Reading Reflex

Greetings Dee,

The Phono-Graphix reading method outlined in the book Reading Reflex has been discussed frequently on the many boards at this website. It is an excellent reading program with a good track record for remediating delayed readers (but not all). I would encourage you to do a search at each of the boards - in particular, Parenting LD and Teaching Reading - to read the previous posts. Keywords to use include: Phono-Graphix, Phonographix, Phono Graphix, PG, Reading Reflex, and RR. I believe Mary MN, who frequently posts on these boards, was trained at the Orlando Clinic and her daughter did a week intensive there. I used the Reading Reflex book at home with my then 13yo dd. She made good progress with this method but hit a wall when multi-syllable management was introduced after the advanced code. I ended up being trained in PACE and MTC and taught my dd to read using this intensive program. She was reading at a 3rd grade level at the end of 6th grade. In May, her total reading cluster test score was 11.0…WOW!!

If you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask.

Blessings, momo

I picked up a copy of Reading Reflex when my 8-1/2yo daughter was still reading at a preschool level in 2nd grade. After about three hours of one-on-one, my daughter and I could both see it was working. We finished basic code together in about 6 weeks (my daughter was ecstatically happy to finally be reading at school, but her fluency was excruciatingly bad), then broke off to do vision therapy and PACE.

The fluency problems in her case were due to severe developmental vision delays. We weren’t able to catch this problem until she could finally decode at a basic level. Once she could finally read, thanks to Reading Reflex, we could see there was something wrong with her vision.

I later trained in Orlando while my daughter did a PG-intensive. (At that point, I wanted someone else to work with her on reading.) My daughter made excellent gains in Word ID during that week, and spectacular gains in Word Attack skills (went from something like 3rd grade level to 10th grade level in Word Attack).

The PG-intensive in Orlando brings children up to grade level in reading about 98% of the time, is what I have heard. Occasionally there is a child with severe problems who doesn’t gain that much. All of the children need follow-up work at home to consolidate their gains, hone skills, and prevent back-sliding, but that is pretty easy to do once they are over the big hump.

If you’re unsure about investing a lot of money into Phono-Graphix, my recommendation is to get the book “Reading Reflex” ($16 at most bookstores) and try the method out at home with your son. If the method is going to work, you should see significant gains within 12 hours of home tutoring, even if you are a totally inexperienced teacher. The method is *that* good. If you’re in a hurry, then the PG-intensive is a wonderful way to get to grade level reading fast. If the home method doesn’t work at all, then you might want to look at other programs that do more remedial work on the sensory level — such as Lindamood-Bell LiPS.

Mary

For kids starting on pre-primer level, especially with LD, another tried-and-true program is the Orton-Gillingham system. I haven’t used it personally but it gets very good reviews from a number of parents and teachers of students with reading problems. O-G is said to be highly repetitive and very basic, which is exactly what is needed at this stage. Workbooks are sold though a company called eps. For more comments and a link to eps, go to the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) website.

I have found through experience that I get best results using two or more overlapping programs — you get the repetition and review you need without going over and over the same page and getting frustrated, and the strengths of one program fill in the gaps in another.

In your shoes I would get Reading Refles *and* the Orton-Gillingham workbooks *and* some very simple readers for practice with “real” books (I swear by Ladybird Key words , just re-issued by Penguin, but any Dick-and-Jane pre-primer will do). The total cost is much less than you would spend to buy a pre-packaged program like Hooked on Phonics, and you have created a rich learning environment with backyups for your backups.

Reading Reflex actually works better used alone. It is less effective when combined with other programs because it uses a very different teaching paradigm. Combining it with something else can be confusing to a child, and can substantially dilute its effectiveness.

If other approaches are going to be used, then I would recommend using Reading Reflex by itself first. If it’s working well, then don’t mess with it. If it’s not working, then look at switching to something else.

One good thing about Reading Reflex is that you almost always know very quickly whether it is going to work with a particular child, as you should be able to see significant results within about 10 hours of one-on-one work (usually less — in our case, within 3 hours even though I had no prior teaching experience). That is not a large investment of time for a reading program to provide its effectiveness.

Mary

This is one little bone of contention I have wiht Reading Reflex.

It’s really not that novel a paradigm. Frankly, the “you must have confused the kid by doing other things with it” has been used as part of a “that could be the only reason RR didn’t work since it’s so wonderful, what are *you* doing wrong?” accusation more than once (not by you!). Now, I would be alert to any signs of confusion and drop whatever was creating a cognitive conflict.

Some kids benefit a lot from a bit more structure and practice (some from a *lot* more practice, and lots of ‘overteaching’) than you get just following RR. And there are some good multisensory strategies that don’t compete or conflict at all (though the McGuinnesses would either disagree or agree depending on their mood).

but Orton-Gillingham would not mix well with Reading Reflex. A parent is best off just doing Reading Reflex. If it doesn’t work or isn’t enough, then the parent can switch over to something like O-G or Lindamood-Bell LiPS that provides more structure and over-teaching.

I agree that Reading Reflex can be supplemented appropriately. However, it is much more commonly supplemented inappropriately — especially by classroom teachers who insist on retaining “the best” of their whole language and phonics rules strategies, just adding Phono-Graphix to the mix. This sends the McGuiness’s off the deep end, unfortunately.

While it’s true that Phono-Graphix owes a lot to Orton-Gillingham and the other programs that went before it, I do consider PG to operate in a different paradigm. This is what makes it especially difficult to mix effectively with other programs. While you might be sensitive to confusion in a child, many parents (and teachers!) would not be, or would have difficulty identifying the source of the conflict.

Mary

MaryMN,
I’d be very interested in your explaining some of the key differences between Phono-Graphix and O-G. You’ve used the phrase “different paradigm” - can you explain this a little more?

-Abigail

Actually, someone on the ReadNOW list just posted a better explanation of the differences than I could. It was posted within the past few days, so it should be easy to find. The poster was “Nowers”, title is “intro”, and date was August 16. The ReadNOW list is at http://www.groups.yahoo.com.

That post was the first mention I have come across of the terms “synthetic phonics” and “analytic phonics”. The former is the sound-to-sight approach used by PG, and the latter is the sight-to-sound approach found in OG and (I think) all other phonics-based programs encountered in this country.

If I had to name just one thing that puts PG into a different paradigm, it would be the “synthetic phonics” approach to teaching reading. However, it is the combination of this with other (probably also non-unique) aspects of the program that set it apart from others — things such as identification of the three subskills necessary for reading (segmenting, blending, and phoneme manipulation), the order of introduction of sounds (starting with just 9 sounds that can be used to practice all of the subskills), and specific error correction techniques.

Mary

Actually, the big NIH/NICHD study that came down solidly in favour of strong phonics teaching in all classrooms supported **systematic synthetic phonics in all classrooms**, as a direct statement, frequently repeated. It also supports **guided oral reading** and comprehension teaching.

The definition of sythetic phonics used in this report seems to be that it is a system of working from the ground up, from single symbols (or symbol groups/patterns) representing single sounds.

A separate portion of the report demonstrates that teaching blending (putting sounds together to make words) and segmenting (splitting up known words by sound) to kindergartners greatly inproves their reading progress later, and that knowledge of these two skills is an excellent predictor of later reading scores.

Every person involved in teaching reading, i.e. every teacher and parent here, would do well to read this study or at least the two-or-three-page abstract. It can be found by a search on ERIC or through LD In Depth on this board. This will give you excellent factual proven backup when you go to talk to school boards, psychologists, and uneducated so-called teachers!

Every good functional phonics program I have seen is based on oral work and on sounds. PG is apparently more direct in its presentation than many (which can only be to the good, the more direct and clear the message, the more kids will get it), but there can’t be any real contradictions between the programs, because they’re all teaching the same code.

The main difficulty in blending programs is order of presentation, and how to deal with irregular sounds, especially vowels. Kids need to be able to concentrate on one new thing at a time, so care is definitely called for in the beginning not to overload, and to be consistent.

The NON-working so-called “phonics” out there, the stuff that fails utterly, is “implicit phonics” and the “alphabetic principle”.

“Implicit phonics” is the totally sight-to-sound approach where the kid is told to memorize “cat” car” and “cow” by sight (as well as “chair” and “center”, just to confuse him) and is supposed to notice, sometimes without being told at all, and sometimes from one little game on Friday afternoon, that a certain group of words that start with c all have the /k/ sound. At best this produces slow readers and weak spellers. (The average reading score of a class taught “implicit phonics” will fall far below the reading score of a *matched* class taught systematic phonics, both high end and low end students.)

The “alphabetic principle” is a confused attempt to teach phonics without actually teaching phonics — teachers who have learned in colleges of education that phonics is a bad word, but feel they have to do something so kids can get try to work out words independently. Kids are encouraged to spell out loud using letter names only, with the idea of sound patterns not mentioned. The letter *names* are used in a weird attempt to sound out the words. In some cases, for example “tree”, the name-sounds tee-arr-ee-ee can be blended together to make something vaguely resembling the word. In other words, as for example “cat”, the name-sounds see-ay-tee are counter-productive in identifying the word. So this method has just enough success to make kids keep trying to use it, very inefficiently, and enough failures to make them very confused and slow and dependent. I have a student right now who was taught this, and what a mess — entering Grade 7 and has never been taught the short vowels … has memorized “helicopter” but cannot read “clamp”.

The message in the report is that we do need systematic synthetic phonics and guided oral reading, absolutely. Brand names of programs are of lesser importance than what we do with them.

I am new so please forgive request for redundancy, but what is this PG-intensive and where do I do research on it?

The Phono-Graphix website is http://www.readamerica.net. ReadAmerica offers a one-week PG-intensive in Orlando. Basically, the child goes to the clinic 5 mornings and spends a total of about 12 hours getting one-on-one tutoring with a highly trained PG specialist. We did this and it was extremely helpful. I believe something like 98% of the children who do the intensive leave reading at grade level or better (although, obviously, continued work is needed to maintain gains and ensure fluency).

There may be other locations that offer intensives also. ReadAmerica trains and certifies tutors in the Phono-Graphix method.

It is a good idea to get the book “Reading Reflex” by Carmen & Geoffrey McGuiness ($16 at most local bookstores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.). This provides an excellent description of the why and how of the methodology, and includes instruction for parents who want to tutor a child using PG.

Mary

The poster I was quoting is from the U.K. She defined “synthetic phonics” as sight-to-sound teaching and cited Phono-Graphix and Jolly Phonics as two programs that use this approach. According to her, “synthetic phonics” starts with a sound and then teaches the different ways this sound can be represented in print.

This U.K. poster defined “analytical phonics” as sound-to-sight teaching, which is the traditional phonics approach we are accustomed to in this country, including Orton-Gillingham and (I think) Lindamood Bell’s Seeing Stars. This approach takes a letter or group of letters and teaches the sound it represents.

The differentiation sounds nit-picky and I had great difficulty believing this difference is significant. I think that for people like me, who had no difficulty learning to read, it is not at all significant. However, I came to believe it does matter to LD children, when I saw the response of my daughter to Reading Reflex. The sound-to-sight approach somehow made more sense to her.

Sounds like NIH-NICHD may use a different terminology or different definitions of terms than the poster from the U.K.

In the absence of definitive research, I think we all end up making judgment calls on these things. My judgment call is that PG really does represent a different teaching paradigm than other phonics programs available in the U.S. The speed with which it remediates, compared to other programs, supports me in my opinion. But, to be quite clear, this really is just my opinion. Opinions can be mistaken, and mine are no exception.

Mary

Mary,

Thanks for your post - sorry I didn’t post sooner, but I went off in search of the link you mentioned, and then I got interested and started researching “synthetic” vs. “analytic” phonics on the internet, and just got lost on the way. I had not really understood the distinction before.

For what it’s worth, I now know my dyslexic son was taught by a synthetic phonics approach from pre-school age. (I knew it before, but didn’t know what it was called). That is, he learned letter sounds and learned to put together the sounds to make words, first. Unfortunately, he was not able to learn to read fluently by this approach - he experienced great difficulty moving beyond primer level.

I don’t want to fault the approach, just to point out that it may not work for all students. Of course, I can only assume that my son would have had even worse problems if he had not had a strong grounding/understanding of phonics. It was always clear to me that my son’s problems were with developing whole word recognition skills - he could always sound out words, and his writing was phonetically consistent even when the English language wasn’t, but he couldn’t remember the words from one day to the next, or even one sentence to the next. So of course, for him the visual/cognitive issues were the ones that needed to be addressed.

Thanks again for the information.

-Abigail

Getting lost researching stuff on the internet, I mean!

Mary

You write:

She defined “synthetic phonics” as sight-to-sound teaching and cited Phono-Graphix and Jolly Phonics as two programs that use this approach. According to her, “synthetic phonics” starts with a sound and then teaches the different ways this sound can be represented in print.

Now, I would define the terms exactly the reverse. To me, sight-to-sound would mean first sight then sound: look at the print and say the sound — whereas sound-to-sight would mean first sound then sight: say the sound and then identify or make the printed form — the reverse of what you’re saying. Now I’m confused.

Anyhow, every good program I’ve seen and used includes BOTH parts; in reading, looking at print forms and identifying sounds, and in writing, saying sounds and forming letters; in the pre-writing level of instruction with beginners, saying the sound and pointing to the letters. Any good program is not just a reading program or just a writing program or just a spelling program, but a reading-and-writing-and-spelling program, since these are all facets of the same skill of literacy.

Maybe that’s why the students I tutor start to learn where other systems have failed. I feel strongly that it’s not the name on the box, it’s what you do with it that counts.

As far as Phonographix, a number of very responsible and intelligent people on this board support it, so I’m convinced it’s a good program.

Unfortunately, the twelve-hour promise smells far too much like snake oil. I’ve done a lot of tutoring, and in general my kids do show improvement within twelve hours. A few show dramatic improvement in that time. Not all of them, because there’s often a huge load of un-teaching to do first. And anyway that’s usually just the beginning; it takes more than twelve hours to develop a good habit. If kids are going home and practicing after the tutoring sessions, that can also speed up the process, but I’ve learned not to depend on parents to find time or be able to work in teaching mode with their own kids.

A *good* phonics program — PG or any other complete and accurate phonics program— can promise that in an average classroom, over 90% of the children will read independently by the end of Grade 1. (The heck with Grade 3, as the present politicians are saying). It can promise that 90% of ordinary learners will go from non-readers to readers in about 100 hours of classroom instruction.It can promise effective remediation for 50% or more of higher-grade non-readers, depending on how ingrained their habit of failure is. It can promise that most dyslexic or LD students, I would guess 80% or more, will learn to read, although they may take longer and may need other types of assistance as well (auditory or visual therapy, for example). It can promise a rise in spelling ability.

But twelve hours is pushing it, and I wish PGwouldn’t say this; it makes responsible educators nervous because they’ve all seen snake oil promises that look like this before.

And I wish PG would not claim that they have the only way, because many of us have been teaching and tutoring quite effectively before they came along — I learned about effective reading teaching from my mother who learned from my grandmother, and I have books from my grandmother’s time 100 years ago to prove it.

I’m sure PG is a good program, but they upset people when they claim to have discovered fire and invented the wheel.

with every point you made, including the 12-hour snake oil promise. It made me wary about trying the program.

I think one of the things that sets PG apart for me is the fact that — as a non-educator and parent — I was able to pick up the book, read it, and then do the program. And it worked! My total investment of time was about 10 hours (reading, preparing materials, first three hours of one-on-one), at which point it became very clear that my 8yo daughter was not going to be reading at a preschool level for much longer.

As a parent with absolutely no experience teaching, this was not only a painless but an extremely rewarding experience! Other programs are good, and experienced tutors may be extremely successful with them. However, it takes quite a bit of training and experience to become an effective Orton-Gillingham tutor. I may not have been the most efficient PG tutor around, but I was good enough to be effective quickly. That’s a huge plus for a parent.

Mary

Victoria,

I wanted to comment on the 12 hours for PG. First, I think that claim is pretty much confined to the Read America Clinic. Now my son went for a PG intensive and , as you know, he is still not reading on grade level. But I can see how, for many kids with less severe problems, they could be. I think they have a narrower focus than you do. They only teach decoding. And the kid is not necessarily doing it fluently just reading. The child is tutored in the morning and is given homework. Parents have spent $$ bringing kids from all over the country so are very committed to doing it. And I think that most kids are older than my son was with glitches that are impacting their reading that can be corrected relatively quickly.

Now, personally, I would love to have a tutor like you who would take my kid all the way to fluent reading and writing but all my calling has not turned one up.
So many of the people doing tutoring are just doing a standard school program slower.

Beth

Here’s a short list of tutor referral services I’ve collected. Qualifications and honesty of the tutors are not verified, so if you do pick anyone from one of these lists, check background with care yourself.

However many of them seem to have good people, and the ISER list is directly designed to help special ed searches.

Some of these (I always forget which) do online tutoring — I’m not sure of the efficacy, but you can try it a few times and see if the person is any good.

*******************************************
Here is a website that lists tutors and therapists in special education, by
area.

Internet Special Education Registry
http://www.iser.com/

Other tutor referral services I have collected include

Tutor.com
http://www.tutor.com/set.asp?Tab=1&Page=/registration/registration_frame.asp

TutorDepot.com
http://www.tutordepot.com/td/add.asp

Hire-A-Tutor
http://www.hireatutor.com/

Tutorcafe
http://www.tutorcafe.com/homepage/homepage.cfm?beanid=97043-36873930-1

BUYER BEWARE!
These lists are self-referrals, and the listing organization knows NOTHING about
the tutor. Some do a minimal police check, and some don’t even do that. **Check
any potential tutor/therapist’s credentials yourself.**

By the way, I am a tutor, registered with all of the above. My company name is
Advance Tutors, and my logon is victoriahal. I work in the Capital Beltway area.
I’m not a Lindamood-Bell specialist, so please go ahead and look for one; but if
you want an experienced and successful reading tutor, please email.
Victoria