I am a volunteer tutor with Project Literacy. My learner can actually read at quite a high level, but does stumble quite often. The problem is that he oftens reads things that aren’t on the page. Once he has the gist of a sentence, he fills in the blanks with words that aren’t there. We were reading an article on macular degeneration, but he kept reading the word “macular” as “muscular.” He also makes mistakes at the ends of words, omitting plurals, or adding them. He sometimes adds “ing” endings to verbs, or changes the tense of verbs. I have tried to encourage him to slow down, and look at the individual syllables of words. This helps, after the fact, but I’m looking for help with correcting the problem all together: some techniques to stop him from making things up, and actually see what’s in front of him. Does anyone have any ideas?
Re: Need help tutoring dyslexic adult in reading
It is called guessing.
The problem is that this person has been taught for years to do this and the guessing has been rewarded.
If you want to improve his reading beyond the minimal level, you will have to help him retrain his habits. Nobody finds it easy or pleasant to change habits, but if he is willing, it can be done.
Two things to do:
One is to re-teach phonics. This is important both to teach him the sound-spelling patterns that he doesn’t know (almost certainly is weak on vowels, as all guessers are), and to retrain him into the habit of looking at each and every letter and scanning left to right, period, all the time.
I use a series called Check and Double Check Phonics from scholarschoice.ca (note ca, not com)
I start almost all students on Book 2 which covers digraphs and blends and vowel patterns, then move into Books 3 and 4 which cover syllables and word structure and variants.
The second is to change how you read with him. As you read, point to every word with a ballpoint pen. Each and every time he makes an error, **no matter how small**, stop him and make him go back. At first this is no fun at all as you stop at every second word. Too bad, he is learning just how sloppy he is. After a short time, usually a couple of hours, he will start to pay more attention. Go *slowly* and make sure he is getting things right; speed comes *after* control. This is the mistake he has been making, going for speed without control — exactly as he has been taught, but you have to break that habit.
Stop and help him syllable by syllable, each and every time on every long word. And do not accept substitutions for short words either — it is all part and parcel of the same guessing habit.
If he still jumps ahead, you can take a file card and cut a little rectangle out of the top left corner. Then as he reads you move this window over the word or the syllable, covering all but the syllable he should be reading. I had one student who complained this made him sound like a robot — he had been used to looking several words ahead so he could speak with expression, what he had been taught in a very mistaken interpretation of “fluency” — and I said, yes, but a robot who can READ. Fluency comes after you know what the words ARE, not before.
This will take time and effort, but usually after just a few hours you start to see results. Then it takes months or years to ingrain the new habit and be sure the old one is dropped.
At the same time, he is probably a horrendous speller. Guessing in reading goes with “alphabet-soup” spelling. (Is my gypsy crystal ball working?) And he may have very mixed-up writing, awkward and slow and all over the place, letters formed upside down and backwards.
Learning to spell by sound is a wonderful surprise to most of these students. Many of them experience a huge feeling of release and excitement when they discover they can actually write! I have kids who *ask* for their spelling lists.
Recently I have gone right back to Ground Zero basics and am using the lists from the back of “Why Johnny Can’t Read” for basic spelling. These lists are carefully planned to work on one issue at a time. Kids just eat them uop becasue they CAN do them. You do NOT repeat NOT have the student memorized them in advance, and NEVER recite the letter names. We just read twenty or thirty words *once* and then spell ten of them. The whole point is to listen to the sounds and then write the letters, period.
After this level, AVKO Spelling can also be useful.
I often find retraining handwriting with a stress on directionality has a big feedback effect on directionality in reading and spelling as well.
Re: Need help tutoring dyslexic adult in reading
Wow, that was really in-depth advice. I’m sure I’ll find it useful. Thanks so much!
Re: Need help tutoring dyslexic adult in reading
I agree wholeheartedly with the previous posters. This adult has an engrained guessing habit, which will require a lot of consistent work to eliminate. I use a mechanical pencil with lead retracted to track on top of the text. When the student makes a mistake, the pencil stops on the mistake. This allows the student to finish the sentence before returning to correct the mistake, plus the visual cue (instead of an oral cue) is much less antagonizing to the student. These types of guessers typically have no idea about how many words they are not paying attention to, so this is informing them of what they are doing.
This type of habit often develops because of underlying problems that made reading difficult. Undiagnosed developmental vision problems is one of these. It would be a good idea for him to get a developmental vision evaluation. See http://www.covd.org for board-certified developmental optometrists who perform this kind of evaluation. Visual efficiency skills are not tested in regular eye exams, and a person can have 20/20 acuity and still have multiple severe deficits in the area of visual processing. These are almost always fully remedial with appropriate therapy.
Cognitive skills training also works on many of the skills necessary for reading accurately — such as visual sequencing, pattern recognition, attention, etc. If a developmental vision eval finds no severe visual efficiency deficits, then a program such as PACE (http://www.processingskills.com ) can be extremely helpful in developing reading accuracy and speed. Also, the Rewards programs from Sopris West can be very helpful because of their stress on developing multi-syllable word attack skills to automaticity.
Only some of the above factors may be playing into this problem, or some combination may be at work. Sometimes you have to be a bit of a detective to start figuring it out. The developmental vision eval is a good place to start, IMO, because it is the most basic problem.
The advantage of adding in appropriate programs is that remediation is likely to happen much faster than if you really solely on use of error correction techniques. Error correcdtion techniques are wonderful and, IMO, necessary. However, there are additional resources, such as the ones listed above, that can be critical to achieving both swift remediation and complete remediation.
Best of luck!
Nancy
A program that highlights words may be helpful in retraining your students tracking issues. I have an adult friend with ADHD and Dyslexia who really increased her reading speed by using a program that trained her visual tracking.