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Author(s): |
Joan Knight |
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Reprinted with Permission From: |
National Adult Literacy and Learning Disabilities Center (info) |
Printed Date: Spring 1998
Date Posted on this Website: June 19 2002
Can the question, "What is it that makes reading so difficult for so many people?" be answered simply with the word "sounds"? Given the number of adults in this country with low-level literacy skills, estimated at over 40 million (Kirsch et al., 1993), all possibilities should be investigated. Research makes a strong case for considering sounds because they are integral to all areas of language acquisition. One need only observe how adults spell and read aloud to see that many are quite unaware of the relationship between letters and sounds. Even in a person with an excellent memory, the ability to read the more than 100,000 words in our language is dependent on the dead-sure translation of letters into sounds, with simultaneous placement of sounds into their syllables. Look at the following words and concentrate on how quickly you can read them, based on your ability to locate the syllables while you read their sounds: kympafastory, splercrastucklingestiors.
"One need only look at how adults spell and listen to how they read aloud to observe that many are quite unaware of the relationship between letters and sounds." |
For over a decade, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have funded interdisciplinary investigations to determine why reading is difficult for so many people. Many of these studies have combined the efforts of three institutions: a major medical facility to look for the constitutional bases of poor reading, a university to design and conduct objective research studies, and a large school district to control contrasting methods that focus instruction either on sounds or on whole words.
The research has identified constitutionally based, poor phonological processing ability with its resultant poor decoding skills as the core characteristic of poor reading (Lyon, 1995). According to Shaywitz et al. (1992), of the approximately 20% of school children with poor reading skills, 80-90% (or 17% of all school children) display poor phonological processing ability. Without diagnosis of the problem and specific instructional methods, children do not outgrow their poor reading skills but become adults with the same disabilities (Knight, 1997; Knight and Randell, 1994; Pennington, 1991).
Lyon (1995) explains that "a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound" and that "it is phonological awareness that appears to be the most deficient linguistic skill in disabled readers." Phonological awareness is indicated by the ability to break a word into its individual sounds and to delete those sounds or move them to different places in the word. Stone and Brady (1995) describe the role of phonological awareness in reading development as "becoming consciously aware of the sound structure of words" which "has proven to be a necessary requirement for learning to read." Lyon (1996) reports that "phonological deficits appear to impede the development of basic reading abilities regardless of general intelligence" and that the "linkage between phonological processing ability and reading development is a causal one."
Raising awareness of sounds is the first step in teaching students decoding skills. The testing that is done in our program during the first few meetings with a new student measures competence in the three areas of symbol, name, and sound. Four types of tests ask the student to: (1) separate, manipulate, and count the sounds in a word spoken by the teacher (sound); (2) repeat a sound that is spoken by the teacher and identify its letter name (sound to name); (3) produce a sound when shown a letter (symbol to sound); and (4) produce a sound when hearing its letter name spoken by the teacher (name to sound).
Instruction in heightening phonological awareness and in learning the relationships of symbol, name, and sound is beneficial when presented in a multisensory manner. To learn the short vowel sound of a, for example, the student will see, say, trace with the finger-tip, write, tap, draw, and associate the sound with a word like apple. Multisensory instruction differs from traditional phonics instruction in that it involves many more parts of the brain in the learning process, activating rather than merely informing. Students who do not differentiate and hold information quickly and easily need to learn to remember by using all the sensory channels in every phase of the language curriculum: sounds, decoding, comprehension, spelling, writing, and vocabulary.
Evaluation
Before teachers attempt to deliver instruction to an undifferentiated group, they need to find those adults whose phonological awareness and resultant decoding and spelling skills are weak and who actually need the instruction. To be useful to the student, teaching is always a part of the testing component. The evaluation process is divided into three parts:
The Interview
The evaluation begins with the interview. Adults who are returning to school and who have not mastered the decoding phase of reading will be relieved to tell you, if given the opportunity, that they have never understood sounds. The opportunity is provided during the initial, private interview between teacher and student. The teacher will also have the opportunity at this first meeting to begin the ongoing explanation of phonological processing and its relationship to spelling and reading.
Although there are many published interviews, teachers can construct their own. Questions can range from areas related to school, medical, and work histories to family relocations and attitudes, strengths and weaknesses in school subjects, and the specific skills the student hopes to acquire by the end of a year in class. The student's answer to each question is written down verbatim, interpreted by the teacher, and explained to the student. For example, if the student says, "I was left back in the first grade," the teacher openly reflects on the disappointment that must have been felt by a six-year old who had not experienced the magic of learning to read.
Teachers will find it easier to design their own interviews and give understanding feedback if they keep in mind the purposes of the interview. These include:
The student is now prepared to continue the evaluation which will reinforce the idea that insufficient phonological awareness leads to inadequate decoding and interferes with comprehension, spelling, writing, and the acquisition of vocabulary knowledge.
Phonological Awareness
Programs that raise awareness of sounds often administer several tests to enable students and teachers to observe phonological weaknesses. One such test asks students to segment and control sounds in words. For example, if the word phlox is spoken by the teacher, students should respond that there are five sounds: /f/ /l/ /o/ /k/ /s/, but students frequently answer "one" or "two." Next, the students are asked to do the following:
(1) say the vowel sound, (the first sound in olive);
(2) remove the first sound, saying the remaining /loks/;
(3) remove the second sound, saying the remaining /foks/;
(4) remove the last sound, saying the remaining /flok/; and
(5) moving the fourth sound to the end of the word, saying the newly formed /flosk/.
Our students find this task extremely difficult. To raise awareness of the sounds, teachers can lead students through a multisensory exercise. Beginning with the thumb, each sound in a word is tapped with one finger and the whole process is repeated slowly, stretching one sound into the next. Students are made aware of the placement of the tongue, teeth, and lips for each, thus feeling differences among sounds. Using the fingertips to tap out sounds seems to help students better control and understand the sounds.
Spelling
Now, the test of phonological awareness shifts to a test of sound / symbol awareness. Students repeat the same slow, controlled sequence of tapping and sounding as they write each letter with a pencil while simultaneously uttering each sound. Another test asks students to write several words that end with a single consonant such as m or I. Students must be able to hear the sound of the consonant, know that it needs a preceding vowel, be able to produce a short vowel sound (e.g., the first sound in eddy), place it before the consonant sound (e-m), hear the two as one unit (em), and use rhyme or another device to make several words that end the same way (hem, stem or emblem). All of these tasks are extremely difficult for people with poor phonological processing ability. Because their difficulty has been specified and clearly demonstrated, students begin to understand the importance of phonological awareness to language learning.
However, there is more to spelling than phonological awareness and knowledge of sound/symbol correspondences. The teacher explains that the learning process involves three areas: (1) auditory memory, (2) visual memory , and (3) linguistic knowledge, and that phonological awareness impinges on all of them.
Auditory memory enables the learner to produce and hold onto the sounds in a word (phonological processing ability), accurately translate them into remembered letters (sound/symbol correspondences), and write them on the page. This requires students to say the word correctly, separate its symbols, then segment the sounds in each syllable. Visual memory is called on to spell words that are unclear and indistinguishable from others. Finally, linguistic knowledge is needed to realize that the letter combinations ti, si, ci, and ce regularly sound like /sh/ as in mention, dimension, magician, and ocean. To realize that the sound of /sh/ exists in all those words, one must be able to hear it and find it.
Decoding
The direct result of poor phonological awareness is not only poor spelling, but also poor decoding skills. Tests that ask the student to read one syllable, multisyllable words, and word parts demonstrate dramatically that limited ability to differentiate sounds clearly interferes with decoding. After giving the test, the teacher points to a single error, perhaps a word that has been read as lex instead of lax. The teacher says lax, lex, and lux with the written text out of view and asks the student to repeat the three. It is in this exercise that lack of awareness of phonemes and of sound/symbol correspondences is most apparent: some students do not hold the three vowel sounds well in their memory , and the three words are usually repeated incorrectly.
Because unremediated students have greatest difficulties with short vowel sounds, vowel "a" can be selected and taught with a multisensory approach. Having now been instructed how to produce the sound at will, the student can correct other mispronounced words containing the short "a" sound. With the teacher's help, the student has specified a part of the decoding difficulty and participated in its correction. Students often are relieved to know that their reading difficulty is not a global inability to read and that the difficulty has been narrowed to specific areas. They also are encouraged to learn according to their demonstrated strengths. The testing/teaching component has strengthened their desire to participate in the remediation program by proving to them that they are capable of learning. It also has introduced them to the multisensory , structured learning approach that will be used for remediation.
Conclusion
When students with poor reading skills turn to remediation, they do so with secret dreams and anxieties. They have long wanted to conquer their learning difficulties and dispel fears that they are impaired. Years of unsuccessful attempts to master reading, writing, and spelling have almost convinced them that they cannot learn and that their teachers cannot teach. By exposing their specific difficulties with sounds and teaching them even the smallest piece of the decoding puzzle during the first meeting, teachers can help students gain confidence in themselves. Students can also gain an immediate appreciation for their instructor and for the multisensory learning approach; this, in turn, gives them a sense of hope. As long as their primary problem is continually addressed and all the language areas of decoding, comprehension, spelling, writing, vocabulary, and handwriting are integrated in every lesson, students resist the impulse to drop out when their progress inevitably becomes stalled. The longer students stay in remediation, the stronger their skills grow and the closer they get to overcoming their biggest problem -- poor phonological processing ability.
References and Further Reading
Kirsch, I., Jungeblut, A., Jenkins, L., & Kolstad, A. (1993). Adult literacy in America: National adult literacy survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, OERI.
Knight, J. R. (1997). Adults with dyslexia: Aspiring and achieving (Orton Emeritus Series). Baltimore, MD: International Dyslexia Association.
Knight, J. R., & Randell, J. (1994). Substance abuse rehabilitation and learning to read. Their World, 56-59.
Lyon, G. R. (1995). Toward a definition of dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 45, 3-27.
Lyon, G. R. (1996). The state of research. In S.C. Cramer & W. Ellis (Eds.) Learning disabilities: Lifelong issues (pp. 3-61 ). Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes.
Pennington, B. F. (1991). Diagnosing learning disorders. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Shaywitz, B. A., Fletcher, J. M., Holahan, J. M., & Shaywitz, S. E. (1992). Discrepancy compared to low achievement defmitions of reading disability: Results of the Connecticut longitudinal study. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 25, 639-648.
Stone, B., & Brady, S. (1995). Evidence for phonological processing deficits in less-skilled readers. Annals of Dyslexia, 45, 51- 78.
Joan R. Knight, author of Starting Over, and Adults with Dyslexia, was supervisor of staff development in the New York City Adult Basic Education program and is now a consultant to schools, unions, and government agencies where she designs literacy programs for children and adults and trains teachers. From 1987-1995, Starting Over was central to the rehabilitation and employment of dyslexic adults recovering from alcoholism and substance abuse.
