OnTrack Reading

Today I’ve revised the section of the Guide I call The Auditory Piece (of the dyslexia puzzle.) You’ll find information on using manipulatives, or letter tiles, to help train the skill of phoneme manipulation on the Page Auditory Processing with Tiles, and the information on training phoneme manipulation strictly by oral means has been moved to the Page Oral Auditory Processing.

I have used the exercises described on those two Guide Pages with all clients who fail to score 100% on the Auditory Processing Test described in the phonics section of the Guide. All clients who have completed the curriculum have managed to score 100% on the test by graduation, usually by the 5th or 6th session or so. Phoneme manipulation is a necessary skill for reading English and it can be trained effectively.

On another note, the reasons my new posts in here have tailed off are two-fold: First, while the Guide on the Sidebar will never be complete as long as we have new information to uncover on reading problems and how to help struggling readers, I have managed to put the bulk of what I consider useful onto the site by now.

However, I had a decision to make as to whether or not to make available my Advanced Code Workbook for purchase by parents for use with your children or to just keep uploading files to the site. About 25% of the workbook is already on the site, but I realize it would be both a chore and very confusing to try to put together a curriculum from a bunch of downloaded files.

So the other reason for my infrequent posting lately is that I’ve been re-writing the Advanced Code Workbook that I use with each of my young clients with the intent of making it available through Lulu.com, an on-line, on-demand publisher. I’ve about completed it, but I need to also re-write the instruction manual that accompanies it, which I’m in the middle of doing now.

My intent is to have Lulu.com sell the workbook, so parents and instructors can order from their website (at a quite reasonable price, I think) and then to make the instructions available in two forms, either in print from Lulu.com or as a PDF file that can be downloaded either from this site free or from Lulu.com at a small fee.

For those of you reading this who’ve seen my existing workbook, the main change will be paper color. The blue paper won’t be available. However, I did order a coil-bound recipe book of the same approximate size as my workbook, and I was very satisfied with the product. About the only change you should notice will be the paper color, and with the instructions available in here as a PDF, the price will actually be significantly less than it would be if I was mailing them out myself. Shipping will even be available at the media mail rate, which can be slow, but the book I ordered that way arrived within five days.

The title will tentatively be OnTrack Reading Advanced Code Workbook and will have a color cover designed by my son, Matt, the graphic designer in the family.

So that’s what’s been going on. Plus I became a Grandpa for the first time two weeks ago. For now, take a look at the changes to The Auditory Piece.

The Auditory Piece is a new section of the Guide that will eventually delve into the auditory issues that might be getting in the way of your child’s learning to read. I say, eventually, because this is an area that I have little experience with assessing, beyond the task of phoneme manipulation.

However, I have put together a word list that is quite comprehensive and can be used to train the skill of phoneme manipulation very effectively if used according to the instructions on the Page. You can download the list as a PDF file from Oral Auditory Processing. This is a very useful list that you will find nowhere else.

I use the word list with every client of OnTrack Reading who fails to get a perfect score on the ten-item auditory processing test discussed under the testing section in the phonics Pages of the Guide. Phoneme manipulation is a useful skill and it is trainable. Clients routinely score perfectly on the testing by the time they finish the curriculum. Here is a link to the test form: Download the Test Scoresheet.

The word list and instructions can be found in The Auditory Piece.

The last skills test is on the Guide Page Testing Auditory Processing Skill.

This completes the three skills tests. The only other test that I’ll add to this section is a Page discussing the Code Knowledge Test. I’ll also be adding another PDF file that you can download which contains the prompts that you should show your child as you administer the Code Knowledge Test.

And again, I’d like to encourage a few comments from those of you reading as I develop this Guide. Two people have told me about lulu.com for having my Advanced Code Workbook printed and distributed, and after spending some time on that site, I think it’s a possibility. They even have the coil binding that I currently use. Then I could just load the workbook instructions in here as PDF files.

The last skills test: Testing Auditory Processing Skill

Today I’ve added Testing Segmenting Skill to the Guide. This test has some significant advantages over the more limited one printed in Reading Reflex, and I would definitely advocate using it instead, especially if you have an older child who doesn’t appear to be using phonics information to attack unfamiliar words.

I’ve tested several older clients, above the fifth grade level, say, who couldn’t segment words with vowel digraphs in them. Examples would be words like rain and bowl. They didn’t realize that the ai in rain stood for just one sound, the /ae/ sound. This is a dead giveaway that they have no usable understanding of the phonics content of English words.

And, on a hopeful note, this is the one type of client that I encounter where I often don’t see any evidence of a vision problem. These are the clients who either were never taught the phonics structure of English words, or who might have had vision issues in first and second grade and didn’t pick up the limited phonics content that their courses contained. I say limited because even if a child has a significant vision problem in the early grades, it is a relatively trivial matter to teach him to segment words efficiently.

So, if your child is older, and performs poorly on the segmenting test, consider hitting the phonics hard first in the hopes that this cheaper option is the route to improving his reading ability. Nevertheless, read the sections of the Guide concerning vision so that you are aware of the symptoms because, in my opinion, if most children in your child’s school are learning to read, a vision problem is the most likely explanation for your child’s reading problem.

Here’s Testing Segmenting Skill.

Today’s I conclude The OnTrack Reading Story on this site with a page titled Reconciling the Research Conflict.

My early indoctrination, and it was very nearly an indoctrination, into teaching methods for reading came from sources that emphasized phonics instruction. This was a clear backlash against the Whole Language methods that had taken over many classrooms including, by law, all of the classrooms of the state of California, in the last couple of decades of the Twentieth Century.

By the time I’d brought myself up to speed on the controversy I was nearly completely convinced that most reading problems were then being generated by inadequate, or wholly missing, phonics instruction in our classrooms. This is one of the side effects of wars, including the reading war of the time. People tend to choose sides. Unfortunately, vision problems weren’t even on the main battlefield of ideas.

Oh, the developmental optometrists along with a small subset of researchers in schools of optometry were publishing all right, but the main battle was Whole Language versus Phonics, and that battle drowned everyone else out. And I was right in the thick of the main battle, in the sense that all of my attention was drawn to it.

It was only through a fortuitous combination of events that I learned to appreciate the role of vision problems in generating poor readers, and possibly even underlying dyslexia. My Phono-Graphix trainers warned that some kids like that existed and even suggested that we find a reputable vision therapy department. But it was truly a fluke that the only developmental optometrist within 100 miles of my office was in the same city as my office. And it was an even bigger fluke that we ran into each other. And what if David had not appeared? After all, I’d worked with several children before David without suspecting vision problems (some of whose parents I later called back to explain the possibility that we might have overlooked a vision issue, by the way.)

So, if you’re convinced that it’s all phonics and auditory issues, I’m here to tell you “been there, done that.” The page I’ve added today details the lengths to which I went after I started to question my initial assumptions, which I now believe to have been wrong, so take a look at Reconciling the Research Conflict.