Linkedin – Forum on how to teach reluctant and struggling readers- Part 2

                                                            

Tom

An interesting discussion
I've watched the wider arguments between those who argue for Synthetic Phonics as it's now called, who seem convinced that you always teach letter-by-letter f-u-r as well as c-a-t
And those who are convinced you teach using Onset and rime f/ur as well as c/at. (Apparently, now it is called Analytic Phonics, at least by advocates of the former method.)
It's the first that has won the political battle. But as yet I've never seen any convincing evidence that discriminates between the effectiveness of either, from either camp.
I assume that outside of the purist camp of Synthetic Phonics f/ur would be acceptable for use by ordinary working teachers.

Linkedin – Forum on how to teach reluctant and struggling readers

                                                              

This is an extract from a forum on literacy for reluctant and struggling readers on LinkedIn. I have changed all the names of the people who had commented.

Emily

I recently overheard 2 reading specialists hotly debating the use of r-controlled vowels in the phonemes er, ir and ur. One was insistent that they should be taught as one sound and the other as two.

Let’s use the example “Fur” – As a Brit living in the States, I’d be interested to hear the different opinions of whether this should be taught “f_u_r” OR “f_ur” – Any thoughts? Does this differ from State to State?

Teaching reluctant and struggling learners

                                                         

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the discussion in a forum under ‘Literacy for Reluctant and Struggling Readers’ on LinkedIn and have tried to figure out if any suggestions there that can help to ease the confusion of dyslexic students. At the end of the day I still feel that dyslexic students will be confused and will ask me just as many questions as they have asked me. 

 

I have students who have asked me why ‘was’ is spelled that way and not ‘wos’. Why had I pronounced ‘as’ the way I did and now sound out ‘was’ which has the ‘as’ in it another way? One student had asked me why I had taught him to sound ‘on’ the way I did and yet pronounce ‘station’ the way it sounded. These are the ‘shut-down’ kids. They always ask the question ‘why’. In school when they are not told explicitly that many letters and letter combinations have different sounds they shut down.

Dyslexia - Why kids shut down

                                                                      

Teachers teach us the sounds/phonemes of the alphabet as: A apple, B bed, C cat, D dog E elephant and so on. Everyone will and can learn this with no problem at all.

Then when they start teaching us to read, the NIGHTMARE begins for the 20% of kids who are later considered stupid or lazy. These kids are neither stupid nor are they lazy. These are the kids who need to be instructed explicitly on anything different from what they have been taught. These are the kids who ‘shut down’ when they are confused.

Phonological awareness and phonics -Part 2

                                                         

Teachers are struggling to teach kids to read. Around 20% of kids in many countries where English is taught can barely read in English.

In the US in January 2001, President George W. Bush announced his plan called “No Child Left Behind”.

Now, in 2015 after 15 years the percentage of children who can barely read in English remains the same as it was in 2001 which again was the same as it was in the 70’s.

The main thing kids do in school is learn to read, and when they don't, they feel stupid. So how can we prevent reading failure?

Phonological awareness and phonics - Part 1

                                                               

The terms "phonemic awareness", “phonological awareness” and "phonics" are often used in the field of education. Some writers use them interchangeably, yet they mean different things and have different roles as children begin to read.  There seems to be quite a bit of confusion over the terms “phonological awareness”, “phonemic awareness” and “phonics”

The English language has 44 phonemes. Words are produced by stringing these sounds together. The ability to manipulate and distinguish these phonemes as they are used in words is called phonemic awareness. It is a natural skill developed in children through talking and listening to other speakers of their language.

Do dyslexics have a phonological awareness deficit

                                                                   

I wrote the following article on 7th February 2011 and I am reposting it with the current date.

For a year I have written that phonological awareness deficit is not the cause of dyslexic children being unable to read. Recently I found an article on the net echoing what I have been saying. I believe there will be more such articles in the future. New generation of researchers will challenge the 30 over years old "Phonological awareness deficit" theory.

"Quality of English teachers matter"

                                                            

Quality of English teachers matter

 

The above was the headline of page 9 of our local newspaper – The Daily Express.

We read similar headlines every year after the school results have been announced.

However, has the percentage of those who fail their English language reduced in the last 10 years?

If the answer is ‘no’ should we not ask ourselves “WHY NOT?”

List of learning disabilities

The web site of Learning Disabilities Association of America is: http://ldaamerica.org/

The Learning Disability Association of America has the following listed under its learning

disability list:

• Auditory Processing Disorder
• Dyscalculia
• Dysgraphia
• Dyslexia
• Dyspraxia
• Language Processing Disorder
• Non-Verbal Learning Disabilities
• Visual Perceptual/Visual Motor Deficit
• Memory
• ADHD
• Executive Functioning

'Disengaged-students'

                                                                

‘Disengaged students’ or students who have ‘shut down’

All the 'dyslexic' students I have taught over the past 11 years have no problem reading in the Malay language. Those who study in Chinese schools can also read fluently in Romanised Chinese (Hanyu Pinyin).

I believe many children cannot read but do not have many of the problems included in many definitions of dyslexia on the internet. This web log is not for parents of kids who have a ‘Auditory Processing Disorder’ or acuity problem. This web log is for kids who cannot read in the English Language because they have shut down or disengaged themselves from what the teacher teaches. They disengage because the English language does not make sense to them. Kids shut-down when teachers do not teach these kids that many of the letters of the alphabet in the English language represent more than one phoneme (sound). As such a majority of the kids who end up being unable to read are simply kids who have shut down or disengaged from what is being taught because they have not been taught correctly.

Dyslexia - A new beginning...

A New Beginning

                                                            

When the world says, “Give up,” Hope whispers, “Try it one more time.”

 ~ Author Unknown

I had lost my blog title and could not renew my web log. My previous web log was at: www.parentingdyslexia.com. However, my son managed to retrieve the blog posts and we have opened a new account. I will post some of the previous posts as we go along.

I have decided to write again as I am currently teaching a ‘learning disabled’ kid ( I don’t like that term but…) and I see the same pattern as in all my previous students. I think ‘Disengaged learners’ would better describe these students. They shut down when things taught to them do not make sense to them.

Dyslexia in Italy

I had posted the following article on 12.1.2012 and decided to repost it here today.A question that comes to my mind is: What did researchers do about this report?
...........................................................
Yesterday a reader commented in my article dated February 20th 2010. I have copied the article he has referred to.  This article says that the reading difficulty is a brain disorder which I disagree with. This is similar to saying that a left hander has a brain disorder. It is simply that dyslexics think and learn in a different way than the majority of the population just like left handers do things differently than the majority of the population. Would anyone dare say that people like Tom Cruise, Lee Kuan Yew, Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Gates , Steven Spielberg and many other dyslexics have a brain disorder.

Following is the article in full.

Dyslexia doesn't exist in Italy like it does in the U.S. and England!

Dyslexia is a learning disorder that manifests itself as a difficulty with reading and spelling. It is separate and distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as a non-neurological deficiency with vision or hearing, or from poor or inadequate reading instruction. It is estimated that dyslexia affects between 5% to 17% of the U.S. population.

Dyslexia is thought to be the result of neurological defect, and though not an intellectual disability, it is variously considered a learning disability, a language disability, and a reading disability, among others. Dyslexia is diagnosed in people of all levels of intelligence.

A STUDY of dyslexic adults has shown that simplifying English spellings could be one way to help sufferers.

It also confirmed that the cause of the reading difficulty was a brain disorder. Experiments show for the first time that the neurological cause of dyslexia is the same in sufferers across Europe. But the disorder appears to be twice as common in the U.S. and England as in Italy/Spain because English has a more complex writing system, or orthography, than Italian/Spanish, which are more phonetic.

French, English, Spanish and Italian adult dyslexics all did equally poorly in tests that involved short-term memory, whereas Italian/Spanish dyslexics did better in reading tests.

The head of the team, Prof Eraldo Paulesu, of the University of Milan Bicocca and the Institute San Raffale, said: "There is an argument for reforming complex orthographies to improve literacy problems in these languages. English dyslexics would have an easier life if their writing system was more regular, with more unique correspondences between sounds and print."

Learning disabilities and dyslexia Part 2

Over the past 8 years I have taught 26 dyslexic students. Most of them were certified dyslexics by experts in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

Among all the 26 students, only 2 had exceptional problems with mathematics. I have also taught one student mathematics. She is an intelligent girl and was very fluent in her English and could read more fluently than most students in her school but had problems grasping mathematics. She READ FLUENTLY and as such she cannot be dyslexic. But she had a problem with mathematics. Would it be proper to call her dyslexic just because some Association decides to include dyscalculia and dysgraphia under the dyslexia umbrella?

To teach or not to teach - Phonics

                                                                     

One of my first students, a girl refused to say the word fox despite being repeatedly asked to repeat after me. I have written about this in my article dated 17th February 2010. Children prone to disengaging shut down when something illogical is taught to them.

My student refused to say the word fox as she had learnt from her former tuition teacher that the phoneme for the letter 'f' is “Fur/Fer”. As such, to her, the word fox cannot be sounded out the way I had sounded it out. If the alphabet ‘F’ carried the sound fer/fur then the word ‘fox’ must be sounded out as ‘fur-ox’. As such she had refused to say it the way I had pronounced it.

Now, I would have expected this kind of wrong teaching of phonemes in countries where English is taught as a second language. However, I just found out that it is rampant in the US, Australia and the UK too. No wonder the rate of illiteracy in these countries is on the increase.

Dyslexia and maths

Not all individuals with dyslexia have problems with mathematics. I have, however, seen a few dyslexic students who don’t seem to understand mathematics.

Individuals with dyslexia who have difficulty with mathematics are quite often misdiagnosed as having dyscalculia. Some children with dyslexia have problems with mathematics because what they have been taught makes no sense to them. Most teachers hardly take the time and trouble to make sure that these children do understand the basic principles. This seems to be the same problem with them learning how to read in English. Their basic problem is that they do not understand and their minds shut down.