reading profile

This is fairly common for this level of reading. “Extremely” doesn’t look much like as many other words as he’s likely to encounter, much less words that would match the context. Confusing when and then, on the other hand, is easier because they are so much alike — and where one fits, the other one does, too.
There’s a term for words like “this” and “the” that don’t provoke an image in the mind or a clear concept. (Try to define “the” :-)) If you’re a reader who starts from the big, meaning picture then it’s harder to grab these words. If you’re into sounds and the flow of the language, then it’s easier.

Another thought is that his syntax usage in his everyday language is simple and he misunderstands more complex syntax. This would explain the confustion in his speech as well. I would suggest doing dictation with him so he becomes more familiar with pronouns and function words and teach him how to expand his sentences using them. You can do it through manipulatives by writing the words down on cards and then have him manipulate them around to change the meaning of the sentence by changing the order of the syntax. This would help him to become more familiar with grammar as well.

This is very common, and often flags a real problem. Many students memorize words by sight and a few key letters, for example something long that starts with ‘e’ must be “elephant” and something medium-length that starts with ‘or’ must be “orange”. This works OK as long as you only read carefully constructed artificial text that has only the memorized words included; it collapses totally when the reading level gets above Grade 4 or when you walk out the school door.
An example I always remember was my first year teaching; I was handed a grade 7 physical geography/earth science class on the grounds that I was a math teacher so I knew some science. We dug some old texts out of the storage room and started trying to teach about the Earth. A number of the kids — NOT just one — read “The Earth goes around the Sun in an elephant orange.” Well, the words printed were “eccentric orbit” but one was long and started with ‘e’ and the other was medium and started with ‘or’ …
If you don’t want your child to read sentences like the Earth in the elephant orange that sound schizophrenic or like an avant-garde performance artist, if you want him to get the meaning off the page that the author put there, then you need to teach him to look at *all* the letters in a word and *all* the words.
This is not necessarily easy or fun. Many kids read what is mistakenly called “fluently” (ie gabbling away very fast, meaning optional) by deliberately doing what your son is doing — say the long words by visual memory and run and mumble as fast as possible over the little ones and hope nobody catches you up on it. Having been taught that speed is good, speed is the goal, speed is grown-up and only babies read slowly and sound out, kids resist fiercely learning to slow down and look at detail. In fact, after they learn to really read and make sense out of it, students speed up faster than before, but it is hard to convince them of this at the start.
You have to read along with him and point each and every time he says an incorrect word and have him come back and correct. At first students hate this, but in a surprisingly short amount of time (often a few hours) they see that the words now make sense and they improve. But continued practice is needed to avoid backsliding.
If you want your child to really read fluently and with comprehension, start now and work on this; the sooner you get it under control the sooner he’ll reap the rewards of reading.

Victoria,

I make my son reread every time he misreads a word. I make him take each sound in order. And he still guesses all the time. It seems like he is hoping he will be right so he doesn’t have to actually decode it. And I see him guessing the right length words just like you have documented. Along the way, maybe despite himself, his reading has improved. He is now reading at a third grade first semester level and he is in third grade. But he makes a lot of errors.

Some days he will sound out all the words. And for the most part—he is correct. But the rest of the time—forget it.

His resource teacher says that he does perfect on any test of segmenting and blending–which is my experience too–but real text—that is another story.

Any ideas?

Beth

I forgot to mention that about 50% of the time my son looks at the word again (after I insist) and gets it right. It doesn’t even require sounding it out. About 25% of the time, he easily sounds it out. The rest of the time he has some trouble—reversing sounds, forgetting what letters represent ect. Some days this happens more than other days.

I am stumped.

Beth again.

Hi Beth,

I can’t recall….have you discussed vision problems on here before?

If so, we might have already gone over this ground. Regardless, your son sounds very much like a child who has a vision problem that is making reading difficult for him.

My experience has been that if a child can decode, and has had effective training in the phonemic skills (blending and segmenting especially) but still avoids reading, then that child very likely has an undetected vision problem.

My first screen for this is: Did either parent, or some siblings, have trouble learning to read (even if they read well now)? My second screen is: Does the child avoid reading, even of material that he should be capable of reading? There are a lot of other indications, such as headaches, obvious signs of fatigue when reading, blocking one eye, etc., but if you answer yes to either of the first two questions, I suspect an underlying vision problem.

Ironically, the kid may even be seeing double, words may be shifting around on the page, or coming in and out of focus, but he doesn’t know that’s unusual, so he will say he can see fine. This is because this is the way he’s always seen print, so he won’t know that others see a far different view of the world of print than he does.

It takes a developmental optometrist, preferably one supervising an effective vision therapy department, to diagnose the vision issues I’m referring to here. These problems are real, and in my opinion, are far more common that presently perceived. There are some complicated political and economic issues that are preventing the spread of this information to the parents who need to hear it, but that’s a long, long story.

Hope you get this figured out…..Rod

Poor readers commonly make these kind of mistakes. They often say a instead of the, or substitute other words for these easy words because they are guessing and not yet making meaning of the words they read. They need to know that good readers sound out words and do not guess. Sight words must be memorized and become automatic. Reading must make sense, the word must look right and sound right in order to be correct.

First of all, I absolutely second Rod on the vision issues. As a person who lost the vision in my left eye due to deliberately untreated amblyopia (the Freudian and/or she’ll grow out of it theories) I can’t agree too strongly.
Another two symptoms he doesn’t mention are klutziness, walking into walls and knocking over drinks (I do these all the time; with the left eye gone, no depth perception); and social problems such as not playing/not being chosen for ball games (no depth perception) or generally having trouble coping in a group of kids moving around outdoors.

On the specifics of teaching reading, if word-by-word correction isn’t working, try having your son repeat the sentence back to you, or repeat it to him as he said it, and ask him to explain it. The goal is to bring meaning to the forefront and to refuse to accept gabble. He may find this terribly embarrrassing at first, but that is motivation to change.

One other thing I have done is to take a book, say for example Harry Potter or a good non-fiction book of interest, that is simply too hard to guess at, at a very high level for the student, and struggle slowly through it. This takes a lot of teeth-gritting for the first few chapters, but the student is motivated by doing something age-appropriate and interesting on its own merits. A good book of literary value will be meaningless with guessing so within a few sentences the student realizes there is something to this accuracy idea; then there are the hours of struggle learning new words andchanging habits, but it’s worth it in the end.

Rod and Victoria,

I have no doubt that vision is somehow playing into my son’s problems, although I don’t think it is the whole problem. And yes, Rod you have spoken to me about it before—and were the impetus for me seeking an evaluation from a different therapist.

This is the story. He has been through vision therapy for 8 months—beginning before he went for a PG intensive. We had great improvements in his ability to do worksheets and the like at school but he still skipped lines when reading. I told the developmental optometrist this and he would test him and insist he was fine. We did then PACE—hoping we’d get automaticity and that this was the problem. His processing of letters did seem to speed up but he still skipped lines and words. I then to him to a different developmental optometrist for an evaluation—recommended by the person he sees for Neuronet therapy (and influenced by Rod’s comments). He said that he had trouble with tracking when given a cognitive challenge (the previous therapist had not tested with cognitive challenge—which is why he thought everything was OK but my son has CAPD as well which makes auditory tasks challenging), had excessive head movement, and variable reduced nearpoint of convergence recovery with binocular function—although mild. This optometrist does not do therapy (and to see anyone other than I had already seen would require driving to another metropolitan area). Our Neuronet therapist told me that he needed body work integrated with vision therapy—so he started doing tracking exercises while on a ball. It didn’t make any difference.

Most recently, she did some additional testing—after continual whining from me. We discovered that he did much better with larger print—more accurate, and better comprehension. She used Gray’s reading test so that the selections were of equivalent difficulty. We also learned that he has difficulty with visual-vestibular integration. The latter may explain why previous efforts including PACE were not completely effective. We are doing exercises now to address his integration problems so maybe we will get to the bottom of this.

Even after all this, I find myself confused. The results with the different size print were striking. So I enlarged a book he had been reading. It seemed to make a big difference at first. He was processing sounds better—not reversing them when he was sounding out words–and guessing far less often. But after a few days, he seemed to revert back to what he had been doing with the smaller print—with lots of guessing.

I think there are auditory problems here as well. We couldn’t get through all the PACE AP work last summer either (this draws from both PG and LIPS and adds a metronome for automaticity). He still doesn’t remember the code consistently despite a huge amount of repetition. He even has had a PG trained teacher this year and we have been working with him for almost 2 years. I have found a Lindamood trained tutor for him for the summer and hope that will help with that piece. She also will train him in Visualizing and Verbalizing so if the auditory component is not the major one at this point, we will get further with V & V.

Beth

Dear Beth,

I have investigated vision therapy and have found that there is no research to supoort that it is effective. The Amer. Academy of Pediatrics and the Amer. Acad of Opthalmology have a position paper stating that it is not supported by research and they do not recommend it. You can get a copy of it from the International Dyslexia Assoc.