Re-learning how to read?

Not every person is “programmed” to decode. Some people do read by, as you say, the whole word approach. You might consider having a reading specialist take a look. Before we insist any child decode, it helps to be sure they have the background to do it.

Hello,
I teach reading and I use Phono-Graphix. I need to “Manufacture the Need” for students to decode. When a child is a guesser I often use very difficult but short selections on a topic that is of high interest to the child. The text has to be difficult enough that the child can’t predict what the next word will be and interesting enough that the child WANTS to know the next word. I find out the topics that interest the child and then visit the book store or library for a book with lots of very short pieces on those topics. I have a book with short selections on various types of fish and whales, for example. Now the child has a purpose for decoding and isn’t just doing it because you want him to.

hi ana,
i read ur letter & i feel that u should give some try to colour coding or highlighting this may prove to be useful if still any problem u can mail me i am currently working as a special educator in india

Ana,

Here’s a link where you can get some free information on how to remediate reading problems the easy way. http://www.OnlineReadingTeacher.com/board.cgi.

Margie

Ana,

One thing you might try is buying Lindamood’s Seeing Stars workbooks. They are filled with nonsense words that you could use to help teach him to decode. They are also pretty cheap—I think $16 for four of them. PG has the advantage of going quickly to real words but this can become a liability if the child has a good visual memory and never learns to decode. We have used the workbooks in conjunction with PG.

We also have made lists of very difficult words and had him decode these. My husband picks a theme and develops a list of words for him to decode. For example, we went away for the long Memorial day weekend and the words were all connected to our trip.

On Sara’s point, of how kids are programmed—my daughter who is an avid reader doesn’t decode well. But she scores in the 90% on standardized tests in reading. What wasn’t clear to me in your post is whether his inability to decode is a wall for his reading to progress. My daughter reads several years above grade level yet scored lower on PACE pretests on auditory processing than her younger LD brother who doesn’t read on grade level. She obviously compenstates with her strong visual skills.

If your child is like my daughter, I wouldn’t worry too much, although I can guarantee he will never spell. On the other hand, if he has learned through repetition an age appropriate vocabulary but doesn’t seem to be able to progress, then you might look at the Seeing Stars workbooks. One advantage of them is they are nonsense words and may help increase his decoding skills without making him dislike reading (he will dislike the workbooks but that isn’t the same thing).

Beth

Hi Beth,

You made some interesting comments regarding your daughter. How does she perform on a test like the Woodcock Word Attack test? Or, to put it another way, how does she do on nonsense words when you show them to her?

Just curious…..Rod

Hi Ana:
You might want to read “The Gift of Dyslexia” by Ron Davis with Eldon Braun. Ron Davis is a severe dyslexic who has developed methods to correct the visual distortions that some visual-spatial learners encounter when reading and dealing with symbols. His philosophy is that dyslexia is a reaction to confusion, not a brain glitch or disorder, that is born in the individual’s learning style and is compounded by inappropriate teaching and the self-image problems that accompany failure to progress as expected with reading. Each dyslexic unconsciously “creates” his(her) own difficulties, and can be trained to overcome them.

Methods in this book were brought to my attention by a really great resource teacher last year, and they have helped my son immensely. (Though younger, he displayed many of the symptoms of perceptual confusion you describe in your son.) The methods are proven and can have great results, especially with older children, teens and adults who have difficulties such as you describe in your son.

The methods are especially suited for those who are natural “whole word” readers, where quality “phonics” and decoding training is simply (and inexplicably) not working well enough. His book also teaches the person to discover and focus on his/her gifts, an important strategy not only for the recovery of self-esteem, but for gaining self-knowledge and the skills necessary to reach one’s potential.

JUST A PERSONAL COMMENT HERE: I disagree with the comment by another poster who said “…he will never spell”. I’m sure that was a quick, unthinking comment, and definitely deserves a “re-think”, with all respect to the poster. To conclude that a child will “NEVER” do something like spelling is not very valid, to the point of being insulting and condescending. He may never do it EASILY, or be considered a talented natural speller (as I am), but I know many adult dyslexics who have proved that spelling is a skill we can ALL learn! I don’t like to be critical, but one DOES get tired of hearing “can’t” and “won’t” and “never” when there is really no basis for these predictions.

Such comments don’t help anyone, and CAN hurt! “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but WORDS can break my heart!” (Linda McCartney).

Best wishes to you, Ana, and to your son! You can explore Davis methods at the website www.dyslexia.com. There is also an active forum for dyslexics and parents, which is very helpful. All are welcome, and spelling DOESN’t count…you’d be surprised how little trouble even the worst spellers have in making themselves understood, and how quickly they improve when they are allowed to write freely without worrying about their skill levels.
love,
lizzybee

She can read nonsense words to some extent but not to grade level. I gave my daughter the pretest that came with PACE which included nonsense words. She scored above age level on everything but word attack and auditory analysis. There she scored 8.5 as I recall. She was 10.5 years old.

We have noticed that she misses sounds in words. This doesn’t seem to affect her reading—at least for meaning. She does mispronounce certain words. She is strong visually and usually aces her spelling tests but in practice is pretty lousy. She scores about 40% nationally in spelling. It seems that her weak decoding skills affect her spelling more than her reading.

We are going to do the auditory portion of PACE with her this summer. We had thought of doing PG with her but since she reads several years above grade level that didn’t seem like it would work. She can read words even though she doesn’t necessarily know how to decode them accurately.

Needless to say, she was taught primarily using whole language.

Beth

My comment came off different than I intended. I was trying to suggest, using my daughter as an example, that not everybody has to decode well to read well and that if her son was reading well, not to worry too much. I do think though that natural spellers (like my husband who never uses a spell check) are good with sounds. But you are right, everyone can improve their spelling with training.

My son scored exactly at grade level for reading comp on a recent standardized test, but a year and a half behind for vocabulary just because he can’t decode. (He has a very good vocab). He also has terrible phonemic awareness test scores. He tends to skim over little words and often miss ‘and’ ‘the’ ‘there’ when reading because he reads completely for meaning and ignores those sorts of details. He starts out trying to decode, but gets past the first two letters and then looks out the window and guesses. He will only come back to the word if it is really necessary for the meaning and then sometimes he’ll just skip that sentence and try to think in terms of the general meaning of paragraphs instead of sentences.

Thank you all for all your advice. Nonsense words and separate activities to help teach him how to decode sound like a good idea. I’m also thinking of getting him an OG tutor. Is the switch from PG to OG an easy one to make? (No one does PG around here.)

-Ana

This is my first post. I am interested in the homeschooling thread as I am considering homeschooling my son next year because he is having such difficulty learning to read, spell, comprehend text etc. He has a language learning problem diagnosed as apraxia of speech but I am seeing carry over in his academic progress as well. An educator who tested my son said she thought he was dyslexic but he has not been formally diagnosed by a psychologist. He has attended kindergarten and first grades and is only beginning to sound out simple CVC words. I have been working with him on the letter sounds but his school has been using a more whole lang./sight word approach. I am concerned that he will just slip farther and farther behind if I don’t do something radical to help him. I have heard that the Spalding Phonics or Orton methods are good for teaching remedial reading but I am wondering if a mom like me could teach this. He has two tutors who are working with him this summer what should I be looking for in their methods? What can I do to help. Blending is a huge problem! Any suggestions?

Hi Beth2:
Spalding is a great program, but you need to be an expert. My son had Spalding training last summer, and it took him from moaning “I CAAANNN’T!” with his hands over his face to reading proudly, albeit at a beginner level. (improvement continued throughout this school year, just with extra reading and word recognition work at home.) The whole-language “primers” used by his regular school were no use, he could memorize the whole thing and fooled us all until February that he was reading, by charming everyone into reading the book once for him first.

The Spalding training was done at an academic summer camp, by a “creme-de-la-creme” of a sped teacher. (not one-to-one — in a group of about 6-8 children of similar abilities, but each child got lots of individual attention.) I got the book, which told me I could do it at home — but it takes more than I’ve got, I found it very confusing and intimidating, so we just worked on spelling words and read alot. I subsequently read that you can’t do Spalding without being trained — I agree! However, if you can find a trained tutor, I believe it is a great system.

Good luck!

She can read nonsense words to some extent but not to grade level. I gave my daughter the
pretest that came with PACE which included nonsense words. She scored above age level on
everything but word attack and auditory analysis. There she scored 8.5 as I recall. She was
10.5 years old.

> We have noticed that she misses sounds in words….

> She does mispronounce certain words. She is strong visually and usually aces her spelling tests but in practice is pretty lousy.
>She scores about 40% nationally in spelling. It seems that her weak decoding skills affect her spelling more than her reading.

> We had thought of doing PG with her but since she reads several years above grade level that didn’t seem like it would work.

Beth

Hi Beth,

What you are describing is a child with a heck of a visual memory who does not know how the code works. If she has the kind of memory that would allows her to succeed with whole language in the 5th(?) grade without inferring the phonetics of English on her own, then there is no reason she should not be in the top few percent in spelling.

Phono-Graphix would work for her because it would address each of the issues I’ve excerpted from your post.

Incidentally, I’m not sure what you mean when you say “She can read words even though she doesn’t necessarily know how to decode them accurately.” I assume you mean that she doesn’t know why “know,” for example, is pronounced the way it is (kn=/n/ and ow=/oe/) but that she just “knows” the word. If she is decoding inaccurately, then she can’t be reading the word as written, by definition, so I assume you’re saying she’s just not decoding at all, but relying on her sight memory instead. Correct? Or are you saying that she misreads (inaccurately decodes) the word, but still gets the sense of the passage? If so, this gets tougher and tougher as the material increases in complexity.

Rod

Rod,

Yes, she has have an amazing visual memory!! Her problem with spelling is that she sees the letters “ch” and can read them correctly but if she hears the sound “ch” she doesn’t know that is represented by the letters “ch”. Plus, she doesn’t always segment words correctly when trying to spell, which means she doesn’t even have the right sounds to represent with letters. There was a discussion in the Seeing Stars manual by Lindamood that gave profiles of kids with strong visual but weak auditory processing (and the other way around) in relationship to spelling that described my daughter perfectly.

Yes, she can read the word as “know” but if you showed her the letters “kn” she would not know what sound they represent. She mispronounces words that she knows the meaning of from reading but may not hear on an everyday basis. Her problems with sounds means that she does not know how to pronounce them.

How would you use PG with a kid like her who can easily read all the words in any of the manuals, despite her deficits in code knowledge?

Beth

Hi Beth,

Phono-Graphix teaches segmenting so rapidly that people unfamiliar with the method don’t even believe us when we say that your daughter could learn to segment the sounds in most one-syllable English words in less than two hours of working with her. This is generally true even of the poor readers, which your daughter obviously is not. Segmenting is covered in chapters three and four of Reading Reflex, and your daughter would probably start in chapter four. By the time you finished working with her, she should easily be able to segment every single sound in any English word accurately.

The the mapping lessons in chapter five would be used to teach her how to associate sound and symbol appropriately, so that she would, for instance, know that the /ae/ sound can be spelled “ay” (day), “a-e” (plate), “ai” (drain), “ea” (great), “a” (table), “ei” (vein), “ey” (they) and “eigh” (weight.) One reason she may not know that the /ch/ sound is represented by the phonogram “ch,” for instance, is that she may have also seen it represented by “tch” in words like “witch,” “scotch” and “match,” and may simply need to be shown that most sounds can be written in more than one way.

She would also learn that the certain phonograms represent more than one sound such as the “ow” in both “cow” /ow/ and “grow” /oe/. If you require her to do the mapping correctly, as directed in Reading Reflex, she would be saying each individual sound as she wrote it, thereby setting up the one-to-one association between sound and symbol that, in spite of the skeptics, truly does exist in over 99% of English words. It’s messy, but it’s there. Saying each sound also continues to reinforce the segmenting work from chapter 4.

My guess is that you could spend about 10 to 15 hours with her this summer doing the segmenting work in chapter 4 and the mapping work in chapter 5, plus just a bit of the chunking work in chapter six, and her spelling would improve dramatically. Furthermore, she would be likely to develop a solid basis for recognizing new words that she is going to encounter by the thousands in her future schooling, as well as a basis for pronouncing most of them correctly.

The main hitch to this is that you find yourself unable to work with your daughter effectively, or unable to follow the instructions in Reading Reflex to the letter. In that case, take her to someone who can. Someone with your daughter’s potential deserves to have the code explained to her in a manner that she can understand and internalize.

All the best…..Rod

Hi,

I’m working through this process now with my son . We’ve gone through oe, ow, er sounds but I’m getting nervous that as he progresses he’ll forget what’s gone before. What’s the best way to reinforce the sound pictures? Should I just do a quick review every day? Should I just point them out when he misreads a word? Should I get him to do ‘review’ mapping exercises? Any tips?

Thanks,
Ana

Hi Ana,

You’re right. He will appear to forget what’s gone before, and if you just do the mapping exercises and don’t follow up with anything further, he may never get the full benefits of the program.

However, if you do both of the things you refer to, that is, review the mapping exercises AND point out the code that he’s forgotten (or has yet to learn) when he’s reading, then he will easily learn the code.

For review of, say, the /oe/ sound, ask him how many ways he can think of to spell the /oe/ sound (oe, o, o-e and oa are some of the possibilities he may come up with) and write them at the top of a sheet of paper or a whiteboard. (Add any missed spellings as you encounter them when going through the word list.) Go through the list of /oe/ words one at at time and have him read the word and write it in the appropriate column (“grow” under “ow,” for instance.) If this seems too trivial for him, he probably doesn’t need the review. I’ve noticed that kids who really do need the review tend to enjoy this process, probably because they can do it and because they realize they are benefiting from the practice at a comfort level. You don’t need to review all of the sounds you cover, but it is a good idea to review all of the major vowel sounds (those with several spelling options.)

You will find that by the time you get to the /oy/ sound, for example, that he will probably already know both spellings (oi and oy) because of all the reading you will have been doing, and because you will have simply told him that “This is /oy/,” while indicating the unfamiliar sound picture (phonogram.)

In other words, the second way he will learn the code is simply by you reminding him of each element that he has forgotten (or has yet to cover) when he encounters it. The beauty of Phono-Graphix is that you can progress to real literature very rapidly because all that is required is that he understand “the nature of the code” and that you be willing to tell him the sounds that he can’t recall or hasn’t learned yet. This is the way all kids learn to talk (by exploration and by testing,) and it is equally effective in teaching them to read. That is, what he doesn’t know or remember, simply tell him, and soon he will quit asking….because he won’t have to ask…he will simply know.

Incidentally, one of the most important pieces of information you can offer is “Yes, that can be /ae/, but what else can it be?” when he is trying to read “tablet,” for example, as “tabe-let.” Simply point to the “sound picture” (“a” in this example) and prompt him for another possible sound. In a relatively short time, he will learn that the options for an “a” are /a/, /ae/ or /o/ (hat, table, want) and will become comfortable trying each option. If he doesn’t remember an option that’s needed, tell him. Eventually, he will automatically try another viable option when the first fails to yield a meaningful pronunciation. One of the more important goals of the instruction is to get him to realize that this is the way it works, that is, that the various overlap options must be tried when confronted with an unfamiliar word.

–A side note regarding flexibility: Phono-graphix is highly adaptable to local dialect. For example, in my area, we say “about,” “around” and “ago” with a beginning sound that is very close to the /o/ sound of the “a” in “want.” Therefore, I teach it that way, instead of introducing a fourth option for “a” which would be pronounced /u/ (u-bout, u-round, etc.) This works fine here, but in other parts of the country, the sounds of the “a” in “want” and “about” may differ radically so another option for “a” is simply introduced.–

All the best….Rod

Hi Rod,
Thank you very much for the help. The revies issue has been worrying me for a while and you answered all my questions. I think I must be getting better at teaching this method (I think I have not been dedicated enough in the past) because this morning my son looked at the word ‘prow’ in a reading passage and said “That could be ‘proe’ or ‘prow’.” That’s HUGE progress for him.

Thanks again,
Ana

Thanks Rod. The hitch for us is that our son’s problems are so much more severe and thus more compelling. But you gave us a plan.

My son does a lot of the things you talk about. Two other thoughts. Put him back reading easier text. I found that old textbooks from the 1940s and 1950s were great because they seemed to have more story lines with fewer words than current stuff. I bought mine at garage sales but old bookstores or libraries would be other sources. I also found that stories about animals or fantasy were preferable to every day life stuff. This is because my son is 8 and the books are really oriented at first graders. He got very irritated at a couple books I had because they were too babyish.

Then make him read every word to you. I follow along with a pencil or pen (closed) and make my son start sentences over if he skips words. I also make him reread words if he reads them wrong. Sometimes I put the word on a white board and make him decode it. Taking it away from the text seems to help for some reason. He doesn’t seem to guess as much. Then we go back and reread the sentence. We read everything, except those below his reading level, every other page. This gives him a break and helps him keep going.

I’m not familiar really with OG but there is a brief interchange about the comparison with PG on the parenting bulletin. Robin and Mary are the posters.

Good Luck. I certainly know how hard this is!!

Beth

My son does a lot of the things you talk about. Two other thoughts. Put him back reading easier text. I found that old textbooks from the 1940s and 1950s were great because they seemed to have more story lines with fewer words than current stuff. I bought mine at garage sales but old bookstores or libraries would be other sources. I also found that stories about animals or fantasy were preferable to every day life stuff. This is because my son is 8 and the books are really oriented at first graders. He got very irritated at a couple books I had because they were too babyish.

Then make him read every word to you. I follow along with a pencil or pen (closed) and make my son start sentences over if he skips words. I also make him reread words if he reads them wrong. Sometimes I put the word on a white board and make him decode it. Taking it away from the text seems to help for some reason. He doesn’t seem to guess as much. Then we go back and reread the sentence. We read everything, except those below his reading level, every other page. This gives him a break and helps him keep going.

I’m not familiar really with OG but there is a brief interchange about the comparison with PG on the parenting bulletin. Robin and Mary are the posters.

Good Luck. I certainly know how hard this is!!

Beth

I agree with Rod that PHono-Graphix could unlock the doors here. It targets exactly where she’s going down the “visual memory” path and can redirect her down the “what’s the code say?” path.

THe “letterbox lesson” on this page: http://www.auburn.edu/~murraba/
is worth looking at for a similar approach to making that connection more conscious, so that “ch” and its sound are more happily connected.

Gee, are there enough Beths here ;) WOrse than the Sues & Susans!!

From my experience teaching middle and upper level kiddos with reaidng problems, if you can pull him out and get the skills in early, DO IT. Lucky folks have school settings that do their jobs — but you can’t singlehandedly train the teachers (especially if they believe that what they’re doing is working).

http://www.auburn.edu/~murraba/ has great info on reading and how to teach and learn it. My site’s got resources I used in teaching (and if you’re in Illinois and looking for a tutor, let’s talk ;))

http://www.resourceroom.net/Surfin/index.asp#Homeschooling101
There are some really good resources here for getting started from folks who understand :)