Seeing Stars and Speeded Naming Reading Fluency?

I am trained in Seeing Stars and have used it with kids to increase their symbol imagery but I haven’t used it to increase reading fluency. I feel that fluency does not only involve the recognition of the orthographic symbols and phonemic awarness but also vocabulary which would explain problems with word retrieval. Another puzzle piece could be ADD or a neurological impairment.

Have you read the 1999 issue of the Annals of Dyslexia by Marianne Meyer, entitled Repeated Reading to Enhance Fluency: Old Approaches and New Directions? I was just reading this yesterday and the article talks about the programs you have tried. It also mentions using flashcards with prefixes and suffixes with having the child overlearn these skills through a drill every day to also increase the child’s vocabulary.

How many times does he do the repeated reading along with the tapes? What are his cold reads on Read Naturally like and after reading along with the tapes 3 times what is his hot time? What I do with Read Naturally is to Visualize and Verbalize the whole story after the cold time then I read along with them and we find the words that are the ones they are stumbling on. I will then make flashcards for the frankenstein words that they mess up on and we work with those as I mix them up and ask them to read them as I lay them down on a table. I do this before they even start listening to the tape and reading along with it. I have found they really do much better this way. I have had the kids doubling their time after this, i.e., they may have a 38 WPM cold read and then after the repeated readings they have a 80 WPM hot read. Probably with the lower cold reads you would need to bump down a level where he is reading more fluently with a higher cold time and then with repeated readings fluency and speed should increase. Have you had any IQ testing and what was his processing speed?

You can use the Rapid Automatic Naming charts by Lingui Systems that use visual images, that all have something in common. The child would be timed and have to rapidly name the items he sees and this would tap into word retrieval.

my guess is that this child was a poor blender at the beginning of remediation, I believe it is the skill of blending that drives fluency, my opinion after working with many kids especially the CADP kids,

since this skill was not in this child’s repetoire prior to reading, it is a weak skill, how do we make it a strong skill, PRACTICE,

no shortcuts and I do think all those fancy program and costly ones to boot are preying on anxious parents,

blending is not automatic for the low fluency kids, they have to say sound, sound sound, then blend,

keep in mind that fast reading is for very proficient blenders

just practice reading orally good interesting material,

put the stop watch away, if someone got out a stopwatch while i was learning a skill I would scream, it is a skill, skills need time to get automatic,

how many hours do you think Tiger Woods practiced to get to the point that every shot he takes is automatic and perfect???

give this child time and let him read at his pace, until blending can be done at the split of a second, fluency will not come, and I believe all those programs are a waste of time and money,

lib

But, does this transfer? I have had colleagues relate that it does not seem to.

..It is transferring, but I think it is because of how I am integrating the langauge, phonology and practice components. I am witnessing it…and there are reams of research that show transfer as well. A child needs the foundation of phonology but when a child is still decoding…s…..l…..o…….w…. they need to spend more time reading at an easy level so that the words are more familiar to them and their confidence and literacy increases.

A slow reader needs to have more exposure to reading and discussing what they have read to increase the comprehension. When they hate reading because it is slow and labored they won’t get the practice and therefore make no progress or subsequent transfer. Many kids at home don’t have exposure to literature because of poverty. Some of the kids on my caseload at school had parents who were immigrants and didn’t know how to read. Others are watching TV and playing video games instead of reading and it is no surprise that they aren’t becoming literate.

A researcher would have to examine the situation and see why the child isn’t making transfer and if they look hard enough they can find the cause or causes. I guess that is why I like research and ld’s, I find it absolutely fascinating to discover why a child isn’t learning and what I can do as an educator to facillitate the learning process for them.

Dear Libby,

Agree with you completely about the need for practice in beginning reading. Our kids (LD) will undoubtedly need more than those who learn to read easily and well.

Questions: Is inadequate blending skill the major culprit in choppy reading? Are there any words that cannot be blended? If there are any, do they interfere with fluency? If such words exist, how and when should they be taught?

Peace.

I worked with my son using a metronome and his reading fluency really improved. (We had also done PACE and MTC, but I added the extra work with the metronome to specifically address the choppiness.) I had him read short selections to a metronome set at 100 BPM—one word (or sometimes one syllable) for one beat. I would alternate the metronome selections with regular reading. Its terribly laborious at first, but it helped him break the habit of taking breaks mid-sentence and reading like his mind had suddenly gotten stuck in the mud. It was like resetting his internal rhythm. It only took a week or so to start seeing a change. Good luck!

What did you think of PACE? Was it worth the money?

I liked PACE and Master the Code a lot, and it was definitely worth the money to me. My son gained a couple years of reading, a total change from choppy to smooth reading, a year or so in writing proficiency, several years in spelling (although,less so in spelling while writing), a huge leap in self-confidence, and gains in other activities like sports and strategy games. He’s basically at or above grade level in all these areas now. I see PACE as a big financial commitment, but its done in a short period of time rather than over years and years of tutoring. Having said that, the learning disability does not go away, it’s just moderated. I would do it again in a minute.

only word I can t hink of is the word “once”, and no I don’t teach these words at some special time, if it comes up in print, then we cover it,

remember I am teaching the nature of the code, not specific rules or exceptions or any of that wasted info,

and I use many ways to “speed” up my slow blenders and I have never bought PACE or any other expensive program,

i make sure my kids have sharp skills, then we move into almost any book, I do not keep poor blenders in easy material, quite the contrary, I move them very quickly into challenging material,

cannot make a skill better doing the easy stuff, and I find kids do not hate reading one bit if they have the skills and understand how words work,

if your kids hate reading, then their skills are not sharp, my thoughts, libby

Dear Libby,

I am interested in how you “cover words” as they come up in print that do not follow “the nature of the code.”

It does not take long before beginners come upon words like: the, of, come, was, saw, were, where, who, how, does, one, only…and once

I think it is impossible to apply blending skills to such words. They are exceptional, and they are very common. Can they be blended, or is there some other sound/symbol strategy that can be used?

I find myself saying, “You are just going to have to memorize some words, kids. You are going to have to say them correctly as soon as you see them enough times so you know them.”

Is there a more scientific way to have children recognize “outlaw” words?

Peace.

I am so glad to see someone else here say to put away the stopwatch and work for value, not speed!

And yes, everything in this world that we want to learn, from golf to skiing to reading, takes work and time and practice. There’s no magic and no snake oil out there.

Yes, certain programs seem to be a big help for certain kinds of problems — if my kid has an ear infection and a fever of 104, I go buy antibiotics; when my kid had a visual problem, I tried to find a good treatment for it (hers is weird retinal damage, and we found nothing). If she had an auditory processing problem, I’d try some of the programs discussed here such as Fast ForWord or PACE. **BUT** that doesn’t mean going out and spending the money on those programs will solve every kid’s problems, just like antibiotics won’t touch the common cold and may do more harm than good.

In MOST cases, the cure is to bite the bullet, start where the kid is, and do the hard work of teaching skills. Yes, those dirty four-letter words, time and hard work.

Arthur writes:

It does not take long before beginners come upon words like: the, of, come, was, saw, were, where, who, how, does, one, only…and once

I think it is impossible to apply blending skills to such words. They are exceptional, and they are very common. Can they be blended, or is there some other sound/symbol strategy that can be used?

_______________________________________________

Arthur, your list is very strange.

Of your thirteen words, only three of the words are very irregular, five have the very very common “muttered” or “schwa vowel sound as their only difficulty, three merely have a single alternate vowel sound, and two are perfectly regular using common diphthongs.

Three of the words — who, one, and once — are indeed very difficult phonetically, and some memorization is required.
HOWEVER, even for these words, there are phonic clues. If you tried to pronounce by the standard phonic rules as outlined in the Grade 3 book I use,
“who” would most likely be pronounced “hoe”, “one” would most likely be pronounced “own”, and “once” would be most likely be pronounced to rhyme with “ponce” or “sconce”, as “on” followed by an “s” sound.
If you read a sentence “Who will help me plant the seeds?” and pronounced it to yourself “Hoe will help me plant the seeds?”, your verbal language skills would kick in and you would say to yourself “That can’t be right; it must be the sound ‘hoo’, not ‘hoe’ ” — and that would be that. (By the way, after some basic lessons in phonics from my mother, this is *exactly* how I taught myself the rest of my reading skills, by sounding words out and then matching to known speech — I, and a large number of other people, can attest that this works very well.)
The one problem with this system is in teaching the child who has extremely poor verbal skills (these are very common words, so even weak language skills are enough) or poor access to verbal skills because of such problems as CAPD. These kids need intensive verbal and oral-reading tutoring, and more power to the parents and teachers here who are doing this. They are, however, a very very small proportion of the population at large, I would guess much less than 1%. One does not build an entire reading program based on the difficulties of less than 1% of the population.

“the”, “of”, “come”, “was”, and “does” all have the “schwa” or common unstressed “uh” vowel sound.
If pronounced by the rules in the Grade 2 book, these would be said
“thee”, “off”, “comb”, “wass” (with short a like class) or “waz”, and as in the plural of female deer “does” (to rhyme with nose). Again, these sounds are close enough to the requiresd meaning for a person with fair verbal skills to be sure what the correct sound is. You read “I see the top of the hill” and pronounce it as “I see thee top off the hill” and you are able to interpret.

“were” and “where” and “only” are only mildly irregular. You’d expect “were” to have a long e and be pronounced “weir”, but instead it has a regular r-controlled vowel and is said “werr”. You’d expect “where” also to be a long vowel and be pronounced “wheer” but instead it has a short e as in “when”. You’d expect “only” to be pronounced with a short vowel, the sound “on”, but instead it’s a long vowel as in “own”.All the Grade 1 and 2 kids I taught were able to catch on to the fact that a few words used different vowel sounds, and if the first sound you try doesn’t work, the second or maybe third usually will.

Finally “saw” and “how” are examples of regular diphthongs/digraphs, taught at the start of Grade 2 (and most of my Grade 1 got that far). “aw” as in awful and raw and paw and lawn and so on; “ow” as in owl and now and town and so on. Yes, “ow” can also be long o as in row and blow; so it has two sounds like most vowels, and you try each and see which works.

Next time, try some hard questions that gfo beyond the Grade 3 book, OK?

Dear Victoria,

Thank you for your request: “Next time, try some hard questions that gfo beyond the Grade 3 book, OK?”

I would be happy to comply, but I try to adhere to the dictum: “Let every shoemaker stick to his last.” I do not have the qualifications to teach reading above the primary level.

I am a reading teacher who does not teach reading. I keep class for students who have tried and failed to learn the roughly 1000 words that account for about seventy-five percent of all the English words in print. Then I let real reading teachers take the reins. (Not rains and not reigns.)

I begin with letter names, a thin strand of phonics (the likely sounds associated with consonants and vowels), letter-order in words, sentences, stories, poems, and interim and final testing. My objective is to get the students to a beginning third grade level. Some of my students are well beyond the age of ordinary third graders, but their reading ability is below that level. Most of my students make slow progress with great difficulty. I am not successful with every student.

Perhaps the greatest value in teaching phonics is that it directs students to the order of letters in words. Fluent readers must acquire that crucial habit. Whole language teachers seem to ignore it or gloss over it. The phonics teacher teaches letter order and sound to bring students to the awareness that pat is not tap. But sound/symbol is not always enough. The student uses observation of letter order to recognize that two is not tow. Then he must memorize those words.

The avowed objective of phonics is to teach reading skill. Phonics works beautifully for the person who can read to a considerable extent. A competent reader knows from trial and error when (and when not) to apply phonics to enable him to “say” words. It is not enough for a tutor to know how to do this; his student must learn to make those distinctions.

Did you read Susan’s post? Re: Spelling problems Thanks for the suggestions EVERYONE. Her parenthetical expression: (the little words or sight words are the real issue) is the message I continue to hear from parents and teachers. These are common words—not rare words that might never be seen in the lifetimes of most people. Common words are a challenge for my students, for me, and I suspect for many reading teachers. I believe they should be taught early in a reading student’s instruction.

Yes – yes – yes, we agree! You are right on the money when you posted: (By the way, after some basic lessons in phonics from my mother, this is *exactly* how I taught myself the rest of my reading skills, by sounding words out and then matching to known speech — I, and a large number of other people, can
attest that this works very well.) A little basic phonics taught early and well and then implicit phonics carries the day for many readers. It did for you.

Let’s be upfront with a struggling beginner. Tell him straight out that phonics works (about 85 percent of the time), but not always. And the “rules” are truly only generalizations that will often fail him.

“When two vowels go a walking the first one does the talking and the second one usually keeps his mouth shut.” This rule only works about 45 percent of the time in words normally encountered in K-3 literature.

It is possible to associate certain sounds with certain symbols but not with the same symbol in the same configuration in other words. We know that a single letter change can change the pronunciation of many words. Fluent readers know the following words do not rhyme, but they have memorized them: the, she; and, any; home, come; does, goes; but, put; said, paid; days, says. Perhaps we should begin with two letter words with only a one letter difference: is, us; of, or, oh, on, ow, ox, oy;

Even words that can be decoded easily become a problem for some beginners if they look alike. Rod, who often posts here, has encountered students who interchange when and then.

The students I am asked to teach have tried to learn to read in the classrooms of some experienced, dedicated, industrious teachers. Some taught phonics; some taught whole words. If phonetic instruction is the magic wand to the ability to retrieve common words instantly, by all means use it.

Bottom Line: It is likely that a student might not be able to read everything, but we should at least try to teach him to say the common, look-alike words as soon as he sees them in print.

Peace.

The explanation you give seems very logical for why these words should not be difficult for the dyslexic to spell or read, BUT for my mildly ds all of these word have been trigger words for him and we still struggle with them at times. The most frustrating part of dyslexia (from a parents point of view) is the inconsistency. I realize if they have truely mastered something that they should always have it. Not so, at least with my son the time of day, the lighting the atmosphere all seem to affect his consistency. The perception of these words is different for these individuals. ‘Saw” and “was” are confused, “a” and “the” are interchanged for no apparent reason. We now seem to have 80-90% accuracy in reading but spelling is far behind. The “rules” don’t work.

Dear Susan,

Thanks for your post. I agree. The *rules* are often merely generalizations and do not always lead to accurate spelling. Look above today for a new post: Spelling Requires Memory 2001-07-25.

Peace.

I have already found it. I enjoy and find interesting your postings.

Victoria, take a breath (or maybe your medicine)! Are you from reading reflex? I thought so, same negative attitude. We are here to LEARN. Many of us thank Arthur for is thoughtful and tested responses. Remember EVERY student is different and will require different strategies to be successful.