Dyslexia: Able readers damaged by phonics, UK academic

The interests of able readers are being threatened by an insistence primary school pupils are taught to read using phonics, an academic has said.

The UK Department for Education wants English schools to use the reading system, which requires children to blend common sounds into words.

But Durham University researcher Andrew Davis says those already starting to read are likely to be put off.

The UK DfE's 'One Size Fits All' policy, insists synthetic phonics is the best way to teach reading.

The teaching method encourages children to sound out words rather than recognising the whole word and reading it for meaning.

The government strongly encourages schools to use reading schemes based on synthetic phonics, and part-funds a range of books approved as meeting its criteria.

It has also introduced a phonics test for all Year 1 pupils to ensure they are using this method to decode simple words, as well as some made-up words.

It argues this is the best way to ensure no child falls behind with their reading.

But Dr Davis, a former primary school teacher, says in his pamphlet a small minority begin school able to read and understand sentences, while a larger group are able to recognise some words.

'Form of abuse'
He argues those well on their way to reading could be put off by reading books featuring only words for which they have been taught the phonetic rules in class.

He says: "To subject either the fully fledged readers, or those who are well on their way, to a rigid diet of intensive phonics is an affront to their emerging identities as persons.

"To require this of students who have already gained some maturity in the rich and nourishing human activity of reading is almost a form of abuse."

He agrees that phonics can be very useful for teaching reading, but argues it should not be rigidly imposed on all.

'Mechanical exercise'
"Being forced to move back from reading for meaning to a mechanical exercise of blending and decoding is likely to be off-putting," he said.

He added that the fundamentalist approach to synthetic phonics "threatens the interests of a minority of children who arrive at school already able to read".

"The vast majority of Early Years teachers handle this kind of challenge with their usual professionalism, and will continue to do so if they are not troubled by rigid prescriptions from policy makers," he said.

A UK Department for Education spokeswoman said: "Too many children are not reaching the expected levels of reading at a young age, do not catch up, and then struggle in secondary school and beyond.

"Research shows overwhelmingly that systematic phonics is the most effective way of teaching reading to children of all abilities, enabling almost all children to become confident and independent readers.

"Thanks to the phonics check 177,000 six-year-olds will this year get the extra reading help they need to catch up with their peers."

Dyslexia: Phonics Alphabet A-Z Sounds for Children - Video

This video from helpingtogrow.com teaches the actual phonic sounds of the alphabet from A to Z.

The Role of Phonology 
In the world of dyslexia, it is necessary to return again and again to the very basics of phonics and “sounding out” words – even in adulthood, since reading fluency is often a lifelong problem.

The place to start is to learn the alphabet, not by the names of the letters, but by the sounds they make. Songs and videos with a phonetic alphabet like the one above are widely available.

The next step is to practice saying and memorize the most common words in the English language.

About 50% of all written material is made up of the 100 most frequent words, so reading fluency depends on learning words such as “the,” “no,” “on,” “like” and “open.”

For longer words, a student must learn to break down words into semantic or syntactic chunks. For example, an ending of “-s” or “-es” signifies a plural noun or a third person singular verb.

A prefix of “un-” indicates some type of negative meaning. If a person can learn to read and understand part of a word, then the rest of the word can be dissected, too.

Latin is sometimes recommended to high school students with dyslexia, because every word in a Latin sentence must be broken down into prefix, stem, infix and suffix to unlock the meaning.

Dyslexia Linked to Brain’s Inconsistency with Encoding Sound

Researchers from Northwestern University report that they have found a biological mechanism that appears to play a vital role in learning to read.

This finding provides significant clues into the workings behind dyslexia — a collection of impairments unrelated to intelligence, hearing or vision that makes learning to read a struggle.

As many as one in 10 children is estimated to suffer from this disorder.

“We discovered a systematic relationship between reading ability and the consistency with which the brain encodes sounds,” said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Communication.

The report, titled “Unstable Representation of Sound: A Biological Marker of Dyslexia,” is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

For the study, researchers recorded the automatic brain wave responses of 100 school-aged children to speech sounds.

 They discovered that the very best readers encoded the sound most consistently while the poorest readers encoded it with the most difficulty.

The brain’s response to sound appears to stabilize as children learn to successfully connect sounds with their meanings.

On a positive note, biology is not destiny. In a previous study, the researchers found that the inconsistency with which the poorest readers encoded sound could be “fixed” through training.

In that study, children with reading difficulties were fitted for a year with assistive listening devices that transmitted their teacher’s voice directly into their ears.

After a year, the children made improvements in reading as well as in the consistency with which their brains encoded speech sounds, especially consonants.

“Use of the devices focused youngsters’ brains on the “meaningful” sounds coming from their teacher, diminishing other, extraneous distractions,” said Kraus.

“After a year of use, the students had honed their auditory systems and no longer required the assistive devices to keep their reading and encoding advantage.”

According to Kraus, people rarely have difficulty encoding vowel sounds, which are relatively simple and long.

It is consonant sounds, which are shorter and more acoustically complex, that are more likely to be incorrectly processed by the brain.

“Understanding the biological mechanisms of reading puts us in a better position to both understand how normal reading works and to ameliorate it where it goes awry,” says Kraus.

“Our results suggest that good readers profit from a stable neural representation of sound, and that children with inconsistent neural responses are likely at a disadvantage when learning to read,” Kraus adds.

“The good news is that response consistency can be improved with auditory training.”

Dyslexia: Brainscape Learn How to Learn Faster

BrainScape app

Dyslexia has always been thought of as a learning disability having to do with literacy impairment.

Many people who have it are unable to read properly when they are younger, or read a lot slower than a non-dyslexic reader.

They may also have trouble spelling or reading things like nonsense words. In short, dyslexia is a learning disability in which people have trouble translating visual language into language that the brain can understand.

It happens to be one of the most common learning disabilities among children, affect anywhere from 10% – 15% of our population, according to various sources.

Until recently it has been thought of mostly as a learning disability that specifically affects the ability to read and understand writing.

However, research recently completed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology adds another dimension to dyslexia that helps us understand exactly what it is.

Graduate student Tyler Perrachione, left, and Professor John Gabrieli found that people with dyslexia have a much harder time identifying voices of different speakers than non-dyslexics. 

Credit Photo: Patrick Gillooly

John Gabrieli, professor of cognitive neuroscience at GabrieliLab MIT, and his team of graduate students performed an experiment in which they took two groups of students, one with dyslexia and one without.

Firstly, they exposed them to voices of English speakers coming from cartoon characters.

Secondly, they exposed them to voices of Chinese speakers coming from cartoon characters.

After seeing the characters and hearing their voices, they were given a test, in which their task was to match the voice to the face of the person.

Overall, neither group was able to match the Chinese voice to the respective bodies with much success.

However, when it came to matching the English speaking voices to their cartoon bodies, the non-dyslexic speakers were able to match and distinguish the voices fairly well, whereas the dyslexic students had a similar success rate to matching the Chinese voices.

In other words, the dyslexic students faced difficulties matching voices to bodies no matter what the language.

This is a very significant finding because it shows that there is more to dyslexia than simply not being able to read properly.

It appears to have something to do with hearing as well, which could prove to be very helpful in diagnosing children with dyslexia much earlier on in life.

Many of the students with dyslexia who participated in the study were very high functioning students, referring to the fact that their dyslexia was not overly severe, yet they still had difficulties distinguishing the English speaking voices when matching them to the cartoon characters.

In light of this study, there could possibly be a way to test children when they are younger for dyslexia.

Currently, many students find out that they are dyslexic around the second grade, by which time they may have already suffered from a reduced level of learning.

Having found that dyslexia is also audio based, would allow educators to test students earlier, using some type of voice recognition test.

However, things are not that simple because failing a voice recognition test may not necessarily be a sign of dyslexia.

Read more at BrainScape an app that claims to help you learn faster.

Phonics: Children who do not respond

What happens when a child cannot learn to read through phonics? 

Educational researchers call these children nonresponders or  treatment-resisters. They use these terms because direct and intensive teaching of phonetic skills is usually the first approach taken to help a young child who is falling behind but a surprisingly large number of children fail to progress to phonics-based interventions.  

Researchers have found that 25% to 50% of children with learning disabilities fall within this category. That is, one-fourth to one-half of kids with reading difficulties won't learn with the methods that are most likely to be offered at their schools. That is a higher percentage than the reported number of children with dyslexia.

New research confirms that the children who do not progress with traditional phonics-based tutoring are highly likely to be dyslexic. 

Unfortunately, schools often follow up the failed intervention with more of the same -- the teachers try harder, reasoning that the child must need to have more repetition and practice to learn but the research evidence also shows that the children who do not learn from phonics-based teaching at the outset do not improve over time; if anything, their performance tends to get slightly worse.   

Most dyslexic kids will struggle to learn to read that way, and those who struggle at the outset will continue to find traditional approaches to reading to be difficult or near-impossible. 

Learn more about the Davis Method:

• Is your child a nonresponder?  
• Research Update: Nonresponders & Dyslexia
• Davis Methods - A Brief Explanation 

CBeebies Fun with Phonics - Video and Books

CBeebies Fun with Phonics available from all good book stores

Dyslexia: Is it Big in Japan?

Many psychologists and cognitive scientists are convinced that Dyslexia is a complex cognitive disorder that only affects people trying to learn and read particularly difficult languages, ones which are full of exceptions to their own grammatical rules and which are more conceptual and not graphical in nature.

With this in mind, Dyslexia is thought to be very rare or non-existent in oriental languages because of the graphical nature of their language and writings.

Below is an extract from The Asahi Shimbun article that not only considers Dyslexia an issue in Japan but has first hand knowledge of the difficulties incurred by students.

Satoru Inoue

"Satoru Inoue and other people in Japan with dyslexia, a learning disorder that makes reading and writing difficult, have begun speaking out about their experiences by writing books and appearing in documentary films.

"I'd like teachers to know that children have the right to learn,” Satoru said, explaining why he wrote the book. “I want to do what I can so that there are fewer people like me."

Awareness of the disorder has been slow to develop in Japan, while support has been lagging that of Western countries.

Since the support is limited, many only become aware that they have dyslexia after reaching adulthood."

A Second extract from the same article:

"Like Satoru, Hiroko Sunanaga reached adulthood not knowing that she had dyslexia.

Her daily life is now featured in "DX (Dyslexia) na Hibi: Bin-chan no Baai" (DX days: The case of Bin-chan), an 81-minute documentary.

Sunanaga, whose nickname is Bin-chan, is now in her 30s.

A professor at an art university in London, where Sunanaga was studying in her early 20s, was the first person to suggest she had dyslexia."
 
Read the full article here

Crickets, Books, and Bach: Develop a Summer Listening Program

The importance of learning to listen

Listening is an engaging way to learn, a primary approach to developing or strengthening reading strategies, and, in some cases, a necessary means to access information and knowledge.

Listening media, such as audio books and text-to-speech, can be especially helpful to children with learning disabilities, such as those with dyslexia and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) , who struggle with print-based learning, and central auditory processing disorder (CAPD), who may struggle to listen.

For such students well-chosen listening experiences can open up new vistas of learning, providing access to information and ideas previously 'hidden' in books and supporting the reading process itself.

Such opportunities provide a powerful supplement or alternative to a reading program focused around printed text.

Research has shown that combining reading and listening through the use of audio books or text-to-speech programs improves the literacy skills of struggling readers, including those with learning disabilities.

Reading comprehension, listening comprehension, phonological awareness and blending, and naming skills have shown to be improved with a combined reading-listening program.

Listening while reading helps children learn the patterns of language, the obvious 'code' of letters and words on the page as well as less obvious codes, such as tone, nuance, and implied meaning.

Brain imaging technologies show that when we listen, different parts of the brain are engaged than when we read—or even when we merely hear something.

Listening can provide whole levels of information that are essential to determining the value and validity of a source.

Teaching children to listen to tone of voice not only helps them develop reading skills but can help in the development of their social and conversational skills, too.

For more information, see Plato Revisited: Learning Through Listening in the Digital World by David Rose& Bridget Dalton, published by RFB&D.

Read more here: Crickets, Books, and Bach: Develop a Summer Listening Program | Reading Topics A-Z | Reading Rockets

Apps for Children With Dyslexia - Gadgetwise

There is software out there designed to help children with dyslexia read (expensive software) but nothing yet in the way of an app marketed for that purpose (and there’s obviously no app that will “fix” dyslexia).
But just because there’s nothing actually marketed as helping students with dyslexia learn to better process in the classroom doesn’t mean there isn’t anything helpful out there.

Warren Buckleitner, who reviews children’s technology for The Times’s Gadgetwise blog, has posted his recommendations.

He suggests starting with a few really well designed letter and word-building apps on an iPad to get a child playfully constructing words and associating meanings.

One of his favourites for preschoolers is Toca Boca’s Paint My Wings, which lets children play informally with visual relationships in real time. For older children, he points parents toward Pocket Phonics, Montessori Crosswords and Word Wizard.

If you use any apps to help a child with dyslexia practice the skills she uses to cope, please, share in the comments. Which ones, and which skills do they improve? What works and what doesn’t when dyslexia is in the mix?

A Profile of Paula Tallal Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioural Neuroscience

A Profile of Paula Tallal, Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioural Neuroscience & Professor II. Her Faculty is the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience

Correcting Language Problems Through Neuroplasticity

Similar to a traveler who unknowingly sets out on the wrong route and needs to be redirected, the brain's plasticity can be utilized to guide the development of neural networks to correct language learning problems.

That key finding and insights into the brain's auditory processing system by Paula Tallal, Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Neuroscience, has helped to bring positive change to hundreds of thousands of children worldwide who struggle with language.

With her co-researchers, Tallal helped to devise a revolutionary technique and software program - Fast ForWord - to assist children with establishing and strengthening the neural networks for language development.

For more than 30 years, Tallal, co-director of the Rutgers Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, has been studying the connections between auditory processing, attention, memory and language learning.

What her research has shown is that timing is critically important for learning language and speech. The central problem for many children who struggle with language, including those with dyslexia, is that their brains have difficulty perceiving rapidly successive acoustic changes, such as the difference between "da" and "ba."

Tallal and her co-researchers hypothesized that the brain's neuroplasticity could be used to rewire neural networks to increase that processing speed or to "fire and wire" as she describes it. 

Neuroplasticity refers to the fact that the brain, rather than being molded and set, is able to reorganize itself in response to new situations or changes in the environment.

In 1996, she and co-researcher Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus, University of California, San Francisco, founded Scientific Leaning Corporation to bring their research out of the lab to help children who struggle with language.

The result was Fast ForWord, a computer-based program that corrects auditory processing problems by pushing the brain to handle auditory information at faster and faster speeds. The software, with an 80 percent success rate, has been used by children in more than 40 countries.

In her research, Tallal found that many children who struggle with language have a listening "window" that is slower than 1/4 second long.

Yet to differentiate fast-changing sounds, the brain needs to be able to perceive differences at the millisecond range to learn the smaller sounds inside of words, the phonemes.

If auditory information could be slowed down, Tallal theorized, it should become easier for children with processing delays to learn those differences.

That instead of mistaking "cat" for "tat," for example, they could learn to hear the discrete changes and if that information then could be presented at increasingly faster rates, their brains could be remodeled to make learning language easier and permanent.

That is just what Fast ForWord and the team's related learning tools accomplish. As shown by fMRI studies, the brains of children who have used the program develop the same firing patterns as children who do not struggle with language.

Her current research is focused on the neural and genetic bases of language development, and early detection methods for language learning difficulties.

In research that followed a set of babies across several years, she and her team found that identifying how fast the brain can organize simple incoming auditory information at very young ages is the best predictor of successful language development.

Such findings could open the way for earlier correction methods to spare children the struggles so many experience because of processing delays.

A Multisensory Approach to Reading | SJB Writing

Let me introduce you to another good article from the experiences of SJB:

"A while ago a parent contacted me for help because her child was struggling with reading. He hadn’t picked up phonics in Reception with the rest of his class, and so now his Year 1 teacher wanted to send him back to Reception for another dose of letters and sounds.

His mother was concerned about the effect this would have on his self-esteem and also couldn’t understand how repeating a year of something that clearly hadn’t worked was going to help him move on.

She asked if I had any idea for things she could work on at home with him that might help him progress.

My first thought was that if phonics lessons at school hadn’t worked at all, he was possibly a purely kinaesthetic learner.

This line of reasoning was backed up by the fact that he learnt more physical activities easily: he had learned to ride his bike without stabilisers with no problems at all, and he was already quite accomplished at several sports.

These were all things he would have learnt kinaesthetically. Phonics in school is taught in a visual and auditory way (see the letter, listen to the sound it makes).

I know that some people claim that kinaesthetic learners are catered for because there are actions to go with the letters and sounds, but I’m a kinaesthetic learner myself and I know for a fact that tapping my arm whilst saying “a-a-a”, or holding a finger in front of my mouth to pretend I’m blowing a candle out whilst saying “b-b-b” wouldn’t have helped me to recognise either of those letters.

I suggested helping him experience the letters in a different way. He started getting to know the letters by using wooden ones (magnetic ones would do just as well) that he could pick up so he would be able to feel the shape of each letter.

He explored which letters had straight edges, which had curved edges and which had sharp angles, and as he picked each one up we said together the sound the letter represented.

From there, I stayed with the idea of 3D letters but we moved on to making them. By using straws, rulers, pens, bits of string, blu-tack, sellotape, etc he was able to make his own 3D letters.

With his mum he made some dough, which he fashioned into letter shapes and they baked them. Eating the letters afterwards brought in taste alongside sight, hearing and touch for a truly multi-sensory experience."

Read the full article here: A Multisensory Approach to Reading | sjbwriting

Dyslexia and Processing Deficit: A Dangerous Combination for a Pre-Teen

I saw a 10-year-old 4th grade boy and his parents in my office, already diagnosed with dyslexia and auditory processing deficit of greater than 50 percent.

He had a series of severe ear infections as a baby and toddler and learned to speak much later than the parents’ other two kids.

He was reading at a second grade level and his grades were C-D, even with hours of help from his parents with his homework.

His parents had spent thousands of dollars paying for reading tutors out of school and during the summer break.

The public school had already had him in Wilson Reading tutoring twice per week. He also had speech therapy once per week to tackle his auditory processing defect.

The reading specialist had so many meetings in the school, that she had to cancel the intensive reading tutoring multiple times. His teacher said he was not improving in his reading skills.

This happens quite often.

The public school reading specialist, often has multiple meetings, and with the budget cutback, often he or she is required to cover multiple schools.

This ends up with the Wilson reading tutor actually spending less time than allotted with the child. This boy often comes home from school and when his parents ask him what they covered in history today, he has no idea of even what century or what country was being studied because he has a severe auditory processing deficit.

I explained to his parents that their son has a double barreled problem with both dyslexia and auditory processing deficit, and that these often come together in the same child.

The Wilson method of reading is fine, but this boy needs daily intensive help before he gets any older. This type of drip-drip method of helping him will not work.

He will get frustrated with school, and will put less and less effort into it. He needs daily intensive schooling that is like basic training, where all efforts from adults are directed toward fixing his problems before they become worse.

His parents need to become assertive advocates of their boy, or they will find their boy becomes a very frustrated, angry teenager if he feels like a failure.

Michael Kaufman and Madeleine Kitaj: Attorney and Physician

BishopBlog: Phonics screening: sense and sensibility

There’s been a lot written about the new phonics test that is being introduced in UK schools in June. 

Michael Rosen cogently put the arguments against it on his blog this morning. 

A major concern is that the test involves asking children to read a list of items, and takes no account of whether they understand them. Indeed, the list includes nonwords (i.e. pronounceable letter strings, such as "doop" or "barg") as well as meaningful words. 

So children will be “barking at print” - a very different skill from reading for meaning.

I can absolutely see where Rosen is coming from, but he’s missing a key point. You can’t read for meaning if you can’t decode the words. 

It’s possible to learn some words by rote, even if you don’t know how letters and sounds go together, but in order to have a strategy for decoding novel words, you need the phonics skills. 

Sure, English is an irritatingly irregular language, so phonics doesn’t always give you the right answer, but without phonics, you have no strategy for approaching an unfamiliar word. 

Read more of this article here: Phonics screening: sense and sensibility

Dyslexia: It’s not all about Phonics!

There has been so much news about phonics and how it works lately that I thought I’d tell you that IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT PHONICS!

You wil find that sum childrn are sow ust to lerning fonics that thay downt tayk eny notis of wot the werds look liyk.

And in case you couldn’t read that it says: You will find that some children are so used to learning phonics that they don’t take any notice of what the words look like.

It’s a bit of a shame that all words aren’t spelt phonetically because then ‘we’ wouldn’t have such a big task when it comes to learning how to spell. This is why it can’t all be about phonics when teaching children how to spell.

Don’t get me wrong, phonics is an excellent place to start and when children can’t spell a word using sounds to work out what comes next is a great way to help them and even if the spelling is wrong it can still be read by them or others.

So what am I talking about?! After your child writes the word phonetically he or she needs to look at the word and ask “Does it look right?” Just asking that simple question can make all the difference.

Helping Struggling Readers Decode Unknown Words

Three common curriculum gaps that can intensify children’s reading problems are failing to teach them phonological awareness, automatic word recognition, and an alternative to single letter phonics.
Teach Phonological Awareness.

This is the ability to identify and manipulate sounds within spoken words. For example, say the word bat without the /b/ sound. Unfortunately, may struggling readers struggle with phonological awareness. To develop proficiency, they need instruction.

• Good phonics instruction should develop phonological awareness. The key to learning to decode words is the [alphabetic] principle that letters can represent sounds 
• The key to the development of the alphabetic principle, word recognition, and invented spelling is phonological awareness. 
• Phoneme awareness [part of phonological awareness] is the awareness of sounds in spoken words. As words are spoken, most sounds cannot be said by themselves.
• For example, the spoken word /cat/ has one continuous sound and is not pronounced “kuh-a-tuh.” 
• Children ordinarily concentrate on the meaning and do not think of the sounds in the word but, since letters represent sounds, a child must learn to think of words as having both meaning and sound in order to understand the alphabetic principle. (Stahl, Duffy-Hester, & Stahl, 1998, p. 340, references omitted)

Teach Automatic Word Recognition. Struggling readers who accurately identify words—slowly and laboriously—will likely tire of reading, resist reading, and become overwhelmed by the volume of all they must read.

Three keys to helping these children become fluent readers are to teach them how to quickly and accurately recognize words, to give them lots of daily practice in doing so, and to engage them in lots reading they find easy and enjoyable. This will help them to quickly identify words.

• Good phonics instruction leads to automatic word recognition. In order to read books, children need to be able to read words quickly and automatically. If a child stumbles over or has to decode slowly too many words, comprehension will suffer. 
• Although we want children to have a strategy for decoding words they do not know, we also want children to recognize many words automatically and be able to read them in context. (Stahl, Duffy-Hester, & Stahl, 1998, p. 343, references omitted)

Teach Word Families. Many phonics programs emphasize the sounds of individual letters and emphasize sounding out most words one or two letters at a time.

This helps many struggling readers to quickly and accurately identify unknown words. But many does not mean all.

Here’s a way that can help struggling readers who struggle with the sounds of individual letters, especially vowel sounds.

It uses word families, such ake: bake, brake, cake, make, quake, rake, sake, snake, take. Word families are also called phonograms or rimes.

• Recent scholarly inquiry into how children learn to decode words suggests that knowledge of certain sound and letter patterns in words may help readers figure out unfamiliar words.
• This is often called the analogy approach to word recognition, and a considerable amount of research supports its use as an instrument for word-recognition instruction.
• Predominant among such letter patterns are onsets and rhymes. An onset is formed by the individual consonant or consonant combination (such as pl, ph, st, sch, str, or th) that precedes the first vowel in a word or syllable. 
• Rhymes are another name for letter combinations that we have for years called “phonograms” or “word families,” the part of a syllable that contains the vowel and all subsequent consonants. For example, in the word bat, the b is the onset and the at is the rime; in slick, the sl is the onset and the ick is the rime.
• Fry (1998) has pointed out that just 38 common rime patterns can be used by readers to decode 654 one-syllable words. Moreover, these same rhymes can also be helpful for partial decoding of a much larger number of longer, more difficult, multisyllabic words. (Rasinski, 1999)

If your child struggles to identify unknown words when reading, ask yourself:

• Has the school assessed his phonological awareness skills? If they’re poor, are his teachers teaching him how to identify and manipulate sounds he hears in words?
• Are his teachers teaching him to recognize words quickly and accurately, or just accurately?
• If he struggles when using individual letters to sound out (decode) unknown words, can his teachers teach him to use word families (rhymes, phonograms)?

References
Rasinski, T. (1999). Making and Writing Words Using Letter Patterns. Retrieved 9/22/2011, from http://www.readingonline.org/articles/rasinski/MWW_LP.html.
Stahl, S.A., Duffy-Hester, A.M., & Stahl, K.A.D. (1998). Everything you wanted to know about phonics (but were afraid to ask). Reading Research Quarterly, 33, 338-355.

How to Learn about Letters and their Sounds

Teaching children how to read is based on the concept of letters and sounds. There are a few ways that you can help your child learn to read using simple strategies. When your little one begins to read on their own, you will feel amazed at the progress and feel thankful for all the work that was put into it.

Make a Sound Connection
Before a child can read, they have to make the connection between the sounds that letters make and the letter itself. Once a child realises that the sound and letter go together, it can be a helpful step toward putting sounds together.

There are lots of phonic books available that can help your child learn the steps toward reading independently. They will first begin to recognise that letters have sounds and begin to memorise what they are. A book that features fun activities for children, will increase their motivation and make them want to learn more.

Words Worth Repeating
A good phonics reading material will feature lots of repetition, so that your child really understands what is trying to be taught. The more practice they have with letters and sounds, the more they will comprehend what they are doing.

One step at a Time
Often a book will be broken down into several teaching strategies, it is recommended that a child learn one area of reading before starting a new topic. When a phonics book is divided into separate components, it can assist the child with learning in a way that suits their learning needs.

Practice, Practice, Practice
The best way to have your little one reading, is to practice every night. You can help them do some work sheets during the day, and then read together at night before bed. The more that reading takes place together, the higher the chance of early reading. Helping your child learn to read, takes patience and time.

If your child has a hard time picking up a new skill, then just keep going over the same concept until they understand it. When a child feels successful at something, they will be more inclined to stick with it.

More.......

Dyslexia: Phonics-based Instruction

New research shows that phonics-based instruction can actually change brain activity in adults with dyslexia, resulting in significant improvements in reading.

The findings from a collaborative study by Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and Georgetown University Medical Center were reported today in the journal Neuron.

“With about 112 hours of phonic-based instruction, adults with dyslexia had significant improvements in reading and changes in brain activity while reading,” said Lynn Flowers, Ph.D., senior researcher, from Wake Forest Baptist.

“We know that dyslexia is not something children outgrow, and our findings suggest that it’s never too late for instruction to overcome this disability.”

This was the first independent research study of whether phonics-based instruction is effective in adults with dyslexia and the first to measure whether the instruction would result in changes in brain activation.

Dyslexia, or difficulty learning to read, has been associated with underactivity in areas of the brain that process language and “decode” words into groups of letters that are associated with meaningful sound patterns.

The research involved 19 adults with dyslexia and 19 typical readers without dyslexia. The mean age of participants, who were mostly from the Winston-Salem area, was 42.5.

Dyslexia is the most common learning disability and affects about 10 percent of the population. “A huge number of adults have this problem, so it’s important to know whether something can be done to treat it,” said Flowers, an assistant professor of neurology.

“Adults with dyslexia can suffer significant financial and emotional consequences.”

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) – which shows brain activation during a task – to verify whether adults with dyslexia process language differently from typical readers.

The testing – performed while participants completed a phonics task – showed that several areas of the brain, predominantly on the left side, were less active in participants with dyslexia.

These areas are associated with processing phonetic sounds and recognizing familiar objects.

“This verified our findings and those of others and confirms that dyslexia is biologically based,” said Flowers.

The researchers then tested to see if instruction in phonics would improve reading ability and produce changes in brain activation. Half of the participants with dyslexia received phonics-based instruction 15 hours a week for eight weeks.

Before the instruction began, they completed pen-and-paper tests to measure their reading ability and underwent fMRI. After the instruction, they completed a second round of written and fMRI testing.

The written tests showed that participants who received instruction made gains of between six and 23 percent in text reading, phonetic awareness and the ability to “decode” the written word.

fMRI testing revealed that the improvements in reading corresponded to increased activity in areas of the brain associated with phonetic processing, being able to associate a symbol with a sound and being able to recognize whether a string of letters represents a word.

Flowers said the gains in reading ability were significant enough to make a difference in the everyday lives of participants.

Dyslexia: Hearing helps and Listening aids

Following on from our previous blog on 'Print Awareness' we would like to look at Listening and Hearing in the developing child.

Listen!
Before we, or our children can speak and read properly we first have to be able to listen and understand what we are hearing.

Professional Speech Therapists will always insist that a full spectrum of hearing test are carried out on a child, before they take them on as a 'patient' or client.

This makes perfect sense, because in the early stages of speech we mimic and repeat what we hear and if we do not hear sounds clearly or there is a loss of some tones and frequencies then we will not be able to respond correctly. It may sound OK to the speaker but not to the listener.

Phonemic Awareness
It is essential that your child's hearing is in good working order, so that they can;

• hear and begin to recognise sounds in words (Phonemics)
• begin to match letters and letter sequences to sounds (Phonics)

Nursery Rhymes
There is a very good reason why nursery rhymes were written, repeated and have stood the test of time. It's because they have a very important purpose in helping a child develop a sense of language, in a simple, fun and therefore, acceptable way.

Children need to be able to detect and repeat simple rhymes in words and sentences, to allow them to develop good language skills. Nursery rhymes are essential in encouraging the child's development of phonemic awareness and as a consequence they also develop good phonic skills.

Sing along
So, make it easy for your children to sing along with nursery rhymes and simple rhyming songs. Sing with them and set aside a time in the day to share this activity with your child. It doesn't have to be a formal arrangement, it can simply be in the car on the way to the supermarket, in the shopping mall , when your both 'busy' in the garden or cleaning house.

Music and sounds
Make sure you have musical toys in your child's extensive and colourful collection of toys. Encourage your child to make the noise the toy makes e.g. a bell (Ding!), a car horn (Beep, beep!), a train (Woo, woo or Chuff, chuff), etc. Are they good at it?

This way you will be able to discover how talented your child is in the sound and music department but you may also be able to detect what frequencies they can and cannot hear.



Ear Infections
Be careful with ear infections in small children, they can lead to difficulties in hearing later on in development and therefore in speech and language development. Do not tolerate ear infections and be insistant with you doctor that your child needs speedy and appropriate treatment.


Don't over react but also don't allow yourself to be fobbed off or dismissed by a taciturn or off-hand remark that 'It'll go away itself!' or 'It's normal for kids. Just leave it!' No, get it treated. Otherwise your child's hearing and future development may be affected.

Summary
Hearing is essential in the development of speech and reading skills. Encourage your child to listen carefully and to sing and make appropriate sounds in response to your prompting.

Don't panic! If you have any concerns about your child's hearing or speaking skills, consult a qualified consultant for their opinion and they will be able to provide re-assurance, pertinent comment and specialist observations.