I do not like the wording, when using words such as suggest that there is support, can be successful, evidence to support. Using words such as suggest, will not change the minds of those who are in the position of power and control to move away from whole language. And I have my doubts on changing people who are gun-ho over whole language, to take the time and energy to look at the research in systematic instruction, and the rest of it, that have proven beyond doubt that systematic explicit phonics is the only reading instruction that should be in our schools.

But on the bright side, at least some of the universities in the United States, have qualified people that can work from the top, pushing systematic instruction.

“TI Endowed Chair in Evidence-Based Education & Professor

Patricia G. Mathes, Ph.D. is a professor of Teaching and Learning and a former classroom and reading teacher who received her Ph.D. in 1992 from Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development. Dr. Mathes has served on the faculties of Pediatrics at the University of Texas Houston Medical School, the College of Education at Florida State University, and Peabody College for Teachers at Vanderbilt University. Since 1991, she has been conducting large-scale classroom based reading intervention research with funding from multiple sources including the U.S. Department of Education, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Science Foundation, as well as state agencies and foundations.”
http://smu.edu/education/evidencebasededucation/people/mathespatricia.asp

http://smu.edu/education/evidencebasededucation/

Thanks for the links, Nancy. Whole language is absurd because it violates the alphabetic principle. Teaching reading is not difficult. You start by teaching the letter and sound relationships, and then you teach the children to blend these sounds. How much research is needed to confirm the blatantly obvious? Until the faculties of education and ministries of education get this parents who are capable of it will continue to teach their children synthetic phonics.

The results are not quite that clear-cut.  This is a synthesis of 11 experimental studies, and you have to look under the covers of those studies to understand what was actually being measured.  I’m not familiar with all 11 studies, but I’ve read a few of them, and it is not pretty.

The first thing that jumps out is that these studies are remediations for poor readers, not instruction of average students.  You can’t generalize from one to the other.

For example, the first study cited is Blachman et al. (2004) who targeted dyslexic readers between the ages of 6 and 9.  Well, some of them may have been dyslexic, but that’s really young to diagnose - maybe some were just late starting readers.

Her protocol provided them with a poorly-designed mix of regular (letter-to-sound) and synthetic (sound-to-letter) phonics plus some sight-words.  This doesn’t really line up with the ‘Encoding Instruction’ claim in the title.

There was a control group of dyslexics who did not receive any help.  Blech!  Doesn’t Yale have an ethics committee?.

This intervention ground on for 8 months of daily one-on-one tutoring, confounding the effects of the training program with the benefits of daily one-on-one tutoring over an extended period.  Most kids would benefit from 8 months of daily one-on-one tutoring, regardless of what training tool was used.  All the study can really claim is that kids who get 8 months of tutoring do better at the end of those 8 months than kids who don’t.

Reading skills were re-tested after a one-year delay but only for the experimental group and NOT for the control group - what the heck were they measuring?  In any case the results were poor, on average the ‘remediated’ students continued to fall behind their peers.

I’m totally gung-ho in favor of phonics, but the above paper doesn’t offer any convincing support for it, and adding up a dozen similar papers doesn’t either. 

here’s a much better paper, describing much better research.  It provides compelling support for ‘Linguistic Phonics’, a flavor of synthetic phonics that explicitly teaches the sound-to-letter spelling-code.  (I’m working on my thesis which explores this kind of phonics as a tool for remediation).

http://gtcni.openrepository.com/gtcni/bitstream/2428/12963/1/LPASumbrief WEB V2.pdf

Tom, I had to register and I do hope I selected the correct study.

I have a few questions.

1. Why do you think that the ages between 6 to 9 are too early to diagnosed dyslexia?  One of the hallmarks for dyslexics, is low phonemic awareness, that can be determined very early on.

2. And my second question, is regarding why have synthetic phonics or ‘Linguistic Phonics’ as a remediation tool?  Should it not be seen as an instruction method for the whole class?

If my child had some type of systematic instruction in reading from the beginning, more than likely she would not have had struggled in learning in the primary grades. Whole language instruction promotes the memorization of words, which essentially happened with my child. She learned to read by memorizing words, which was her only strategy by default, since she has low phonemic awareness. There is quick assessments that can be used to determined the students who will have future difficulties in reading and writing, if the problem areas such as phonemic awareness is not remediated.

My child was a textbook example of dyslexia in the primary grades. Yes, she could read providing there was no new words in the reading material. Yes, she could write neatly providing there was no new material to understand. However, her writing clearly showed how her low phonemic awareness impacted her writing, What was seen as spelling mistakes, was really a sign of a much deeper problem of low phonemic awareness, and where a simple quick assessment would have determined it.

And yet the study conducted by Patricia Mathes, in my eyes gives me hope, since the study included the newer methods of addressing reading concerns for the teenager. Essentially, reteaching the students to read, using systematic explicit phonics approach. The high school that my child attends, was willing to used this approach, which would include about 40 % of other students in her class. The board turned it down which is par for the course, but re-teaching reading for teenagers who have low literacy skills, using a systematic explicit phonics approach is being seen as the most effective method to addressed low reading skills, according to the most recent research.

Why wait to remediate, when systematic explicit phonics or like-approaches are far more effective to reduced the number of students needing remediation in the older grades?

Thomas,
Good to hear you are in favor of, I hope, systematic explicit (synthetic) phonics for beginning readers—not just for remediation.
Perhaps you missed the point of my posting—I was being sarcastic and a bit cheeky.

SQE has a big repertoire of studies supporting this approach (after all, we’ve fighting for this for 20 years!)  See also our remedial program, Stairway to Reading, in the menu on this website, which is based on sound research of effective reading instruction.  This program is the most visited and downloaded destination our website.
Here’s another study for your thesis.  It’s the famous UK Clackmannanshire longitudinal study.

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/education/sptrs.pdf’

What the researchers found was that when children were initially taught to read using sythentic phonics, and followed up over 7 years, they continued to significantly outperform their peers.  There was no gender gap and there was no significant socio-economic gap in reading.  In fact, the boys slightly outperformed the girls. 

What SQE has been trying to get across to the education powers that be, is that teaching beginning readers in this way is more effective and reduces the amount of remediation and intervention that has to take place later.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure so to speak.
It is much harder to fix bad habits created by whole language and “balanced” literacy programs that perpetuate poor strategies such as guessing.

Nancy is correct and I’m sure that Jo-Anne Gross will fill in with the rest.

Nancy and Doretta are correct Tom.

http://www.dyslexia-ncbida.org/articles/Latefallnov02 web.pdf

I believe Dr.Lyon and the NICHD team solved this problem years ago but with the publishers(they`re in charge aren`t they?) rolling out Balanced Literacy and Fountas and Pinell because they WANT to tell us we are drill and kill radicals and traditionalists fail to hear that we want to instruct Reading from the left brain to the right,that is teaching students to decode efficiently and spell perfectly and move to comprehension as soon as the children have read the words-in the same lesson.We here at SQE also believe in handwriting instruction,after all putting down proper letters for the words you hear is rather important!

Comprehension teaching is an oral exercise and can and should be done with oral stories and vocabulary development.Reading should be taught explicitly and systematically and it does not go as quickly as speaking the language but eventually the 2 collide,taught according to the research mentioned.
Phonics is an all encompassing word and perhaps we should change to Phonology,phonemic awareness ,the hearing of the speech sounds have to be taught to teachers,there are 44 of them and they make 90 pictures(graphemes).Yes,after the knowledge, fluency instruction begins with the blending and segmenting exercises which lead to automaticity,only 5 % of kids can`t get there because of the double deficit;read Mary Ann Wolfe,Tufts University.

In my work where I train teachers on a user friendly explicit systematic curriculum to assist them in remediating children identified with a struggle in the early grades and remediating identified children,it didn`t take long till we saw the 5 pillars of research based reading instruction(Honouring findings of NICHD research study)as well as the deeply neurologically invasive theories of Orton Gillingham that hearing,reading,spelling and handwriting are linked,we figured out rapidly that we can prevent 95% of problems and we do not NEED to wait for failure,Jean Chall`s thoughts also.In fact,waiting to identify when teaching properly at age 4,5 6 7 and 8 can alleviate pretty well the whole syndrome created by flawed instruction and reduce the special education numbers significantly is a pretty exciting idea.

For those caught in this abysmal unnecessary pedagogical fight,telling us we are neglecting reading comprehension with kill and drill are actually the fabricators of a systemic problem where learning disabilities growing at such a rapid rate in the realm of reading,spelling and writing could be pretty well reduced to 5%.

The phonological deficit theory is now widely accepted in all academic,scientific circles and yet the faculties of education continue to ignore the research .
We should call this educational malpractice.

Weak phonemic awareness,just taught in the early grades in a multisensory way, creates new neurological connections as found in Dr.Sally Shaywitz’s lab at Yale.

A child who would otherwise have failed is now going under the radar and doing well and we avoid pain,labeling and expense at the school board level.

There is a lot at play here like huge departments set up in school boards to deal with failure,we wouldn`t want to dismantle those would we?

Tom, I would like to add one more thing to consider is the final outcomes regarding reading and writing levels of adults in English speaking countries that for the most part instruction is in whole language or one of the many versions of whole language.

The english-speaking countries such as England, United States and Canada have for the most part while over 40 % to 50 % of their population with low-literacy skills. What do they have in common, a whole-language approach or the many versions, regardless of age.

People with low-literacy skills, have the ability to read, but they are not very good readers, and have difficulties in comprehending the reading material. In turn it impacts writing, and having the ability to express in clear writing.

As Joanne has expressed in large education departments, the adult education departments are also huge where the public education systems of English-speaking countries have grown in the number of staff and public monies to addressed the impact of low-literacy skills in the adults. What is more worrisome here, is the rampant use of whole language approaches, and other progressive methods that requires more time and effort, to raise literacy levels, than the systematic explicit phonics approaches and other methods based on the science research.

After reviewing low-literacy skills in adults, now they seems to a pushed to change the criteria for levels in reading and writing on the global scale, where countries like England would dropped from 48 % to 3 %. This amounts to dumbing it down, much in the same way as it is in the current public education system with students who are struggling in reading and writing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/1424850.stm

Or the several I read that low-literacy adults should be seen as having a learning disability. Therefore reducing the number of low-literacy adults by labeling them, to defend the current whole language and its many versions and in turn low-literacy is no longer a concern by governments.

Hi, thanks for the comments. I didn’t mean to start a fire.  I’m humbled that you all too so much time and care to respond to me.  thanks.

I’m particularly interested in ‘evidence-based’ treatments, and I like to review the evidence.  Much of it is distressingly bad.  Blachman’s study, for example, doesn’t stand up to much examination, and Mathes’ use of the Blachman study raised my hackles.

Dorretta, thanks for the link to Clackmannanshire.  I had read the Johnson & Watson (2004) paper on this study in ‘Reading and Writing’ which has more details about the methodology, but I had not seen your version with the longer time base and case study.  It’s interesting to triangulate between the two reports.

This is an unusual study for several reasons:  it was conducted in classrooms, it compared synthetic phonics to regular phonics (rather than against whole-word), and it addressed socioeconomic factors.  But it wasn’t a particularly intensive experiment, the different phonics ‘treatments’ were only taught for 20 minutes a day for 16 school weeks, then the study collapsed the regular and synthetic phonics groups with everyone moving to synthetic phonics. 

The 2004 paper only deals with the first 16 weeks (plus a second experiment).  At that point the synthetic phonics learners seemed to be doing better, but that is a very weak result since assessments only tested single-word skills which seems biased to synthetic phonics.  In any case,  retesting after a one year delay showed that the differences between the training groups had disappeared.  Perhaps the correct inference from this study is that teaching synthetic phonics gets students decoding faster.
The paper you provided gave the 7-year followup, comparing these students to others via standardized tests.  I’m going to have to dive in some more to understand these numbers, but the effect sizes look small.  I get concerned when I see that boys are ahead in spelling in grades 4, 6, 7 and girls are ahead in grades 5, makes me think that maybe some of the numbers aren’t too significant or the tests aren’t very reliable.

But there are two important take-aways.  A good one is that these students were taught with synthetic phonics are outperformed their ‘standardized’ peers (assuming that there are no surprises if I drill into the testing).  This is strong evidence to support changing the curriculum in other schools.

And a puzzling bad one is that by grade 6, there were as many disabled readers in this group as in any other school (16.2% of students more than two years behind in reading comprehension).  So counter to the claims of McGuinness and similar researchers, systematic instruction of synthetic phonics does not seem to prevent reading disability.

There is also a focus in the second study on a single case study, a child with language impairments who was able to decode non-words with the help of synthetic phonics.  That’s great, but unfortunately, he remained 30 months behind in reading ability.  I plan to spend more time with these reports of the study, and try to understand them better.  Thanks again.

Nancy,  I’m just a beginner in my studies of dyslexia, but I believe there is evidence for testing early readers regularly and frequently, and pulling out the poor performers out for intensive interventions - and then getting them back to their classrooms as quickly as possible.  And yes, this would include 6-year-olds.  My comments were about Blachman’s study treating 6- to 9-year-olds as a single cohesive group, not about whether we should help struggling students at that age.

I’m less certain that teaching systematic phonics to high-school kids is useful.  There seems to be different points in the reading acquisition model at which readers get stuck - basic decoding, digraphs and trigraphs, morphological affixes, syllables, etc.  I read about students who have had years of remedial phonics and can decode perfectly - but can’t read fluently because they painfully decode every word.  I am finding excellent research that suggests how we can assess and address each stumbling point - what has to be unlearned, and what has to replace it. 

To your second question - the current state of affairs is unacceptable, and like all of you, I am hoping to help improve it. I’m focusing on getting my arms around the research because I think there are 20 years worth of great evidence-based ideas that haven’t been implemented (they are needles in a very large haystack of poor research).  I’m focusing on remediation because there is a dire need, and I have some developer skills, maybe I can make a difference.  I would be thrilled if basic educational reforms made my labours irrelevant.

The BBC article highlights the difficulty of operationalizing a construct like ‘literacy’.  And also the poor state of research in reading.

continued…

... continued from previous

Jo-Anne, your ‘drill-and-kill’ comment puts the finger on it.  We read for pleasure, we read for meaning - all the stuff that the whole-language crowd claims. But if a child has trouble, we need to pull him out and DRILL - intensively and purposefully.  Doesn’t matter whether it’s fun or not, a child might choose whether he wants ketchup or vinegar on his fries, but he doesn’t get to choose whether he learns to read well.  Why are we so sensitive about doing the right thing?

I will contest whether the phonological deficit theory is supported by good evidence.  It is well established that there is a correlation between phonemic awareness and reading disability (hence to Nancy, why we should test for it).  But correlation is not causation, and there are valid questions about which way this particular relationship works.  From my readings, it seems more likely that we develop phonemic awareness by learning to read.

Thanks again for the careful comments and suggestions.  I’m brand-new to this.  You guys are sitting on a huge trove of knowledge and experience, I wish I could recruit you to help keep my thesis on track.

Sorry to be so long-winded.

Tom,

“From my readings, it seems more likely that we develop phonemic awareness by learning to read.”. That is, we may develop phonemic awareness if reading is taught properly, that is explicit teaching of phoneme-grapheme correspondence.

You may be interested in this article: http://collection.europarchive.org/tna/20060731065549/http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/RR711_.pdf

“I am finding excellent research that suggests how we can assess and address each stumbling point - what has to be unlearned, and what has to replace it. ” 

It would be very helpful if you could supply references to those studies.

Thanks,
Lillian

Tom you said,
“But it wasn’t a particularly intensive experiment, the different phonics ‘treatments’ were only taught for 20 minutes a day for 16 school weeks, then the study collapsed the regular and synthetic phonics groups with everyone moving to synthetic phonics”

Actually the researchers did not “collapse” the study as much as they felt it would have been unethical to continue by NOT teaching all three groups (Synthetic, Analytic (balance literacy to us), and the control group) using synthetic approach because they observed its superior results.

It only TOOK 20 minutes a day for sixteen weeks. That’s the point.  An ounce of prevention….as I said before.

There are more studies in a similar vein.  A quick look at our links page or our newsletter archive will quickly find them.

Tom,

I know for a fact that the phonological deficit theory is conclusive and that teaching speech sounds(phonemes) corrects the problem in 90% of students and when we do it preventively-wow!.However,they need to be integrated in the learning process through multisensory simultaneous modality instruction.

Every thesis contests the other,that`s why we needed the NICHD study.And there`s a lot more than Benita there,there`s Fletcher,Foorman,Torgesen,Shaywitz,Moats and read Linnea Ehri from National Reading Panel.

Time to start helping kids instead of developing new theories.
I reiterate Jean Chall`s words,“we`ve got all the reading research we`ll ever need”.

If I seem exasperated,I am.
Weak phonemic awareness happens either genetically or because kids aren`t read to or they have constant ear infections when they are young.Whatever the reason,teaching the phonemes orally,showing them what they look like and adding and deleting simple consonants around them is crucial to their success.We learn what it means AFTER we read it-and then if we`d hear it in our oral world it becomes incredibly exciting.

http://www.childrenofthecode.org/library/refs/phonemicawareness.htm

I am very glad I became puzzled about meeting so many teenagers with low literacy skills when I started teaching. This made me read “Overcoming Dyslexia” by Sally Shaywitz. It was very easy to recognize the phonological deficit in my son, then aged four. Being trained in phonetics, I started teaching the sounds and how to articulate them explicitly. My son is now able to read (that is decode), and I think I have prevented what may have otherwise turned into dyslexia.

I am Norwegian, and Norway adopted the whole language approach in the 1987 curriculum. Since then the literacy levels have gone, well, you may have guessed it - down.

Teaching reading is not difficult. Immerse the children in language and talk to them. This will foster vocabulary growth and reading comprehension. Teach the children how to decode. This is how they learn to interpret the arbitrary symbols called letters. Comprehension and decoding use two different routes in the brain. Both are necessary for developing literacy.

You may be interested in “Reading in the Brain” by Stanislas Dehaene

.

“From my readings, it seems more likely that we develop phonemic awareness by learning to read.”

Then you are not reading the right stuff—not surprising considering the state of our education faculties.

Actually, it is the other way around—everyone decodes.  It is how we learn to read.  If students are stumbling over decoding then they need exercises and practice in fluency so the skill becomes automatic.

It’s like learning to play the piano. 

Read Jo-Anne’s citations above or anything Chall, Adams, Stanovich, Bruck, etc.

Tom, low phonemic awareness can either be innate or environmental factors such as coming from an environment where language is not as rich. Or both can impact early reading development. Phonemic awareness comes first, and without phonemic awareness in place, there will always be difficulties in reading at each stage.

Whole language approaches compounds the reading problems, by asking students to guess the word by using pictures or the words that surround the unknown word. The students in the older grades, besides learning some bad habits from whole language, begin to act like they are full-blown dyslexics. Take for example in the older grades of 4 to 8, students with lower literacy skills, will skip the unknown words, missed the small but very important connecting words such as and, less, but and take other words and completely change the meaning of it.  I discovered this to my horror when my child was in grade 7. All the work that I was doing at home was wasted, because none of it was being reinforced at the school level. My child was apparently the only dyslexic as I have been told by the school, and yet there was over 40 % of the class acting like they were dyslexics.

It is why I would differ and argue that the majority of high school students with low literacy skills, all have problems with decoding, and not knowing their sounds. The decoding has to be corrected, before jumping on the other weaknesses such as comprehension. There is programs that has been developed for the older students, that takes in all aspects of reading, starting off with relearning the sounds of the English language.
To your comment - “And a puzzling bad one is that by grade 6, there were as many disabled readers in this group as in any other school (16.2% of students more than two years behind in reading comprehension).  So counter to the claims of McGuinness and similar researchers, systematic instruction of synthetic phonics does not seem to prevent reading disability.”

Might very well be, since reading instruction is often done in isolation, from the other aspects of language, such as writing. Along with systematic reading instruction, direct instruction with grammar, spelling, verbal, listening, and other aspects should be done at the same time, reinforcing and showing how every aspect of language is connected. Many students need to be taught explicitly and directly in the same way as in reading instruction, with or without a developmental problem in phonemic awareness.

It is all interconnected, where one aspect will reinforce another aspect, and vice-versus. Reading, writing and numeracy needs to be taught explicitly using the most efficient methods, which often do include lots of practice to obtain mastery. By targeting specific weaknesses, as you have suggested - ”  I am finding excellent research that suggests how we can assess and address each stumbling point - what has to be unlearned, and what has to replace it.”; The problem is with remediation in reading, improving vocabulary in isolation is not as effective as re-teaching from the beginning learning the phonemic sounds. However very effective to target, with students who have good to excellent reading skills.

But that is another story, to be found in the brain and cognitive science fields, which has confirmed over and over, direct explicit instruction is the most efficient for learning to take place. The Children of the Code site, has reams of research dealing with the brain and cognitive science aspects, related to reading, writing and numeracy. There is scientific reasons why children have reading problems, and much of it has to do with instruction, and the preconceived notions of the brain, that educators have.

I urge you to explore the brain and cognitive science research, and learned some surprising facts on long and short term memory processes, and how whole language approaches can play havoc with the memory processes. Or you can go to the stats and wonder why only approximately 4 % of the LD students go on to received a post-secondary education. In the province of Ontario, only 2.28 % of the LD students received a post-secondary education.

The ‘Phonological-Deficit Theory’ is obviously a touchy point. 

It dates back to a series of studies by the Libermans and their associates in the 1960’s and 1970’s where they investigated the nature of the phoneme, identified the correlation between phonological skills and reading, and then hypothesised that phonological skills develop with age. 

For anyone who is interested, I commend “Language Development and Learning to Read” by Diane McGuinness.  There is no fiercer advocate for strong-and-systematic phonics than McGuinness.  She dedicated a companion book, ‘Early Reading Instruction’ to reviewing the question of what works best (hint: synthetic phonics taught systematically starting at age 4).

But on the question of ‘why’ it works best, LDLR tells a curious story.  McGuinness spends almost half her book reviewing the methodology and evidence from the Liberman studies and a series of related and opposed studies.  She presents a strong argument and (in the scholarly tradition) provides a careful roadmap for anyone who wants to go back to review her line of reasoning.  Which I am doing; I have the original Shankweiler & Liberman book “Phonology and Reading Disability” on my desk and I’m working my way through it.

In a nutshell, the Liberman research is supported and the correlation between phonological ability and reading ability is supported, but the hypothesis that phonological skills develop with age is not supported.

One reviewer commented that “McGuinness’s careful and detailed arguments regarding why common assumptions about the development of phonological awareness are not supported by methodologically sound research may be so infuriating that the book should be accompanied by a health warning.” (Kennison - PsycCRITIQUES 51:4).  The review closes by recommending this book to every graduate student interested in reading or language development, to which I concur.

It’s not fair to try to package and present McGuinness’s arguments here, although I’ll have to do that for my thesis. But there is a very practical consequence of her thesis - if the phonological hypothesis is right, then there is something wrong with the child.  If McGuinness is right, then there is NOTHING wrong with a dyslexic child, the fault is entirely in the sloppy and disorganized way we teach.

The practical consequence is that remediation interventions should assume normal reading performance is both attainable and expected for every child.  Nothing less is acceptable.

From one of the many reviews on McGuinness’s book.
“If nothing else, Diane McGuinness’s book is an interesting and energetic read for anyone with a
concern over how best to teach children to read. The overall conclusion one reaches is that the
book is basically about research, or rather one particular interpretation of it, that endorsed by the
National Reading Panel. In general McGuinness is probably right on the need for clarity over
classroom approaches and she is a formidable proponent of identified and successful phonics
teaching that start from the sounds of the language. It may be an excellent beginning to the story but it certainly isn’t the whole one.”
http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/RFL/April2005/reviews/harvey.pdf

As for her stance on dyslexia: “McGuinness has stirred up controversy for her views on dyslexia and teaching letter names. She argues that dyslexia is not a biological condition but a socially-created problem that results from a complex spelling code and ineffective teaching methods. She has argued against teaching the letter names in the early phases of instruction on the grounds that letter names can confuse students. What is important, McGuinness argues, is that students be taught the relationships between sounds and letters.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_McGuinness

Since I am dyslexic, my father was a dyslexic, and my youngest child is a dyslexic - I would argue that developmental dyslexic has a biological proponent.

“An international team of researchers say they have discovered a genetic basis for dyslexia - a condition which results in problems with reading and writing. “
http://www.dyslexia-teacher.com/t108.html

What does my family members who were dyslexic have in common?  A speech delay in their pre-school years. A social problem?  Yes, because for the most part, dyslexic is not diagnosed until a child enters school, where reading and writing problems makes their appearance. Reading instruction and other pedagogy teaching the 3 Rs, causes more harm not only to the emerging dyslexics, as well as to other children with weaker language skills,

Many advances have been made to add to the knowledge of learning problems. What is consistently found from my own observations and experience, the research is the way child are taught is the most critical factor.

Welcome to my world, where in an education system it is acceptable to make decisions on education through the ideology, political, and personal bias promoting practices that will ultimately create people with unequal abilities in the foundation of the 3 Rs. Research in learning has exploded and expanded covering many different areas and specialties. The history of the research in reading difficulties, covers over 100 years.
The evolution of research on dyslexia
http://ibgwww.colorado.edu/~gayan/ch1.pdf

As suggested by many others, there is no one solution that will solve learning problems in our schools. But rather a combination of the research, to ensure that teachers are well aware and trained to help all children.

“Teachers need to know about all these factors and adapt their teaching accordingly. This approach is more complex than the simplistic approach of: identify problems with X, fix X, problem solved (where X = phonology, but could in principle be any
single factor). Literacy is a highly complex cognitive activity, and it is highly improbable that assessing and remedying one factor (phonology) is going to address the problem of dyslexia.”
http://www.lucid-research.com/documents/factsheets/FS01_PhonologicalDeficitTheory.pdf

To your comment on - ” identified the correlation between phonological skills and reading, and then hypothesised that phonological skills develop with age. “

Today’s science would tell a different story, regarding important development milestones of the pre-schooler and how they are building the foundation from which reading rests on. One of them being the development of speech, and the importance of speech and learning to read. Even though my youngest had intensive speech therapy starting at the age of 15 months, up to the age of 4, it is recognized today that speech delays of short or major duration, puts these children at high risk for learning problems once they enter a school.

Apparently from my own observations and reading, this little fact has gone unnoticed by the public education system, among many other advancements in the brain, cognitive and learning fields.

And yes normal reading performance is both attainable and expected for every child. However, in my personal experience dealing with my youngest, the educrats decided otherwise. But that is another story, and I do commend you in your position to add knowledge to an education system that would rather not hear about their ways and practices that hinders learning.

Hi Tom,I read the book-and I love you already!

I have started to use her theory in First Nations schools to prevent literacy problems from ever occurring;the results,anectodal of course,are exhilarating. The educators that have taught in those schools for years state the difference is staggering.

Keep up the good work.

Hi Lillian,

Thanks for the link to the Torgerson paper.  I’m just skimming it for now, it is quite long and will have to wait. 

But I noted an interesting point about the Clackmannanshire study (Johnson & Watson 2004) in it:  the students were not assigned to treatment randomly but rather the worst were assigned to the synthetic phonics group in order to test synthetic phonics hardest.  But as Torgerson points out, the worst readers were also most likely to have the largest gains, so the reported advantage may have just been a regression to the mean. 

I’m using the ‘stumbling points’ from Spear-Swerling & Sternberg’s book ‘Off Track’, where they extend Frith’s development model to include the negative strategies that a disabled reader can acquire.  I’m still trying to find good strategies, for example Dowhower (1994) is an excellent technique for fluency, and several researcher have made suggestions on how to improve it.

Dowhower, Sarah L.(1994) ‘REPEATED READING REVISITED: RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE’,
Reading & Writing Quarterly, 10: 4, 343 — 358

Thanks again.

Hi Tom,

I took a quick look at linguistic phonics, and found this guidance for parents:
http://www.belb.org.uk/Downloads/lp_guidance_for_parents_june_2008.pdf

This approach will work because it is systematic and it introduces the building blocks of language in a logical and sequential way. In addition, parents are given advice on what to do. This approach focuses on meaning and the code at the same time, which is essentially what reading is about.

Thanks for the reference to the Dowhower paper. I am just about to read a book on repeated reading in Norwegian. Repetition is key to all learning. Thinking back, I usually read the books I loved most several times when I was a kid. I suppose all good readers have done this regardless of school instruction? Then again, I was taught reading with synthetic phonics, so I never had trouble with the code.

What is your thesis going to be about?

In this case, repetition isn’t about learning the meaning of the passage but rather giving the reader a chance to notice new orthographic features in an increasingly familiar text.  This is an example of I meant when I said there were 20 years of great ideas out there that had solid evidence supporting them. 

If Norwegian uses a transparent orthography, then teaching synthetic phonics becomes almost unavoidable.  You provided the Dehaene link, so you know what that’s all about. 

Northern Ireland is running a full-scale roll-out of LP in their elementary schools, retraining their teachers, and tracking the results.  The Gray study I provided a link to at the top of this thread talks about that project. 

But Belfast is using LP in early reading classrooms.  I am interested in how to use LP for remediation of older children (say 10+).  In particular, I want to build a web-based interactive training tool for guiding a facilitator-and-child team through continuous assessments and focused remediation exercises.  Something that a parent or tutor can use without much training.

At that age, a disabled reader probably doesn’t need to learn the sounds of the basic letters, and probably knows all the sight words he or she will ever need (but we still need to make sure).  But he may have difficulty sounding out words with digraphs or breaking syllables, etc.  And of course, will certainly have fluency,  speed, and spelling problems.  Motivation and self-esteem issues too.

Of course, the child has to become an avid reader to develop vocabulary, and I can’t help with that.  There’s a really fascinating question of whether strong readers are strong because they read more, or whether strong readers read more because they are good at it.  Stanovich suggests the former (the ‘Matthew Effect’) but I’m hoping it’s the latter. 

I’m also hoping to use this web tool as a research platform, to support variations in training and see what difference they make.  It’s kind of a Wikipedia approach to research - get lots of hands working on it.  But that makes it critical that the materials are based on the reading evidence, since then I have a baseline of theories to test.

Hoping to have a prototype working by the end of the year, and then start running some test cases through it.  But I think of this as a 10-year project, I’m certain it will evolve over time.

“There’s a really fascinating question of whether strong readers are strong because they read more, or whether strong readers read more because they are good at it.  Stanovich suggests the former (the ‘Matthew Effect’) but I’m hoping it’s the latter. “

Tom, just from a parent and her own observations and experience - I believe it is strong readers read more, because they are good at it.

I also commend you for looking at web-based interactive tools where parents and tutors can used without much training. Often parents (at least here in Canada) are not seen as being useful in facilitating and being seen as tutors or teachers in the home, concerning reading, writing and numeracy. When my child was younger, parents were actively discouraged from providing increase help in reading, writing and numeracy that was not in keeping with the current instruction and curriculum of the day. As a result, software and other web-based tools were discouraged, and what was encourage was to used the tools, resources of the school. The parents are there to provide the home environment that mimics the school’s methods and resources.

I believe parents are important in the remediation process, where they become important in areas of reinforcement and practice of what was taught at school. However when my child was younger, it was made clear to me at all levels, in the education system that what I was doing at home in areas of fluency and automatism was hindering my child’s learning and in the end creating more confusion in my child’s mind to never becoming an independent learner. Good thing I ignored the advice of the school, or my child would never be thinking which university she would like to go to.

I would also think that strong readers read more because they are good at it.

“If Norwegian uses a transparent orthography, then teaching synthetic phonics becomes almost unavoidable.”

Norwegian orthography is more transparent than English , but it is not like Finnish or Italian. Synthetic phonics does not become unavoidable - since 1987 synthetic phonics has been abandoned in beginning readers. Beginning readers today have fancy pictures, and place meaning before decoding, which results in a lot of trouble for a lot of people.

I believe I understand letters and how spelling works myself. I’m writing this in English, and one of the reasons I can do that is because I was taught letter-sound relationships and how to blend sounds/letters. I still remember the four first words I learnt in English, which were “cat”, “mat”, “rat”, and “hat”. I also learnt how to conjugate irregular verbs by rote, etc., the sort of things which are thought to be detrimental to kids today.

“Of course, the child has to become an avid reader to develop vocabulary, and I can’t help with that.” This is partly what we call subject instruction, and that is what teachers are for, isn’t it? Obviously, there is also a self-teaching element in vocabulary acquisition. Here is a link to an abstract, I have not read the paper in full yet: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027794006452

Whether you call it linguistic phonics, synthetic phonics, or bobelibob. The main point is that you HAVE to learn letter-sound relationships AND blending in order to become a fluent reader. Of course, this is only the beginning stage of reading.  Jeanne Chall’s “Stages of Reading Development” is a useful reference.

When I lived in Japan, our company insisted that my husband and I learn Japanese.  It was a tough language to learn, but despite that we decided to learn to read as well, so we took hiragana and katakana, the Japanese script.  The first thing we had to do was memorize what sound the characers represented, so that we could read.  I’d love to see the advocates of whole language decode a script they don’t know by guessing and pictures! 
Personally, I think that all of this research should be disregarded, rather than countered:  it’s trying to make both the obvious and common sense into a science, and people are writing books about this?!?  Nonsense, except for the people who are making a lot of money by doing this…

while the reading “experts” continue to fight about what’s best for students how be we just give and support parents and educators alike in being able to teach and help their children learn in the way they want?

If it’s not phonics and that’s the choice of parents and educators, let them account for that choice in whatever abilities their graduating students have.

If it’s phonics parents want and educators are willing to teach let them have it.

We’re so quick to champion choice, why not choice based on different models, practices INCLUDING traditional ones?