It takes time and effort to clear this up, but if you re-train left to right scanning with a pointer (and if absolutely necessary, as a *temporary* tool only, a window cut out of a file card) and modelling sounding out and re-teaching vowel sounds, he can straighten out the confusion and read more accurately.