readerswithautism.com » reading strategies

Textual clues to emotion will help with inflection

readers1 — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:52:32 +0000

By Richard Finegan

Just a couple of observations about two high school students I have worked with recently:

One writes in short, concrete sentences, almost always in the present tense, even when he’s journaling about what he did yesterday. Is verb tense, particularly when writing, a common problem for kids on the spectrum?

Both of these students (and one is much nearer the Asperger’s end of the spectrum than the other) are capable of reading aloud with inflection if they KNOW what the emotion of the speaker is supposed to be. If there are textual clues that the speaker is angry or happy, they know how that sounds. I find this interesting since one of my students speaks in a monotone generally and reads routinely in a very soft tone.

Yet if the text says something like:

John was angry. “Give me my backpack!” he demanded–both will add appropriate, louder, inflection when reading John’s words.

To get a student with autism to read with inflection, especially the younger ones, perhaps we need to TELL them what the emotion of the speaker is. They usually won’t infer this from the situation, even though most of us will. But they know how an angry person sounds if they know he’s angry. Or a happy person. Or a sad person.

The more they recognize the different tones of voice, the easier it will be to infer emotions in daily communication. Perhaps.

Inference Cuing: What is the most likely reason for that?

readers1 — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 04:45:01 +0000

By Richard Finegan

It has frequently been observed that children on the autism spectrum tend to be concrete and literal thinkers who have difficulty with abstract concepts like inferring a character’s unstated motive. When reading fiction, the concrete thinkers will focus narrowly on the minute physical details and often miss the “big picture.”

Fernando’s red jacket flapped in the wind as he raced on his new bicycle down Maple Street. Ignoring the stop sign at the end of the block, Fernando ran straight into the side of a passing city bus. When he woke up he heard a siren and realized he was in the back of an ambulance.

The child with autism should have no difficulty telling you that Fernando’s jacket was red, and his bike was new. He probably would be able to report that Fernando ran into a bus.

Yet some may not recognize that the person in the ambulance is Fernando, because Fernando’s name is not stated in the last sentence, only the pronoun “he” is used (an example of anaphora). Children with autism frequently will not connect one sentence to the next, even within paragraphs.

While it may seem to us both obvious and critically important for the reader to recognize that Fernando is injured, the child with autism may make no such connections without coaching. They do not always think about the ramifications of coats flapping in the wind, bicycles speeding, and stop signs ignored. The visual image of a child’s body striking the side of a moving bus does not automatically come to them, or necessarily suggest to them an ambulance ride to the hospital, or worse.

Anaphoric cuing (about which there are several articles on this blog) teaches the child to stop when he gets to anaphora and ask himself who or what, or where or when or why questions to focus his attention on the meaning of what he is reading by identifying the referent words. The reader needs to think about who is waking up in an ambulance, and why. Was Fernando napping or was he knocked unconscious?

Inferring motive

A character’s motives may be similarly difficult for the child with autism to recognize, even when they seem clear to most readers.

Bob’ s favorite green Boston Celtics hat was missing from his locker! He looked up and down the hallway and spotted George wearing a green hat! Bob ran down the hall, shoved George against the wall, and grabbed the hat off his head. As Bob was walking away, he noticed that the green hat he was holding said Dallas Mavericks.

The child with autism might know that Celtic hats are green, might know Bob’s was missing, might know the hat George was wearing was green, and yet may be stumped by the question: Why did Bob shove George and take his hat? Since the text does not explicitly say that Bob suspected George of taking his hat, the reader with autism might not make this seemingly obvious inference.

How to infer state of mind, emotion, or motive from a character’s actions is something that must be taught patiently to young readers with autism. Often the teacher or aide must have to learn how to recognize themselves when they are inferring so they can guide the student to a similar inference.

What is most likely?

When a character is described as frowning and speaking loudly, we may infer “anger” without even being aware we made an inference.

Julia waited on the front porch of Elizabeth’s house for 15 minutes. When Elizabeth finally came outside, Julia frowned and asked loudly, “Can we go now?”

The concrete thinker, if asked, might surprise us with the number of other possible (if implausible) explanations for speaking loudly while frowning. They can always come up with fanciful scenarios (“maybe a caterpillar crawled in her ear“) which have no connection whatsoever to the text. They may need to be prompted to focus their thinking on what is most common and most likely under the circumstances of the story.

What are the most common reasons why someone would do that?

What is the most likely reason this character is doing that, considering what just happened to her?

Keeping track of details is a strength

When instructing a whole classroom of students, most of which do not have autism, on a long piece of fiction one may discover an advantage that many readers with autism have: they can often keep track of a surprising number of minor characters and minute details, even if they have difficulty connecting them.

A high school student with autism, having studied an abridged version of Romeo and Juliet for several weeks in class, was watching the Zefferelli film and laughed to himself when Romeo’s servant, Balthazar, passes a monk on a donkey while on his way to Mantua to tell Romeo of Juliet’s apparent death. “Friar John” the student said. Friar John was not named in the version of the play studied. The name was mentioned once in class weeks before.

I have also observed (to my surprise) that some children with autism are as capable as other kids of learning the meaning of idioms such as “nose to the grindstone” or “sick as a dog” or “hold your horses.” In fact, they may even recognize the humor in certain idioms, once they learn the meaning, that others more familiar with the terms may overlook. Drawing an absurd picture to illustrate a witty idiom may be great fun for these children.

FAQs about anaphoric cuing and reading comprehension

readers1 — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:05:07 +0000

Q: Is it “anaphoric cuing” or “anaphoric cueing”?
A: Yes.

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Q: What are anaphora?
A: Anaphora are words, often pronouns, which refer back to reference words previously used in the text. For example: “Dan opened his book, put his head down on it, and fell asleep.” In this case, “his” and “it” are the anaphora and “Dan” and “book” are the reference words.

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Q: What, briefly, is anaphoric cuing?
A: Anaphoric cuing involves teaching the child to identify the anaphora and to pause to relate them to their reference words while reading. In this way, the student begins to connect the parts of the text to one another. The active engagement required to relate words to one another supports the child’s connection to the text and reduces his or her habit of passive decoding.

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Q: Who first identified anaphoric cuing as an effective intervention for teaching reading comprehension to children on the autism spectrum?
A: Researchers Irene O’Connor and Perry Klein, both of the University of Western Ontario (Canada),worked with 20 adolescent students with hyperlexia to explore the success of cloze questions, pre-reading questions, and anaphoric cuing. They found anaphoric cuing to be the most effective teaching strategy for improving reading comprehension with these students.
[O’Connor, I.M. & Klein, P.D. (2004). Exploration of strategies for facilitating the reading comprehension of high-functioning students with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34(2): 115 -127]

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Q: What is meant by hyperlexia?
A: Hyperlexia is a reading disorder characterized by a precocious ability to decode words, usually two or more levels above the child’s age or grade, combined with significantly impaired comprehension of the same words. Many children on the autism spectrum have this difficulty, even though they may not be diagnosed with hyperlexia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlexia )

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Q: Has O’Connor and Klein’s study been “proven” in the classroom?
A: This blog’s primary author, Sara Finegan, has had success with the technique (http://readerswithautism.com/2009/09/autism-and-hyperlexia-part-1-anaphoric-cuing/ and http://readerswithautism.com/2009/09/autism-and-hyperlexia-part-2-helping-bobby-read/ ) and would like to hear from other teachers or parents about their experience with anaphoric cuing or any other teaching strategy that has worked to improve reading comprehension by students on the autism spectrum.

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Q: How did Sara learn to do this?
A: As her first posts show, Sara and her student, Bobby, worked it out for themselves. The process is not complicated. Paraeducators (paraprofessionals, classroom aides) can help to implement it. (http://readerswithautism.com/2009/12/anaphoric-cuing-asking-clarifying-questions/ and http://readerswithautism.com/2009/09/role-of-the-classroom-aide-to-help-the-child-toward-independence/ )

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Q: Does the technique work with students trying to improve reading comprehension in another language besides English?
A: We don’t know for sure, but would assume that in any language that uses pronouns or other anaphora regularly in text, large numbers of children on the autism spectrum have difficulty with comprehension. This technique could be tried to see if it helps and PLEASE let us know what your results are.

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Q: I’m a teacher (or parent) willing to try anaphoric cuing but I have questions. Can I contact you?

A: Certainly. We want you to Post a Comment to any one of our articles, including this one (see below), or you may Contact Us ( http://readerswithautism.com/contact-us/ ) by email. We will respond to any communication from an educator or a parent trying to help a struggling reader.

Our Goal: Providing help for struggling readers on the autism spectrum.

So he resists reading: What does he like?

readers1 — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:11:20 +0000

Few children, even those not on the autism spectrum, will voluntarily read something they aren’t interested in.

When we have students with reading comprehension problems, perhaps with hyperlexia, who have difficulty making meaning of what they read, it helps greatly if they care that they don’t get it. Do they want to know about these characters and what is happening to them?

The first task of the the teacher and paraeducator in trying to help a struggling reader is to engage him or her in the reading.

Find something that interests the child.

When your struggling reader with autism is allowed to freely choose a book in the classroom library, what does she choose?

Even “fake readers,” kids who turn the pages, look at the pictures, and recite from memory passages they’ve heard read aloud, will generally return to the same books, or series of books, or subjects (butterflies, horses, ancient Mesopotamia).

When they are being read to, by the teacher in a read aloud, or by a parent, is there something particular they like to have read to them?

This can be a way in for some kids, but often the child with autism has receptive language deficits which make it difficult for him or her to follow a story read aloud.

If they simply don’t (yet) relate to books…

Do they watch animated movies? Finding Nemo? Toy Story? Ice Age? Shrek?
Do they like live action films? Harry Potter? Spy Kids? Spiderman? High School Musical?
Are they crazy about TV shows? ICarly? Wizards of Waverly Place? Suite Life of Zack and Cody?
What about cartoons on cable? Pokemon? Scooby-Doo? Dora the Explorer?

Finding what interests them is a way into their imaginations. Whatever gets and holds their attention, whatever the medium (TV, film, cartoon) can be used to transfer their interest and attention to text. Almost anything produced for kids on film or video is also available in some print form or another.

Knowing what the child cares about allows you to find high-interest fiction tailored just for him or her, and high-interest fiction may be just what it takes to begin engaging that struggling reader and make them care about the story they are reading.

Anaphoric cuing: Asking clarifying questions

readers1 — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:38:58 +0000

By Richard Finegan

In their book The Mosaic of Thought (1997) Keene and Zimmerman identified six“cueing systems” which they described as the channels or sources through which the brain receives information during reading:

grapho-phonic cuing–the identification of letters and
lexical or orthographic cuing–the identification of sight words
syntactic cuing–the recognition of the form and structure of language
schematic cuing–prior knowledge or association
pragmatic cuing–the purposes and needs of the reader
semantic cuing–the meaning of the text

The authors identify a sample semantic cuing problem: reading words fluently but experiencing difficulty defining what is meant by a word, sentence, or text. (p. 203)

This is precisely where we often find our kids with autism (and always those with hyperlexia) stuck in their comprehension. And this is where (with due credit to the study done by O’Connor and Klein, 2004) we find anaphoric cuing (also spelled cueing) as a useful semantic cuing tool to help get them unstuck.

See Autism and hyperlexia, Part 1, http://readerswithautism.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=256 .

Comprehension problems are not unique to kids on the autism spectrum, and some practical hints on how to use anaphoric cuing can be gleaned from the literature on reading comprehension generally.

As Cris Tovani notes in her book I Read But I Don’t Get It (2000), good readers ask themselves clarifying questions as they read. Who, what, when, where, and why questions about characters, setting, or events. (p. 52) Asking themselves these clarifying questions focuses the reader on meaning, not simply on decoding, word by word.

But if the child with autism or hyperlexia has lost the meaning of what they’re reading, how do they know what questions to ask themselves?

There is the beauty of the anaphoric cuing technique.

With a fairly short list of anaphora (words that refer to other words) that can be listed on a bookmark we can teach them when to stop in their reading and what to ask themselves before they move on.

When we read:

he, she, they, we, I, you

we ask who?

When we read:

hers, his, its, theirs, ours, yours

we ask whose?

When we read:

it, that, this, can, do

we ask what?

When we read:

here, there, come, go

we ask where?

When we read:

then, before, after

we ask when?

By learning a list of specific words and answering a few related questions, many kids can make significant improvement in their comprehension of text, particularly narrative fiction, which often is the most difficult for a child with autism to comprehend.

Stories they help us write

readers1 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:41:27 +0000

By Sara Finegan

I’ve written a great deal about the specific interventions I use to help kids learn how to make meaning from text. Because kids with autism often do not hold on to a story while they read, much of what we must do to support comprehension involves teaching them about how to think while they read.

The other part of the equation that creates comprehension is, of course, the concept of purpose and engagement in the text. Kids who don’t want to read are not going to understand what they read. Kids who do not read for a purpose aren’t going to get much out of it.

To that end, I’ve posted about finding books of interest for readers with autism and, more recently, my experiences writing serial stories about my students for them to read. There’s another technique that works well with younger or more immature readers, and that is writing stories for the kids to complete.

I got the idea when I happened to buy a book about one of my favorite worlds, Pern (author Anne McCaffrey writes sci-fi, which I don’t ordinarily like, but this series has to do with dragons, and I was hooked). I thought the book was going to be a bunch of short stories about Pern, and it was, but there was a catch. It was one of those “choose your ending” stories, which I hate, hate, hate.

There are many such books available for kids, and many children love them. Readers with autism do not tend to enjoy them, for the simple reason that they don’t feel comfortable using their imaginations in that way. They are perfectly prepared to enter a world of fantasy, where things exist that don’t exist in the real world; they just aren’t willing to write their own endings.

I understand that completely. It occurred, to me, however, that if my readers with autism did like that kind of book, it would be a really great way to get them engaged in a text.

Several weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about fill-in-the-blank worksheets. (I hate it, because when I wake up like that with an idea, I’m too sleepy to flail around looking for a pen to write it down with, even if a shred of paper did exist on my bedside table.) I had no idea why, but as I let my mind drift, the pick-your-own-ending books straggled around the edges of my thoughts.

In the morning, the idea seemed to gel in my caffeine-loaded brain, and I began to work on a story for one of my students who had trouble staying with a narrative. His mind would start to wander and he’d start fake-reading about a paragraph into any text. What I discovered in my new strategy was a way to keep him hooked to the text and striving for meaning all the way through.

I call this particular intervention the “stories we write together,” even though I do most of the writing and all the reader has to do is fill in a word or two here and there. The idea is to write a story for your reader about a topic that interests him or her. Hope that it is a topic for which there are photos or clip art on the web, because you need to illustrate it.

Every few sentences, leave a word blank. When your reader comes to that blank space, he will be asked to fill it in with a word. You can write it, or the student can write it.

What happens when our readers with autism get a high-interest story like this that requires them to be paying attention so that they can add a word or phrase here and there is that they tend to stay with the story, hang on to what’s happening, and enjoy the interaction they have with the text.

TIP: I’m sure you could use stories that already exist – just retype them onto a text document, add illustrations, and insert your own blanks where you think the student will be able to add meaningful words or phrases. Not all of us love making up stories at the drop of a hat.

If you do decide to write your own, don’t worry about the quality. For God’s sake, don’t sweat about character development or setting; the point is to create a narrative that intrigues the child, and believe me, children don’t get wound up over glitches or parts that don’t make as much sense as they could if we spent hours writing the plot.

Here’s an example: “Teddy Meets The Incredible Hulk”. My original had cool illustrations (Google Image is a teacher’s best friend), and you can easily add them to any such stories you write.

You should enjoy this as much as the reader with autism!

The child in the IEP: Can we really see him as described?

readers1 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:03:28 +0000

By Sara Finegan

I’ve got a new student with autism. He’s a fourth grader, and he moved here from another state last year. The IEP he came with was quite specific about his mechanical reading skills (working on long and short vowels, etc) and reported minimal progress toward decoding and phonemic awareness over the previous year.

He spent the second half of last year in our lower-grades Special Day Class, and now he’s with me. I took a look at his IEPs for the past several years, and I must say I’m disappointed.

Allow me to step up to my soap box for a bit and voice some concerns about the IEP process and how we think about our readers with autism.

I do not know how it is possible for anyone to create an IEP that only addresses one part of the reading process. If I am going to support a child in reading, there are many things I want to know besides the simple decoding skills he or she has or does not have: I want to know about whether the child

enjoys being read to,
enjoys looking at books,
comprehension levels,
questions the child might ask,
topics of interest,
favorite characters in books, and
genres.

A reader is not simply a person who can read words; a reader is a person who has expectations of text, has preferences in text, and has experience in text.

A kid who cannot decode long “O” and “I” sounds can still delight in having Captain Underpants read to him. A kid who cannot focus on the written word for more than 15 seconds at a whack can bring me a copy of The Indian in the Cupboard and ask me to read it to him over and over and over. A child who doesn’t know that a book starts on the left side and not the right can squeal with delight when we read Frog and Toad books.

We need to know as much about what a child can do as what he cannot do. Yet.

When we are working with a child on comprehension in reading, we build on the skills that exist now. I cannot devise a plan of action unless I know what the child already knows, and what he almost knows.

Think about it: how much does knowing that I cannot use an electric screwdriver without stripping screws, cannot thread the needle on a sewing machine, cannot keep track of socks, and often fail to keep plastic containers together with their lids really tell you about what it would be like to come to my house for dinner? Not much, I expect.

Note toParents:

Parents are part of the IEP team, and if the case manager doesn’t include the skills your child already has, you have not only the right but the obligation to make sure it’s added. It’s as simple as asking whether the case manager could please add a list of the reading/math/writing/whatever skills the child does have to the description of “present levels.” If your child is present at the IEP, ask him or her to contribute a list of strengths.

I’ve had it up to here with IEPs that do not accurately describe a child, or which leave enormous blanks in the picture of the child I am teaching. We’re talking about a person, not a skill-set, and not a file in a drawer. Anyone who participates in an IEP meeting must consider how the child is portrayed, and if it is as complete a portrayal as possible in the document. If you are unsure, consider whether, if the subject of the IEP was you, people would be able to see you as you are.

Irresistible reading: Stories starring our kids as characters

readers1 — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:39:32 +0000

By Sara Finegan

I’m in the process of writing some social stories for an incoming student of mine who is a boy with medium-functioning autism, and it got me thinking about the power of stories about the kids who are actually reading them.

(Social Stories are a tool for teaching social skills to children with autism and related disabilities. They provide an individual with accurate information about those situations that he may find difficult or confusing. The situation is described in detail and focus is given to a few key points: the important social cues, the events and reactions the individual might expect to occur in the situation, the actions and reactions that might be expected of him, and why. The goal of the story is to increase the individual’s understanding of, make him more comfortable in, and possibly suggest some appropriate responses for the situation in question. From http://www.polyxo.com/.)

Many of my students on the autism spectrum have been kids who really, really disliked reading, and avoided it whenever possible. This was partly because they really struggled with the decoding process, and partly because they really struggled with comprehension, and, in some cases, partly because they struggled with focus issues.

Many years back, I hit on a sure-fire way to get kids like that more engaged in reading. I started to write serial stories about kids in my class.

I think the first one I wrote was about “The Day Aliens Kidnapped Eddie and Joey.” It was set at our school, and all of the students in my class, plus my aide and our principal were characters. As I recall, the narrative began when, while waiting for the school bus, Eddie and Joey were suddenly snatched up by an alien spaceship. The aliens were fascinated by homework, and tried to conduct a cross-examination of Eddie and Joey about their assignments. In the meantime, the rest of us were trying to figure out how to save them.

Each of my students had a role in devising a brilliant strategy to get Eddie and Joey back. Our principal, who happened to have a huge supply of hot air balloons in the library storage room, provided both inspiration and logistical support.

Every few days, I’d write another installment of the story, and the kids would gather together in pairs to read and respond. The excitement was palpable. Students began to submit ideas for scenes, and suggestions as to what we could do with the aliens once we reached their space ship (feed them cupcakes….teach them to moonwalk….). Kids in other classes began to hear about the story and wanted copies. It became quite a cool thing to be in my class that month.

Long story short, even kids who hated, hated, hated to sit down with a book waited anxiously for each new installment about Eddie, Joey, and the aliens. They were perfectly willing to read and re-read the story to answer comprehension questions, identify different uses of language (simile, metaphor, hyperbole, dialogue), etc.

Bobby, who had a lot of difficulty connecting to text in general, began to ask a lot of questions about the story: Why did the aliens pick San Diego? What if Eddie and Joey get thirsty? Why can’t the principal just call the aliens? Where is Superman when we need him? (See my other posts about hyperlexia, anaphoric cuing and helping Bobby read.)

Then, Bobby started a running commentary: Eddie and Joey should be careful on the spaceship, because some aliens have slimy skin; Mrs. Finegan should stop singing while she makes helmets for the kids who are going up in the hot air balloon, because it might scare them (!); we should probably eat lunch before we launch the rescue mission, because there’s no food in space.

I managed to stretch out the alien story for about 6 weeks. When we finally finished, the kids continued to read independently for longer periods of time; their stamina had increased by between 4 and 10 minutes. They were more willing to work their way through stories at their instructional reading level, and their interest in setting and characters improved.

Since then, I’ve tried to write short stories featuring my students or, several times a year, another longer tale in installments.

For readers with autism, being a part of the story is a terrific introduction to the concept of “jumping into” a book.

Reader with autism and figurative language, part 1

readers1 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:06:28 +0000

By Sara Finegan

My class is in the throes of what our District calls a “Unit of Inquiry,” which essentially is a unit of literature study. Someone has devoted a great deal of time to developing entire courses of study for up to six units per year for each grade level. The Units of Inquiry focus on different genres of writing and different plot elements, among other things.

I’m not utterly wild about them as a whole, because I think that even for children without learning disabilities, they are pretty advanced and don’t actually match kids’ developmental stages.

Leo Tolstoy

When I went to school, (and I attended a very good public school in a University town) we didn’t even think about things like “theme” until maybe the 8^th grade. A precocious reader, I was reading at the college level in the 8^th grade, and I don’t think I would have been able to describe in detail the motivations of the characters as they apply to the author’s theme in most of the texts I made my way through.

So here we are, in Unit 2 of the fifth grade curriculum, talking about theme, which is an amorphous sort of thing if you are in the fifth grade and a really incomprehensible thing if you are a concrete thinker like a reader with autism. To top it off, this particular unit is full of figurative language: metaphor, simile, hyperbole….I read the unit description and immediately reached for Mylanta.

The text was overflowing with figurative language

The first story we were supposed to read was a short piece by Sandra Cisneros, who is a brilliant and evocative author (The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek) whose work is just so amazing I could read it over and over without getting bored. The thing is, though, that the first piece, entitled “My Name,” wasn’t a story if by “story” you mean a narrative with an actual plot and a beginning, middle and end.

It was a reflection, I guess, about the name of the character in the book (Esperanza). And it is, like most of Cisneros’s writing, riddled, frothing, overflowing with figurative language – sometimes multiple similes or metaphors in the same sentence.

I was not convinced that this would appeal to any reader with autism and pretty sure that my readers with autism were going to be absolutely untouched by the piece.

It must have been the sunny weather that made me refrain from kvetching and take a dive into this unit without floaties. We started reading “My Name” last Wednesday, slowly, line by line, as a whole group (my class is 15-strong).

I will be writing more about our experiences in the coming days. For now, I’ll just say this: On Thursday, we abandoned all of the other texts in the Unit of Inquiry and decided to focus exclusively on Sandra Cisneros stories. They cannot get enough of her!

And, more to the point, I’m learning a lot about how readers with autism can deal with figurative language and deeper meaning in text.

Is decoding overrated?

readers1 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:13:58 +0000

By Sara Finegan

Several people have asked me recently which program I recommend to teach kids the mechanics of reading: decoding and phonemic awareness. I’m having a hard time answering.

My problem isn’t choosing between a variety of programs, or determining which is the most successful at helping kids learn to decode the letters and their sounds.

My problem is that I’m not convinced that decoding is as important as everyone seems to think it is. Before you start throwing rocks at me, let me explain.

If you spend any time at all thinking about how you read, you are undoubtedly going to realize that you actually use your phonemic skills to decode words less than 10% of the time. Maybe less than 5%. I did a little survey of myself (it was fun, being both the subject and the observer!) and discovered that in 847 pages, I only had to decode one word.

How can this be? Isn’t the foundation of reading the ability to put the letter sounds together to form actual words?

Not…..really. It may be so at the beginning, but I’m wondering if it isn’t a really limited period of time in the life of an emergent reader.

What do readers do, really, at all but the primer stage?

We recognize words.

My theory, and it is untested and will not necessarily be particularly popular among reading researchers, is that sight words are more important than decoding skills. I think that good readers are people who recognize words when they see them. I think that the difference between any level of reading in elementary school through middle school has more to do the expansion of one’s personal bank of sight words than anything else. The more words we can recognize and know, the more words we can read.

Don’t get me wrong: I still spend time with my students on basic phonemic skills. I don’t allow people to leave my class without knowing the basics, more or less. But we spend a lot more time on word recognition, which we work on in a variety of ways. Much of what we do is outlined in the Reading Category on our other blog, The Demanding Classroom (www.thedemandingclassroom.com).

Over the years, I’ve had numerous students enter my classroom in the fourth grade and up who still do not know their vowel sounds and blends, and are not able to decode any words that have more than one syllable. These students have been given intensive interventions, either in self-contained classrooms or in pull-out sessions in the Resource Room, but despite at least four years of work, still have not been able to learn basic decoding skills.

Now, my school’s Resource Specialist is a gem among gems, an incredibly talented teacher with endless patience and know-how. Teachers in the primary level of our self-contained classroom at our school had more training than I in reading instruction, and a good many more years of experience. If they couldn’t get a child to competent decoding levels, there isn’t a lot I can do.

It has seemed like focusing intensively on the phonemic skills was not working. I’ve come to the conclusion that in cases such as these, we need to approach the reading from another angle, and the angle that seems to have the most success is addressing word recognition and reading fluency.

In the coming weeks, I’ll try to post some more about what we do, and why. In the meantime, check out The Demanding Classroom!