School Success for Kids With Dyslexia and Other Reading Difficulties

Walter Dunson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032144160
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000495959
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Psychology

School Success for Kids With Dyslexia and Other Reading Difficulties provides parents and teachers with goals that will meet the needs of students who are struggling with reading, leading them to work through their difficulties and enjoy reading. It includes information, assessments, and techniques that parents, teachers, and school administrators can use immediately to foster reading success. Through an understanding of how English words are constructed, how the brain processes language, and the differences that exist between learning styles, parents and teachers will gain keen insight into the processes of reading, reading acquisition, and reading instruction. The book also covers topics such as how language skills can affect reading difficulties and how technology can be used to help students, and it provides a structured approach for parents to implement at home to help their struggling students find success.

chapter 1 The Development of Reading Skills

DOI: 10.4324/9781003237846-2

THE most fundamental responsibility of schools is to teach students how to read (Moats, 1999). The development of reading skills obviously serves as the gateway to the world of printed information, as reading serves as the major foundational skill for all school-based learning (Lyon, 1998a). Most, if not all, of the informal education that we receive is accomplished without the use of printed material. Historically, the oral tradition was the foundation of the informal education process and continues to remain so. However, school presents a different situation—formal education in school requires the ability to read printed material. Through the development of reading skills, we prepare ourselves for our journey toward learning the material that must be mastered during the formal education process.

Many proponents of “whole language” education feel that because humans learn to speak their native language through immersion, the act of reading follows a similar pattern and exposure to the printed word leads to the development of reading skills. This reasoning bears a false truth value. A great deal of care and attention to detail must accompany reading instruction, because reading is quite different from speech.

In speech, the listener is provided with many clues as to the meaning of the words presented by the speaker. Intonation, pitch, cadence, and body language all provide context clues that assist in the comprehension of auditory signals. Further, according to the innateness hypothesis, children are equipped with a blueprint for the innate principles and properties that pertain to the grammars of all spoken human language, called universal grammar (Fromkin, Flyams, & Rodman, 2002). Barring neurologically-based developmental delays, children do not require explicit instruction to master the spoken language. Universal grammar aids the child in the task of constructing spoken language. Additionally, through stages in oral communication, a speaker learns from the surrounding linguistic environment the proper cadence, pitch, and intonation associated with the successful display of language ability as well as the rules of grammar that are language specific. This presents speech as a natural process (Fromkin et ah, 2002).

Reading involves a quite different presentation for a couple of reasons. First, written language is a relatively recent human construct. In the evolution of writing, we have designated symbols to represent the sounds of spoken language. We have, in essence, created our own code. The sound-symbol correspondence that has been developed for the English language is called the English code. Students must absolutely understand the sounds of our language and the symbols that represent them. Our spoken language has a code, and written language, as a representation of spoken language, therefore must also have a code. The code for written language is more complex because most visual and auditory cues must be inferred based upon two-dimensional symbolic representations called punctuation.

Although universal grammar was specified for spoken language, written language is of a different construct. Education, based upon its modern manifestation, is founded upon mastery of the written language. Just as children learned the rules for spoken language through oral communication, they must learn the rules for written language. In order to read, a student must be able to translate the written symbol to the corresponding sound that it represents. To spell, students must be able to translate the sound to the appropriate written symbol that represents it. This knowledge is called sound-symbol correspondence. The ability to make this translation is called phonemic awareness. Reading, or decoding, involves sound-symbol correspondence and phonemic awareness, neither of which is a naturally occurring process. Further, students should be taught not only the phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters) associated with the language, but also the myriad of spelling rules governing usage and application. For example, when choosing between using “ai” and “ay,” for graphically representing the tat phoneme within a spoken word, the rule depends upon the location of the long vowel phoneme within the word. If the long vowel phoneme / ā / appears in the middle of the word, we use “ai” (e.g., “rain,” “chain,” “pail”). If, however, the long vowel phoneme / ā / appears at the end of the pronounced word, we use “ay” (e.g., “day,” “pay,” “stay”).

Second, the two key components of reading, which do not manifest themselves in speech, are word identification and concept imagery. Word identification involves recognizing that words are a systematic string of individual graphemes or letters. Each individual sequential combination represents a different word. Students must be able to string together the individual phonemes or sounds the letters represent to produce these words. This is the essence of decoding. The other half of the reading puzzle involves comprehension of the meanings behind the sequential combinations of letters, or words. Concept imagery allows students to visualize the item or process represented by the words. Students who have weak word attack skills (word identification) will stumble and stammer as they attempt to read the printed language. Those weak in concept imagery (comprehension) may read with prosody but will not understand what is read.

To understand the impact of word identification and concept imagery on the reading process, one merely needs to be reminded that the printed language is a code for spoken language.

Word Identification

Every spoken language has a class of vowels and a class of consonants (see Chapter 4 for more information; Fromkin et al., 2002). The essence of decoding, as mentioned earlier, is to translate the written symbol to the corresponding sound that it represents. Additionally, a student must string together the individual sounds or phonemes to produce a word. Sound-symbol correspondence is paramount. A student must recognize the symbol, and he or she must have knowledge of what the symbol represents. Take a look at Figure 1. Read it out loud.

The overwhelming majority of us cannot decipher what we see in Figure 1 because we do not recognize the symbols. Even if we did recognize the symbols, do we know what sound or sounds each symbol represents? This is knowledge that we must have, as we must be able to string the sounds together in order to produce a word. Now, try reading the passage in Figure 2.

Languages, written and spoken, have grammars that govern their construction (e.g., subject and verb, interrogatives). All grammars contain rules of a similar kind for the formation of words and sentences (Fromkin et al., 2002). In the example in Figure 2, even though we recognize the symbols, we are unable to string together the represented phonemes into words. Note that we have a mixture of alphabetic and numeric symbols. The sequence “hrt5n,” for example, is inconsistent with how our code manifests.

Concept Imagery

In the final figure, Figure 3, each sequence of symbols manifests in the fashion to which we are accustomed in our language. Note that we have a capital letter at the beginning of each sequence and punctuation at the end. What separates the two sequences is that we have comprehension of the meanings behind the sequential combinations of letters (words) in sequence #2. We are able to “pull meaning from the print.”

Figure 1. Try to read this out loud.

Figure 2. Now, try reading this.

Figure 3. Two examples of sequences of symbols.

For additional clarity, concept imagery is the ability to form an image in the mind’s eye based solely upon sensory input, whether visual, auditory, or tactile-kinesthetic. It represents the ability to take the next logical step toward comprehension. For example, if I say that the animal I am thinking of has whiskers, four paws, a tail, and says, “meow,” you envision a cat. You formed an image in the mind’s eye based solely upon the sensory input. Students with strong word identification and poor concept imagery skills may read beautifully. Yet, ask them what they have just read, and they will respond with “I don’t know.” Academic language therapy is the proper treatment for weak word identification. To address weakness in concept imagery, I recommend that parents investigate the curriculum Visualizing and Verbalizing for Language Comprehension and Thinking by the Lindamood-Bell Learning Process company.

The National Reading Panel

In 1997, the United States Congress asked Dr. G. Reid Lyon, Chief of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, to appoint a 14-member panel of experts to determine the effectiveness of various approaches to reading instruction. The criteria for the selection of individuals for the panel included the ability to be completely objective as the panel researched and evaluated more than 100,000 different reading programs and methodologies. Better stated, no member of the panel could have any investment, financial or otherwise, with any reading methodology or program. The National Reading Panel Report (Learning Point Associates, 2004) condensed several decades of scientific research and showed that effective reading instruction should address five critical areas, labeled as the five pillars of reading. They are:

1. phonological awareness,
2. phonics,
3. fluency,
4. vocabulary, and
5. comprehension.

Phonological Awareness/Phonics

To begin, many believe that phonological (phonemic) awareness and phonics are the same thing. Nothing could be further from the truth. Phonemic awareness is the awareness that words are composed of sequences or strings of individual sounds called phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest parts of sound in a spoken word. For example, the word “at” has two sounds or phonemes, / ă// t/. The word “dog” has three phonemes, / d// ŏ / g/. Even though the word “box” has three letters, it has four phonemes, / b // ŏ // k // s /. As evidenced by the word “box,” phonemes are completely separate entities from the symbols that we call letters of the alphabet or graphemes. A grapheme is the smallest part of written language that represents a phoneme in the spelling of a word. A grapheme may be just one letter such as “t” or “d” or several letters such as “aw” or “eigh.” Graphemes represent the phonemes in written language.

Students must have the ability to identify and visually imagine the number, order, and identity of sounds and letters within words. These abilities underlie accurate word attack, word recognition, reading fluency, and spelling. Children who have phonemic awareness skills are likely to have an easier time learning to read and spell than children who have few...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents Page
• Introduction
• chapter 1 The Development of Reading Skills
• chapter 2 Reading Difficulties
• Strategies for the Claaroom and chapter 3 Home to Remediate Reading Difficulties
• chapter 4 Understanding Consonants and Vowels 59 How Sounds Are Constructed
• chapter 5 English Language Word Construction
• chapter 6 A More Specific Strategy for Remediation: A Structured Plan for Teachers and Parents
• References
• appendix A Scripts for Teaching Segmenting and Rhyming
• Phoneme Deletion/Substitution Drills 197 appendix
• appendix C Latinate Roots
• appendix D Latinate Prefixes
• appendix E Greek Combining Forms
• appendix F Assessment of Sound/Symbol Correspondence
• appendix G Spelling Deck Administration Form
• appendix H Diagnostic Deck Assessment Form
• About the Author
• Index