PG or Great Leaps for high school?

Hi Jan,

I haven’t tried Phono-Graphix with a group, but I have worked with a wide range of poor readers using the method, including high school and college students. When you examine the PG curriculum materials, you have to keep the big picture in mind.

The big picture is: How well does one particular individual read, and if reading is a problem, are there deficits in 1) skills, 2) code knowledge and 3) reading strategy?

To illustrate, I’m working with a high school boy now who only had a very modest deficit in his ability to segment. Using PG techniques, that was remedied using 10 minutes of the first two hours. What I’m left with is a boy who simply doesn’t like to read that much, and whose interests are elsewhere. This boy doesn’t need PG; he needs a good teacher of reading and literature and someone who can connect with his interests and get him motivated. I’m working with him, but I’m not using much of my PG training while doing so. You are likely to have kids like him in your group of six to eight, and PG training will help you determine who they are.

As another illustration, I have worked with a boy who was in college and unable to decode at the 3rd grade level. He simply couldn’t read. He couldn’t segment sounds, he knew very little code (first choice for “ch” was /k/, for instance) and his strategy was to look for a hint and guess away. As childish as the PG curriculum may look to you at first glance, I started at the beginning with him. He needed work in basic CVC words, he needed to read simple coded stories and he needed to start at a level where he could see that it worked, so that he could justify the effort that it would take to change his basic reading strategy from guessing to reading phonetically. He was also smart, learned readily, and should have never been a non-reader, in my opinion, but that’s another story for the reading wars.

I hope you can see from my illustrations that PG training will prepare you to do exactly what you need to do with your class. You need to test them, find out roughly where they are in skills, code knowledge and strategy, and go from there without wasting any of the precious time you have with them.

As for the tutor/tutee arrangement, I would be tempted to try this: Assuming you have a fairly wide range of kids in your small class, train the better readers to work on skills and code knowledge with the poorer readers. If you obtain the PG training you will realize how simple this would be to do. For instance, you could have a couple of kids who were comfortable with the code helping the others with mapping sounds either in class while you worked one-on-one with another student, or as homework (practice outside of class.)

What concerns me about this suggestion is that I have poor teaching skills when it comes to working with a group. One-on-one is fine, but I’m afraid I’d lose control of six or eight. If you are comfortable in that regard, you might be amazed at how they would respond to finally being taught a reading method that made sense to each of them.

One final caution: If one of the kids obviously understands what they are learning, but has a devil of a time reading real text and begins wearing down and becoming frustrated after a few minutes of reading, he may have an undetected vision problem. From my experiences, given a group of six very poor readers, there will be at least one who simply can’t maintain focus on print with both eyes and needs either corrective lenses or, more likely, vision therapy.

Anyway, good luck….Rod

Hi Rod,
Thanks for your input. By testing, do you mean the tests at the start of Reading Reflex, plus having the student read orally to me, or more formal testing? Also, would you recommend the Word Work Kit for such a group or would the RR book alone work fine? (I have read the latter, am planning to trial test it with my SK son starting in June.)
I could pair students in the class as you suggest so the stronger help the weaker in preparation for possibly also teaching the program to a needy elementary school group.
I taught modified English courses to SLD groups of 9 for10 years and have a lot of experience with groups, including multi-level. I have strengths in the areas of teaching literature and writing for this population, but my success with a reading booster program will very much depend on the group.It’s easier to work one on one with failed readers, especially those who are marking time until they can break free of school. I’m going to do some research on them next week if I can. Maybe meeting with each one on one before the end of June to check out their interests, wants and needs will help get my plan off the ground. I could meet with them a second time to test them. If as you suggest I can hook them enough to amaze them with a method that finally makes sense to them, it will be an accomplishment!
Thanks for your help.

Hi,

I am familiar with Autoskills, the version I had the audio was poor and hard to work with. It is a good program and has lots of facets to it. The other program that you may consider would be Read Naturally. The kids can be tested out on their reading level and they along idependently with a tape, They do a cold read for one minute and try to beat their time after they have listened and read along with the tape at least twice and then read for another minute to get their hot time. The whole idea is to get their reading up to 150 words a minute orally. This helps with reading fluency, auditory memory and vocabulary. I have had favorable results from Read Naturally and there is some reasearch on the Read Naturally site that you can investigate. The training is inexpensive $155 and includes a set of stories and tapes for use in the classroom.

Pattim:
Thanks. I’ll check it out.

Hi Jan,

The four tests in Reading Reflex/Wordwork need to be given. Three test for skills and one tests their current level of knowledge. In addition, if you can arrange to test them for word attack skills and word identification knowledge using something like the Woodcock Word Attack and Word ID tests, you should do so. They don’t need the full battery of Woodcock testing, however. Finally, as you indicated, you should have them read from a book written at the approximate level indicated by their Word ID test to see if they can actually read unfamiliar text fluently at that level. Some kids are not at all fluent at the level they test at, or their reading is marked by an inordinant amount of careless errors at that level (“of,” “for” and “from” all read indiscriminantly, for example.)

If you have the funding, I would pick up WordWork and use it, bearing in mind that much of it is geared to a beginning reader so you will be skipping over it. However, I think it will give you a better feel for the method than will Reading Reflex. It would be a real plus if you could get trained, of course.

Your background sounds fantastic. I would just caution you that one of the common errors that I think a trained teacher makes when trying to use Phono-Graphix is trying to augment Phono-Graphix with all of the other “tips and techniques” they’ve learned over the years, so that pretty soon they’re teaching phonics rules and exceptions, rather than teaching reading. This is, I think, especially true as you get into the multisyllable work with a child who isn’t quite ready for it. Instead of going back and cementing the skills and code knowledge, and making sure the appropriate groundwork is laid, one starts teaching prefixes, suffixes, root words, etc., and pretty soon the kids are back where they are used to being….struggling in an English class.

Wishing you the best…..Rod

Hi Jan, I have taught high school classes to read using Phono-Graphix and followed it up with Read Naturally which is similar to Great Leaps. I would highly recommend that you teach the students PG first and then Great Leaps to develop their fluidity. You are right in saying that explaining the theory of PG will hook your students, that is what I did. I also had an ‘in’ because my 19 year old daughter was being remediated at the same time with PG. My students all improved their reading to practually grade level before school was out. I also took responsibility for their not learning how to read. I told them that there wasn’t anything wrong with them, just that we didn’t teach them using a method that worked for them. This is very important. PG works very fast with older kids as long as they will work with you. Tell them also if you were teaching a 40 year old, they still would have to know the skills of blending, segmenting, and phoneme manipulation. Of course, they have to know the magic of the “code”. I also used sports skills as examples. Such as, no matter how old you are when you start learning how to play tennis, you will have to learn the same way as if you were 5 years old. Good luck, Shay

Hi Shay,
Thanks for your input. I take it that Great Leaps does not have enough sound-symbol relationship and sound-awareness content for disabled readers without prior work in this area because its main focus is getting to the fluency aspect? Could there be students, though, for whom it alone might be adequate (i.e. grade 7 or above in reading level)? Or is it best to go back to basics for all readers who are below grade level?
Will PG work for severe LD/dyslexic students? Or should I supplement with Orton-Gillingham (Starting Over or Wilson) for these students (though I wonder if this would even be possible in a group situation, expecially when I have a career-related skills package and other government-mandated material to get through!)
How closely related are the Reading Reflex (home version, which I have), and the PG (teacher-oriented) versions of the program?
Luckily there is a PG training course near me this summer. I am looking forward to it and am also considering Wilson Training (overview workshop and distance training), but perhaps I’m getting over-ambitious! PG and Great Leaps may be enough to chew on for now!
Thanks for your help. (How did we get by before the invention of the Internet?)

Great Leaps was designed to be a remediation program to get results as fast as humanly possible. Other major considerations in its design were ease of implementation with low costs. Though labelled a fluency program, I would call it a “behavioral intervention in reading.” Coupled with other programs under the guise of a well-trained instructor, results can be phenomenal.

Truly dyslexic students need a lot more than the five minutes a day Great Leaps requires. Yet, most students labelled as having learning disabilities are not dyslexic nor do they appear to have trouble in learning to read. In all studies I have seen, 1/3 plus of the students using Great Leaps gain two years plus per year. All students have shown gains. It appears the average gains with adolescents with significant reading problems come to 1.7 years per school year. In two years of implentation during a school calendar - the average middle/high school student who began the program at the first grade or lower in reading - would come to an independent reading status two years after the beginning of implementation. (This can and has been done with volunteers with little or no training in reading.)

Great Leaps stops when a child reaches independent reading. Strong evidence suggests the environment then takes over - our job changing from instruction to motivation. During the past two years I have been heavily involved in researching and developing the next step of reading - to take our children from 4th to the 12 grade + in reading and comprehension. With a good measure of luck, those products should be available sometime near next Christmas. It’s really difficult to have an idea in your mind, to be able to clearly see it - taste it - yet, before the first kid can benefit - two/three years must pass.

Sure, I wish our country had a million trained reading tutors and unlimited financial resources to help our kids. It doesn’t, nor will it. Commitment to children with special needs continues to disappear. Commitment to the worship of the Almighty Dollar continues unabated. I pray that we as a country again learn to take care of our children, our elderly. That isn’t liberal nor conservative - merely civilized.

Great Leaps has played a significant part in the remediation of thousands of children - especially poor children. I generally don’t post Great Leaps information on this, respecting it as a bulletin board - never using it as a huckster to advertise my wares. If this appears to be an advertisement, rather than my trained opinions as a teacher, product developer and researcher - I sincerely apologize.

Jan,

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