OnTrack Reading

This section of the Guide describes a day-by-day instructional sequence that any teacher in junior high school, or even high school, can use to rapidly improve most of your weaker readers’ ability to read multisyllable words. Why most? Because some older students continue to fight undiagnosed vision issues to such an extent that they still won’t be able to make sense of print. Plus, some have other issues that are still poorly understood, and that get in the way of learning an alphabetic system.

Go to the Table of Contents of the Course

If you’re teaching junior high or high school, you very likely have a fairly significant cohort of students who read poorly, but who are now capable of learning to read better. Why? Because one way or another, their maturing brains have resolved their vision issues to the extent that they can now deal with print. And why do you likely have a significant number of students who read poorly? Because if you’re teaching a content area, you are probably seeing between 80 and 150 students each day and it’s likely that 10 to 15 percent of them struggled with vision issues in the early grades.

The method I will describe here has, as of the start of the 2007-08 school year, never been used before. It can be used by teachers in any content area, or two or three teachers could team up and use it together. The goal is to pare down the instructional steps to bare essentials and present a mini-curriculum to a group of weaker readers over the first three to four weeks in a series of approximately 10-minute lessons. You will not need to be an English teacher to do this. It will work in science, math, social studies and even in the vocational courses.

Basis of the the Methodology

The method described on the following pages of this Guide is based on the OnTrack Reading Curriculum that I’ve used one-on-one with about 200 clients as of mid-2007. That curriculum is a blend of the Phono-Graphix method and the Spalding method, both of which are described and discussed at length in other parts of the Guide. (See the Sidebar for the Guide’s Table of Contents.)

Due to a fortuitous combination of events, I came up with an insight that makes it far easier to teach an older student how to successfully attack unfamiliar multisyllable words, and let’s face it, that’s one of the main challenges your weaker readers face in your classes. They can finally read common one and two syllable words and even the weaker readers are somewhat fluent by the time they get to, say, sixth grade or so. But longer words still throw them, as you know well from experience.

The basis of the insight was a comment by someone on a website discussion that linguists claim we tend to break spoken words after the vowel sound except when it is awkward to do so. Thus, all three of these words, razor, rapid and rabbit, tend to be verbally broken down as ra-zor, ra-pid and ra-bbit as we speak them. Note: This can drive phonics instructors who have learned fixed syllable rules over the edge, but if you have no strong opinion yet on this (or even if you do,) try saying “ra-zor,” then “raz-or,” pausing very briefly between the indicated chunks. You will find that it is significantly easier (more comfortable verbally) to say “ra-zor” than “raz-or.” The second requires an unnatural verbal pause, where the first example flows naturally, like speech, which is what this is all about.

Now, try the same thing with rapid. Say “ra-pid,” then “rap-id.” You should notice that the same thing happens. “Ra-pid” flows easier than “rap-id.” Try it several times if you’re not convinced at first, because it’s a fact. We linguistically break words like rapid exactly like we break razor, that is, after the vowel sound. Yet, if you check the dictionary, the syllable break is rap-id. Why is that? Because English teachers, and phonics instructors too, believe in something called a closed syllable. And what’s that? It’s a “rule” that says that short vowel sounds like the /a/ sound in rapid can’t end syllables, and that long vowel sounds like the /ae/ sound in razor can, and usually do, end syllables. Unfortunately, this “rule” has been made the basis of many instructional approaches even though it is somewhat confusing linguistically (because of the unnatural syllable boundary it imposes.)

And what of the word rabbit ? Ah, here the syllable “rule” really results in true irrationality when it comes to its influence on phonics instruction. Students are taught that words like rabbit have two /b/ sounds! They are to think of rabbit as being composed of the syllables rab and bit, as in rab-bit. This is indoctrinated so thoroughly that many adults, and even some teachers, think a word like rabbit has two /b/ sounds in it. Of course, if it were spelled rabit it would be pronounced exactly the same, but those same people would only “hear” one /b/ sound and, because of the closed syllable concept, they would put it in the first syllable.

The Eureka Moment

So, what was the insight? Simple. It was that all of this was nonsense. Since it is perfectly obvious that all three of the words, razor, rapid and rabbit, break naturally after the vowel sound, any instructional technique that tries to convince a child otherwise is going to be, at best, confusing and, at worst, misleading to the point of being ineffective. The weaker readers among your students are already leaping to a wild guess based upon what they hear as they fruitlessly attempt to decode a word, so why not at least have them break longer words down in the very manner that they most easily hear them? Why not teach them to stop each syllable after the vowel sound?

The number one answer to that question is that parents look at you like you’ve just claimed to have discovered Atlantis. But, when they see that their child is easily adopting the strategy and is actually starting to decode long words instead of guess at them, they quickly change their minds and decide to give this new, admittedly unorthodox, strategy a chance.

Chunking Versus Syllables

Of course, you can’t start lying to students about syllable boundaries. They are well-defined in most dictionaries and we can’t build in a new level of ignorance intentionally. The solution is to not call these new divisions by the term syllable but, rather, to call them chunks. Thus, “Stop each chunk after the vowel sound” becomes the Main Rule of the OnTrack Reading Curriculum’s multisyllable approach.

Advantages of Applying the Main Rule

Probably the most difficult aspect of learning the English alphabetic code is the tendency for a vowel letter or a vowel digraph to symbolize more than just one sound. Thus, the letter a can be /a/ in bat, /ae/ in table or /o/ in want while the digraph ea can be /ee/ in teach, /ae/ in great or /e/ in head.

The second most difficult aspect is the tendency to spell a particular sound with a multitude of spellings, particularly a vowel sound. Thus, we have the /oo/ sound spelled zoo, to, suit, clue, truth, soup, tune and blew, and this is just the alternatives I teach. There are other less common ones too, as in through and neutral.

Because of these idiosyncrasies of English, a reading method that focuses directly on the vowel sounds in longer words brings a student’s attention to bear on one of the most difficult facets of English words, the alternative vowel spellings, and their pronunciation overlaps. As they begin to focus on the vowel sounds, they begin to learn what the various vowel spellings are, and what sounds those spellings can reasonably represent. Explicit instruction also helps, of course, but it is much more likely to be attended to by the student when it is actually resulting in successful attempts at decoding.

Replacing Bad Strategy with Good

So, back to your weaker readers. What is their main strategy when they come across a word like dictatorial in social studies, or horizontal in math? You know the answer. They apply their limited phonics knowledge and their even more limited phonics strategies to the word base they already know and let fly with a guess! Dictatorial becomes dictator, dictionary, director, even distant if they try the /s/ sound for the letter c. Horizontal becomes horizon or even hosanna. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you’ve even heard someone come up with hizzoner (his Honor) if they had that in their listening vocabulary.

Your purpose, and the intent of the curriculum presented here, is several fold:

1. You want to get them to stop guessing. To accomplish that you need to offer an alternative that works. This mini-curriculum will do that.

2. You want them to learn the phonics they missed (either because their vision issues kept them from absorbing it, or because their old school never taught it in the first place.) This mini-curriculum will include several short lessons on the more important elements of the English code and will help you describe new words to your students in terms consistent with this curriculum.

3. You want them to learn your content material by reading the text materials. Once a student learns that he or she have a chance of correctly reading the more difficult multisyllable words in your content material, this might actually begin to happen. I’m hopeful that it will, and would like to hear of your experience using this curriculum, should you decide to do so.

What’s Next?

The next page of this Guide lists the Table of Contents of the mini-curriculum. As of August, 2007, it’s just been completed. If you decide to use it as presently drafted, expect to find some typos as well as some serious underestimates of the lesson timings. I would appreciate hearing of any difficulties you encounter if you decide to try this mini-curriculum in your classroom.

My goal was to devise a program that you can teach in about twenty ten-minute blocks. The final product has only ten lessons, but it is probably optimistic to claim that each can be delivered in only ten minutes. Nonetheless, I believe that a content-area junior high or high school teacher could use this curriculum to quickly build the reading skills of your weaker readers. This happens routinely in my one-on-one sessions and I’m usually working with third and fourth graders, so I see no reason why older students wouldn’t do as well, or even better.

Go to the Table of Contents, or return to the OnTrack Reading Home Page.