reading fluency

Laurie, call me at 877-475-3277 and I’ll do my best to answer any questions (without hard sell) about my work in Great Leaps. Ken Campbell

Hello Ken…I spoke with you on the phone approx. a week ago about my daughter, who is 14, recently diagnosed with dyslexia. You recommended this sight to me to see if anyone has any information on the Dyslexia Institute of America….Thank you… Your assistance has given us all hope at our home. I have learned so much and am looking forward to working with our daughter this summer. As for no hard sells…..Yes, this is true, you were amazingly helpful, when you could have sold me your program, you instead refused to and explained other options I might have. So, from the bottom of our hearts…..THANK YOU!

Those are both good. I have used and like Great Leaps. A new one is QuickReads. Please note that you CAN order single copies of the books at $9.95 each. There are 3 books per grade level and a total of 90 selections per (reading) grade level. This will be an advantage over the other two as neither has nearly as many selections per reading level. However, you could start with Great Leaps and just add the stories from QR. QR also has some comprehension questions, which can be nice for some kids.

http://www.quickreads.org/

Janis

Thank you Janis, and I will look into Quick Reads as well.

It has been my experience (and this has been thoroughly reviewed) that with 4th - 12th grade readers with high “sight word” error rates - that the problem has little to do with their not knowing the words. Work with the words in isolation - or in “sounding them out” is a virtual complete waste of time. By embedding the words in phrases, getting progressively more difficult/longer, and requiring very high accuracy rates 99-100% - the error rates dramtically decline - comprehension then dramatically rises.

My family is Highland Scot - leaving Scotland in the late 1700’s in the attempted ethnic cleansing of the Gaels by the Sassenachs.

Ken Campbell

On Tue Jun 01, 2004 7:57 pm Post subject: Fluency Ken Campbell wrote:
“It has been my experience (and this has been thoroughly reviewed) that with 4th - 12th grade readers with high “sight word” error rates - that the problem has little to do with their not knowing the words. Work with the words in isolation - or in “sounding them out” is a virtual complete waste of time.”

Why did you put “sight word” in quotation marks? Is the definition for the term in dispute? Do such words exist? Is there a better term to label such words? How do we identify a word as a “sight word?”

Why do you state that some 4th - 12th grade readers need to work with embedded (sight) words in phrases if their (reading) problems have little to do with “their not knowing the words?”

You conclude that “sounding them [sight words” out” is a virtual complete waste of time.” Since “virtual” means *near,* do you acknowledge that the application of sound/symbol principles has value in reducing decoding error rates

Laurie, I’m a mom, using Quick Reads with my 11 year-old son (with dyslexia). Overall I’m favorable, with one small problem. The “graded” levels seem to be determined based on grade-level content, not on grade-level readability. I have done a few estimates of the Frye readability of the late 4th grade passages, and some of them compute to more like 7th or 8th grade. This is mostly due to the very large number of words with more than 3 syllables. But again, I’m very satisfied. Also, the content is great for a kid who likes science and social studies.

Frye’s dependence on syllables has always been a bit of an annoyance to me — “important” is more difficulte than “schedule” because it has more syllables; America is more difficult than chasm.
Arthur, the value of fluency practice is that — all decoding stuff aside — when you’ve got words that you do know in isolation, but you read them wrong in context, it really helps to practice reading them in context and enforce accuracy adn build speed and automaticity.

I have two sincere (not gotcha) questions:

I suspect that nearly all thoughtful reading tutors agree that the practice you encourage [reading words in context and reinforcing them)] makes perfect sense. Perhaps you have encountered students who read some words accurately in context but miscall them in isolation. Is that a problem that demands a remedy? Is the most effective remedy reinforcing “decoding stuff” that was temporarily set aside?

Maybe it isn’t supposed to be a “gotcha”, but it’s a trick question anyway.

Arthur posts:
“Perhaps you have encountered students who read some words accurately in context but miscall them in isolation. Is that a problem that demands a remedy? Is the most effective remedy reinforcing “decoding stuff” that was temporarily set aside?”

Well, I disagree with the hypothesis of the first question, which means the second question is moot.
For years I have heard tell of students who could read in context but not in isolation, but on actual investigation over twenty years of tutoring and some classroom teaching I never met one of these creatures; I’m pretty sure by now they are mythical beasts. Every time it’s a friend of a friend, who knew one, like urban legends.

What I find on having the students actually read aloud to me (a radical thought which many other people have never tried) is that they *fake* pretty well in context, but obviously don’t have the clues to fake in isolation.

For an example of what I call faking as distinct from reading:
I have mentioned before a very gifted student in a totally “silent reading” program (oral reading was old-fashioned and evil and should never ever be demanded of students) who got B’s and C’s all through Grades 1 to 3, and then started having trouble in Grade 4; on investigation he turned out to have a pre-primer reading level, about fifty words vocabulary and those inaccurate.
So, how did he get through three years and what did he do when he supposedly “read”? One day we had a page with text one side, picture the other. The first sentence said “The boys are on the cliff top.” What the student said, after a slight pause, was “The boys are standing on top of a cliff.” By this time I had caught on to the fact that something not quite right was going on here, so I watched carefully what was happening. He didn’t actually scan the words left to right. Rather, his eyes wandered in circles. He sort of ran around the print side randomly and picked up the words he knew, and he ran all over the picture and picked up as much as he could from that, and then he put it all together and made up a sentence that he thought made sense. Being very gifted, he often made up good sentences. Just not what was written.
In this case he could read the pre-primer words ‘the’, ‘boy’, ‘are’, ‘top’, and he could see a cliff in the picture and made a good guess that the word with c and l would be “cliff”. Does this mean he could *read* the word “cliff”? Not if your definition of “reading” is “getting meaning from print”. He wasn’t getting any meaning, or a minimal amount, from the print. He got all the meaning from pictures and from what clues the teacher gave him — and he was really good at reading *people* and getting lots of clues.
I have to point out here that unfortunately this kid was doing exactly what he had been taught; I observed a Grade 1 class in this same district and the teacher never ever asked kids to “perform” by reading orally, she just told them to look at the page and she asked them all sorts of questions about it, more than half of which had to do with the picture rather than the words; and when kids didn’t give the answer she wanted to a hypothetical comprehension question (What would your mother do? Would she act like that?) she let them know with gestures and intonations what she thought was the right answer. So it isn’t that the boy misunderstood what reading is, he understood very well what he had been *told* that reading is, the only problem being that he had been told something false.

If your definition of “reading” is “getting meaning from print”, then students have to be able to take a page of print, without pictures, without being told ahead of time what it’s all about, without being coached in the vocabulary, without hints and suggestions and leading questions, and simply pick it up and read it, cold. And read it accurately, as written.
Using this very simple test, no, I have *never* met a student who could read words in context but not in isolation; it’s not the context that’s helping them read the words, it’s all the other NON-reading stuff.

Which is NOT to say you shouldn’t help students learn new words as they read, just that you have to be honest with yourself how much the student is reading independently and how much you are helping.
The student is unlikely to ever become independent if you’re always doing it all for him, and he is going to get a very distorted picture of what reading is if you model and reward non-reading behaviours as the best way to work.

As far as the “decoding stuff” I am all for it and am firmly of the opinion that this is the missing foundation piece for the great majority of later reading problems. But it is a foundation piece, not the whole structure. History is more that the list of kings and battles, math is more than addition tables, and reading is more than phonics. You’re going to have a weak structure if you leave the foundation out and you’re going to have a hard time stuffing a new foundation back under a weak upper structure, but on the other hand you don’t stop at the foundation either.

In this case I’m half in agreement with Ken. Definitely you need practice in reading sentences, paragraphs, and entire books. Lists of words are pretty useless outside of occasional drills for a specific purpose. But if the student can’t decode well enough to read the words in the paragraph, just giving him the paragraph isn’t going to do much. You need both; it isn’t an either-or question.
Shay, who used to post here frequently, deals with high schoolers who are non-readers after years of being given context-type materials to work with. She has one or two years to get them from inability to read at all up to passing the state tests so they can graduate, and she has a very high success rate. She starts with re-teaching basic phonics/decoding in isolatinon using PG, and then she moves into reading whole texts and writing. It’s notable in this discussion that she says after she has taught the phonics skills on isolated words and they are successsful, whn she moves into paragraphs and books the students *apparently* backslide and act as if they have never heard this idea before. She says that she has to re-start and teach them all over again to *use* the decoding skills when reading in context.
I have had some similar experiences with students who have been “taught” various skills but have never learned that these skills are supposed to apply outside of filling in workbooks. Such students need less time to learn decoding because they already do have several parts of the puzzle and they need more to learn applications and connections.
Students who have not learned any decoding at all, however, are a different kettle of fish.

Thank you for your thoughtful, comprehensive post. Ditto. I suspect there are few people who can read words in context that they cannot read in isolation. Those who might exist will need careful instruction.

Reading is meaning activated solely by print. I insist on accurate word reading without recourse to pictures, teachers’ clues, or paraphrasing.

The following is a true anecdote. Only the names have been changed.
Joe had completed a one-on-one reading lesson with his tutor, Mr. Ball, whose teaching style was influenced by Whole Language reading instruction. Mr. Ball incorporated many of its major principles into his tutoring strategy. One of the things he urged his students to do was to predict events as they read. Joe was an intelligent, cooperative student who read few words. During the lesson, Joe had read some words correctly. When he came upon a word he was unable to read, he made a prediction and gave the word a likely (but incorrect) pronunciation. As he came upon words he did know, it became necessary to read them incorrectly in order to create logical sentences. Mr. Ball reported with a grin, “Joe ended up with a story that made sense. It was totally unlike the story the author had written. But he was reading! He does that a lot.”

Don’t teach mush, and refuse to accept mush as evidence of reading ability! Do not permit tiny, preventable errors to destroy comprehension. Context is an invaluable tool; it is not infallible.

I’ve had similar experiences — and I think that’s the underpinning of a fundamental belief difference between teachers. Some of ‘em really do think that “as long as you’re reading” — even if you’re making up half of it and it’s miscommunication, not communication — hey, it’s A Good Thing. Personally, I suspect that at least sometimes it’s an elitism symptom; that kid is unequipped to *really* be expected to read, so as long as he’s doing something, and is happy about it and isn’t going to get me into trouble, hey, my work here is done.
(This is NOT to say that this is a fundamental belief of the majority of people using Whole Language principles; however, many major folks in that arena *do* consider accuracy relatively unimportant.)

Where could I buy the items in these posts?

Where would I get a catalog for Great Leaps?

Great Leaps

http://www.greatleaps.com/

Quick Reads

http://www.quickreads.org/

(please note that QR is coming out with Level A (1st grade) soon and that they do sell single copies of the books at $9.95 each.)

Janis

Who will actually articulate the idea that there are just some students who will never learn to read. And some will communicate the same idea without actually articulating it…

But I have never met a student I could not help. The student just needs to be taught to “do decoding” in a concrete, multisensory manner, if said decoding is not done abstractly. Anita

Very few students cannot be taught to read something. It is likely that no one can read everything written in his native tongue. Albert Einstein insisted that he could not comprehend the Internal Revenue Code.

A tiny percentage of students could never be taught to read a single word by the finest reading teacher who ever lived. These are the unfortunate, profoundly retarded humans. It can be argued that these people cannot be classified as “students.” Yet, for a period of time, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in its compassionate wisdom was transporting some of these children to public schools in vans in the middle of winter so as not to deprive them of their civil rights to educational opportunities. They were unaware that they were in school, and they often returned to institutions with serious health problems.

It is likely that your students have far more intelligence, and they make significant, measurable reading progress under your competent, professional care.

Arthur, But you would be surprised at the conversation I had with a now-retired elementary teacher. She said, “Anita, you cannot expect that everyone will learn to read.” I responded, “Well, I know it is hard to teach even the life skills words to moderately mentally disabled persons. BUT—I never tried introducing each word multisensorily, etc. I would like to be able to go back and try that way with the students I was teaching to match cards with the words on them. I am beginning to believe that they could learn the words if they were introduced to them that way. And add color and smell. But, I will admit that it would be hard to teach persons who have moderate mental disability to read. However, I know I can teach persons who have either mild mental disabilities and severe LD.” To which she responded, “No, that is not what I mean.” I said, “Then are you talking about persons with normal intelligence, etc?” And she said, “Yes, there are just some people who will never learn to read…”
When I realized what she meant, I decided, well, no more use arguing with her about what I believed. We were just too far apart!
I would not be happy in education if I felt the same…

Dear Guest,

There are some well-educated, experienced teachers who will read this thread. Many will insist that they have encountered students whom they believe “will never learn to read.” They have tried many different teaching strategies. Their students have IQs 90+, are cooperative, are industrious, are emotionally stable, have good vision and hearing, and insist that they desperately want to learn to read. The teachers’ challenge to you is: “So you think you can teach these kids to read. Maybe so. You are welcome to try. Please show me their test scores when you have finished.”

What a thrill it would be to work with such students—to be able to apply your methods, materials, and experience in meeting their reading needs! You are likely to make considerable progress.

That’s exactly the market I work with — the schools have given up, the special ed teachers have given up, often the tutoring centers have given up, but luckily the parents still think their kid is bright and can learn and they are willing to pay me cash in hand to do something about reading.

I had one failure with a kid who really was very slow learning and who just wasn’t ready for intensive tutoring, and I had one family who kept changing goals and decided to go with other tutoring, but other than that every kid I have worked with on reading for a few months at least has improved reading greatly, usually a year to two years in six months; many have gone from total non-readers being sent to special classes, to being in the normal class with no accomodations.
I don’t do test scores, not my part of the business, but I see the report cards and believe me there is proof there.
Of course there are always the wonderful people who after the fact say “See — he’s just “ready” to read this year” or “Of course he had all our extra help in class and now he understands” — amazing how kids just suddenly get “ready” or how the school “help” suddenly works after I and the kid spend a couple of months of very hard work, isn’t it?

Victoria,

I have attended many seminars on teaching reading to LD students. They did not teach me (or the others in the audience) how to teach reading to the LD population. During the past few months I have often thought that many teachers—beginners and experienced teachers alike—could benefit immensely if you ever decided to do some workshops.

Your posts cause me to believe that you employ practical, no nonsense methods to achieve progress with a population that many people have consigned to the non-reader scrap pile. The teachers who failed get bruised egos when they learn of your success.

You have stated that you “don’t do test scores.” Some educators seem reluctant to acknowledge or credit your contribution to the reading progress of students with severe learning difficulties. Perhaps pre and post-testing would force those educators to admit that your intervention in a child’s reading program made the difference.

You have undoubtedly heard people make statements like: “She is reading four years below her grade placement.” –or—“I made two years of reading progress with Robert after only six months of tutoring.” What is the objective data that proves either of these assertions? How do we move beyond subjective assessments and begin to measure reading levels?

My problem with test scores, as well as with certification, is the eternally retreating goal. I do a test — it isn’t the “right” test. I go out and buy an officially recognized test — it doesn’t count because I administered it myself so it’s biased. I try to get the school to do testing — they don’t do it that way, they decide the child is “emotionally disturbed” and omit the reading test. After a while you realize that you are dealing with people who have to be right and have to make you look wrong, and at that point I say fine, enjoy yourselves and I walk away.
The parents have the child’s report cards saying in Grade 2 that he is in need of special placement and giving D’s (only not F’s because they never give F’s, social promotion) and then in Grade 3 A’s and B’s; they also have his notebooks in Grade 2 showing everything written upside down and backwards, and in Grade 3 full sentences with acceptable spelling and grammar in two languages; so *something* happened during that year, and the thing that was different was me working with him twice a week. Yes, it would be nice to have formal objective measures of this, but as yet nobody seems very interested.