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Even maximum motivation and interest for a reading/writing project cannot prepare the child to code sounds and letters. However, once the coding process is reasonable, not perfect, the creativity of whole-language strategies should afford the child expression of ideas, feelings, and opinions in a uniquely creative manner, a worthy goal.
The term alphabetic principle is not new. In the 1960s, Heilman used the term in alerting teachers to consider phonologic perception as a basic skill in the coding process (Heilman, 1976, pp. 1–19). The term became more frequently used in later years, for instance, in the seminal publication, “The Alphabetic Principle and Learning to Read” (Liberman, Shankweiler, &
Liberman, 1989), distributed by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Many other research articles have used this term for the past several decades, which raises questions regarding minimal imple-mentation of the principle to individual children in assessing their written language progression.
An interesting feature of many children with dyslexia is that, once they can manage coding, much stronger semantic skills are typically released, and they generate imaginative, rich, and sometimes profound narrative and expository products. Many even become voracious readers. Compre-hension and expression of meaning were never their problems; the coding struggle was simply so frustrating and energy consuming that they had no cognitive energy left for comprehending what they read and wrote, so they simply rejected reading and writing. Some children hold on to negative feelings about reading and writing, even after they have become proficient, because they cannot forget the embarrassment.
Lindamood
Some speech-language pathologists (SLPs) have found inventive ways to address dyslexia. Speech-language pathologist Pat Lindamood was one of the early proponents of a remedial program that dealt with the basic perceptual phonologic deficit that she found in her clients with dyslexia.
Through her own intuitiveness, she discovered that using colored blocks to spell words allowed her to detect what phonemes were not heard, mis-heard, added, put in the wrong position, or substituted for the ones needed.
It allowed her to target the error patterns with supplemental exercises to help clients perceive more precisely the phonemes to be coded with letters in words, which led her clients with dyslexia to more successful reading.
She developed a training program called Auditory Discrimination in Depth (C. H. Lindamood & Lindamood, 1975), later called Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS) (P. Lindamood & Lindamood, 1998), which included distinctive feature classification, multisensory discrimination training, non-sense syllable block coding, some consideration of letter coding using letter tiles, and other exercises.
How widely held is the concept of alphabetic principle?
Does dyslexia mean lifelong avoidance of reading and writing?
What did Lindamood code with colored blocks?
Other Spelling/Reading Programs 37
Many of Lindamood’s principles can be found in NAR. Often clini-cians use nonletter symbols to represent phonemes, but her classifications and block coding provide a broader visual reference for what children hear as they consider the repertoire of Standard American English (SAE) pho-nemes. NAR expands the range of distinctive features, characterizes and addresses several features differently, avoids any reference to letters until later in the remedial process, does not offer routinized exercises admin-istered by non-SLPs, and offers a systematic letter coding process for all 40+ phonemes of English using graded spelling lists. Many other differ-ences are found in NAR, but much gratitude is extended to the late Pat Lindamood, who was an expert clinician, a nationally recognized leader in reading research, and an inspiration for the diligence she showed in helping individuals understand the role of phonologic perception in dys-lexia. Many SLPs use the LiPS kit for discrimination training and find this a useful resource in working with dyslexia.
Phono-Graphix
NAR principles can be found in resources introduced by other profession-als. As the role of phonology in reading became better understood, many professionals interested in reading realized that a more natural approach to reading was to code phonemes with letters (spell) and then read the words.
If children could map what they heard with logical letter spellings, it was felt that they could more easily reverse the process for reading. Shankwei-ler and Lundquist (1993), in a report for Haskins Laboratories, point out that the processes for spelling and reading are not exactly reversed but that the developmental order of spelling before reading is a more natural process. Phono-Graphix (P-Gx) is one of the programs that uses the concept of spelling sounds. It selects approximately three fourths of the phonemes of English and presents some of the spelling options for each of these pho-nemes, using a set of early elementary words to exemplify the spelling options. After the child finds the right spelling for a word, the words are grouped with others that share the same letter patterns. Other exercises identify same letters that make different sounds.
Using lists of words to be spelled is one of the concepts NAR uses to target different phonemes; however, the NAR lists are grade based, include many more words that are spelled and read by children at those grades, and cover all 40+ phonemes of English. P-Gx’s simplicity is appreciated by parents and provides homeschooling teachers a helpful strategy to correlate spelling with reading. An SLP using P-Gx would notice that several pho-nemes are not included for coding and that the range of spelling options for the ones cited does not include many of the English spelling options chil-dren face in grade-level material. P-Gx offers a greatly simplified concept of phoneme-grapheme spelling. For instance, it does not include the highly problematic spelling options for [r] and []. It offers no classes or sensory What role has Pat
Lindamood played in the treatment of dyslexia?
How does P-Gx approach reading?
How does P-Gx differ from NAR?
features of phonemes that could serve as recall hooks, and, most impor-tant, it does not address the pre-letter-coding phonologic perception skills that block spelling and reading acquisition in many children, especially those with dyslexia. P-Gx presumes a certain degree of reading capability, which is understandable, considering the natural inclination of children to attempt and for adults to encourage word-gestalt, sight reading when young children have inadequate concepts of phoneme-grapheme match.
P-Gx attempts to clarify the match for words already word-called correctly and teaches new words by emphasizing the letter pattern of the targeted phoneme. For some children, the approach is sufficient, and in early stages of spelling remediation, after phonologic perception training, SLPs find it a helpful tool for parents to use as a supplement to therapy activities, and some use P-Gx as an approach to reading in the classroom.
Phonics
The commonly implemented approach to reading in schools is phonics, and the construct for that approach is found in Orton-Gillingham-based (OGB) programs. Teacher commitment to these programs tends to be resolute. The rules for reading (how to pronounce written words) are presented as a set of instructions using terminology that requires if-then reasoning for children to understand, memorize, and apply to written words. It requires short-term retention of rules presented during instruction, varying degrees of reinforcement depending on the child, accurate storage, and recall of rules from long-term stored memory for application when actually reading and spelling. In other words, the OGB rules are another translation of written language graphemes, noting that graphemes are already a translation of oral language phonemes. These programs tend to be highly structured with numbered lessons and instructional levels and meet the National Reading Panel’s requirement for being explicit and systematic. Again, many home-schooling parents find OGB programs helpful because they offer a step-by-step process, which parents can modify because homeschooling can be more readily individualized.
Despite widespread use and a great deal of research, the evidence for reading success using OGB programs is not evident. Best Evidence Encyclo-pedia (Johns Hopkins University, School of Education, n.d.), What Works Clearinghouse (Institute of Education Sciences, U. S. Department of Educa-tion, 2010), and the Journal of Special Education (Ritchey & Goeke, 2006) all cite the lack of conclusive evidence for the effectiveness of OGB programs.
Considering the widespread use of OGB programs, their lack of evidence for success, and the continuing reading literacy problem in the United States, providers of remedial reading services may need to reconsider the National Reading Panel’s first recommendation for reading success, pho-nologic perception training.
Do OGB programs teach how to
pronounce letters or how to spell sounds?
How successful have OGB programs been?
Other Spelling/Reading Programs 39
This author’s experience supervising many SLPs for many years in a school for children with learning disabilities allowed observation of the difficulties language-learning impaired children experience in classrooms using an OGB approach to reading. The author and other clinicians found many of these students showing significant frustration during classroom instruction and later in their comments about reading. As children with dyslexia, they tended to have weak memory as well as weak phoneme perception, so they could not cite or explain rules that applied. Much of the invented rule terminology had no references in their lives, so they had no clues for meaning and had to memorize, but not really know how to apply, words such as digraph, vowel diphthong, open syllable, macron, breve, r-controlled syllable, and VCe long. They could not cope with inconsistent rules that did not apply when they tried to use them. SLPs noted that some rules were phonetically inaccurate, and in critical areas. Some children with stronger short-term memory and long-term recall skills who were more agile in if-then reasoning could skip over inconsistencies and irregularities and apply the rules during the split-second decoding process in reading and longer, but still short, encoding process in spelling. They, rightfully, took pride in their ability explain the rules for how words should be pro-nounced. Their brains automatically sidestepped rules that did not fit and filled in the coding process using other strategies such as context to cue words, much stronger visual whole-word recall, predictability of word order, syntax knowledge as a native speaker, and their intelligence. These less-involved children or children with compensatory resources could benefit from the systematic structure of the OGB program. But children with more complex and severe dyslexia required much more support in speech-language therapy to master reading.
References
Heilman, A. W. (1976). Phonics in proper perspective (3rd ed.). Columbus, OH:
Charles E. Merrill.
Johns Hopkins University, School of Education. (n.d.). Best Evidence Encyclopedia:
Orton-Gillingham Approach. Retrieved from: http://www.bestevidence.org/
overviews/O/Orton-Gillingham-Approach.htm
Liberman, I. Y., Shankweiler, D., & Liberman, A. M. (1989). The alphabetic principle and learning to read (pp. 1–33). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lindamood, C. H., & Lindamood, P. C. (1975). Auditory discrimination in depth (Rev.
ed.). Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.
Lindamood, P., & Lindamood, P. (1998). The Lindamood phoneme sequencing program for reading, spelling, and speech (3rd ed.). Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.
Ritchey, K. D., & Goeke, J. L. (2006, November). Gillingham and Orton-Gillingham-based reading instruction: A review of the literature. Journal of Special Education, 40(3), 171–183.
Shankweiler, D., & Lundquist, E. (1993). On the relations between learning to spell and learning to read. New Haven, CT: Haskins Laboratories.
What skills help children succeed with OGB instruction?
What Works Clearinghouse, Institute of Education Sciences, U. S. Department of Education. (2010, July). Orton-Gillingham-based strategies (unbranded). Retrieved from: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/intervention_reports/wwc_orton gill_070110.pdf
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