OnTrack Reading

Hi,

I see that one of your members has posted a link here. I would put this information on your board if I get signed up, but for now it appears the information that is most relevant to your current discussion is a program I’ve written up called the Junior High Phonics Course.

You can get to it from the link above or by scanning down the sidebar of this site. Some of you might also find the information on vision skills interesting. It’s my belief that kids who fail to learn to read in spite of having access to a good phonics program are usually suffering from undiagnosed and untreated vision issues.

I’ve been slow in posting lately as I’ve been trying to get my Advanced Code Workbook restructured as a printable file so I can possibly make it available on-line from an on-demand publisher. It’s been a long project.

I’ve finished adding six new PDF files of word lists for the spellings of the /sh/ sound to the Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling.

In the OnTrack Reading curriculum, the sound /sh/ is explicitly taught as having six spellings, the most common one, sh, plus ch in words like chef, and then four spellings that share the common characteristics of all being digraphs ending with the letter i and all representing the /sh/ sound in the middle of words, never at the beginning or end. These four spellings are ti, ci, si and ssi with examples being patient, special, mansion and mission.

Another curricular approach would be to teach suffixes like tion, cion, sion and ssion, and this might be the best way to go if words like special and patient didn’t also come into play, because then the number of suffixes grows to a point where a child is being asked to do more or less the equivalent of memorizing whole words, a strategy that has disastrous effects when used as a primary reading strategy at the outset.

I’ve used this approach for six or seven years now, after first trying the suffix-oriented approach, and in my opinion this one works much better, plus it’s consistent with the sound-by-sound decoding approach that I use in the rest of the curriculum.

Incidentally, there are a lot of ways to spell the /sh/ sound and the word lists cover most of them. However, I could only locate two words int the 7,000-word database using ce for /sh/ (ocean and licorice) and two using sci (conscience and conscious) so there are no lists for those two spellings. I realize there are other examples, but they didn’t make the children’s dictionary I used to create the database.

The word lists for the /sh/ spelling are currently at the very bottom of the Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling.

I finally managed to put together a Page discussing the Convergence Insufficiency Study that was published in January of 2005.

There you will find a link to the complete article describing the study, as well as a link to a very useful questionnaire used to determine if your child has the symptoms of convergence insufficiency. I’ve also linked to the three charts of results that were obtained in the study so you don’t have to plow through the whole thing yourself.

The study appears to have been well designed and is, I believe, part of a larger study being done at several locations to determine whether convergence insufficiency is best treated by vision therapy. What is particularly impressive is that the article was published in the Archives of Ophthalmology in spite of the Academy of Ophthalmology’s longstanding policy statement opposing vision therapy as a viable treatment. This is, in some sense, progress. Maybe someday everybody will get on the same page with all this and we can start to catch all the children that are currently being missed.

Again, the study is discussed on the Page Convergence Insufficiency Study

The Word Lists for the consonant sound /n/ have now been added to the bottom of the Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling.

One value of these word lists is, I think, that you gain an appreciation for how common any particular spelling of a sound turns out to be. For instance, I was somewhat surprised to find that the number of words with the gn spelling of the /n/ sound was so short. Remember, the database contains about 7,000 words taken from a children’s dictionary, so that short list is about all they’re going to run into for a while anyway.

Also, please note my treatment of the ne spelling. There are already a lot of ending digraphs which have the letter e at the end, such as ge, ce and ve, so the approach I’ve taken in the OnTrack Reading curriculum is to always treat the split-vowel situations (a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e and u-e) as representing just one sound for decoding purposes. This, however, means that a way must found to explain a words like gone, some and infinite. I’ve chosen to treat the ne, me and te in those words as ending consonant spellings. Children readily accept this and it has the advantage of training them to always first try the split vowel construct to see if they recognize the word, and only then to fall back on a different vowel sound and an ending consonant digraph.

By the way, I said yesterday that without vision problems most kids would just learn to read and word lists, cute tricks, etc., would not be necessary instructional tools. I should have added that I believe this would be the case because once the vision-challenged are taken out of the mix, we would find that a decent phonics program would work for everyone, so a decent phonics program would, in fact, actually be utilized. As many of you know, this is not always the case in today’s classrooms. I wanted to clarify that, as I don’t want to sound like reading is something that kids naturally “pick up.” It does still have to be taught.

Again the Page with the new word lists for the consonant sound /n/ is Consonant Sounds by Spelling.

Word lists for the various spellings of the /f/ sound have been added to the Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling.

It contains one list that treats ugh as a spelling of /f/ in six words (and their derivatives,) those being laugh, cough, rough, tough, trough and enough. This is a relatively trivial matter, but the reasons for doing so are discussed at the bottom of that particular word list. As explained there, the alternative is to treat the digraph gh as representing two sounds, the /g/ in ghost and the /f/ in rough. There are disadvantages in doing so, as detailed in the explanation.

Once I get the consonant word lists completed, I’m intending to refocus on the vision side of things as I believe that vision problems and “dyslexia” as we understand it are inextricably linked and this is the far more important area to investigate. In fact, dyslexia wasn’t so common, I suspect all of the focus on word lists would disappear. People would just learn to read. Word lists are just one more work-around that we utilize in our quest to help kids learn how English is structured. But we are more or less forced to take these steps because the dyslexics infer so little information about print on their own. Essentially, we’re getting the cart before the horse in much of what we do in reading instruction, I think.

But enough on that. Here again is the link to the Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling. The four lists of /f/ spellings are currently at the bottom of that Page.

The Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling now has an extensive collection of word lists covering the various spellings of the /g/ and the /j/ sounds.

The /g/ and /j/ sounds are listed together because of the overlap of the letter g which can be the /g/ sound in words like grab and got as well as the /j/ sound in words like gem and gist.

In the OnTrack Reading curriculum, a Rule of g is only obliquely referenced because it is not as reliable as the Rule of c. Nonetheless, a very similar pattern does occur and it involves the same trailing vowel letters, e, i and y. While I will teach every client, no matter how young, the Rule of c once they get into longer multisyllable words, I rarely get into anything like a Rule of g except with some of the older clients (5th grade and up or so) who might be more likely to deal with the inconsistencies encountered.

Besides, teaching the digraphs ge and dge for the sound /j/ goes a long ways toward training the concept that the letter g usually represents the /j/ sound in front of the letter e and that is the most prevalent situation covered by the “rule” anyway.

Again, the Consonant Sounds by Spelling word lists are at the bottom of the Guide on the Sidebar.

New word lists for consonant sounds can be found on the Guide Page Consonant Sounds by Spelling. For now, the Word List section of the Guide is at the bottom of the Sidebar’s Table of Contents, so you have to scroll down the Sidebar quite a ways to find it if you don’t use the link here.

In the OnTrack Reading curriculum, vowel sounds are clustered together for instructional purposes when there are overlaps of pronunciation. For example, all of the /ow/ spellings, ou, ow and ough, can also be /oe/ spellings, so it makes sense to teach /ow/ and /oe/ one after the other. Clients then easily see the relationship between the two sounds and their spellings.

Similar overlaps in pronunciation also occur in the consonant sounds. There is some overlap, for example, between the /s/ and /z/ sound where the letter s and the digraphs se and ss can represent either a /s/ or a /z/ sound in different words.

So, the consonants are organized first by sound, and within each sound, all of the common spellings of that sound have word lists. Nearby that group of lists will be any other group of lists which have spellings which overlap with the first group. Take a look at the Page to at Consonant Sounds by Spelling to see what I mean. It’s easier to understand by just looking at the titles of the word lists.

The final step in the phonics lesson plan for older students is to add three exceptions to the Main Rule of chunking after each vowel sound, followed by a summation. These Lessons are listed below. They can be accessed from the Table of Contents of the Junior High Phonics Course.

Lesson 7: Exception 1 - Markers
Lesson 8: Exception 2 - Double Consonants
Lesson 9: Exception 3 - “Hard to Say”
Lesson 10: Summing Up

I’ve tried to get all of the necessary steps added to the Junior High Phonics Course as quickly as I could, and as I said earlier, I’ll no doubt be making some changes later. In addition, if you decide that you want to try this with your students, bear in mind that you’ll have to judge for yourself how much additional time to set aside for reviewing the concepts taught earlier in the lessons.

I do believe that the best way to review this information, once you’ve taught it to your class, is to just continue to use it. this is quite easy to do if you introduce new vocabulary in an organized manner as it’s encountered. All you have to do is make sure and write the words on the board, define them, and then chunk them according to the procedures being laid out in the Junior High Phonics Course and your students will then be getting a continuous review of the chunking process that they can then apply to other unfamiliar words they encounter in their content-area reading.

This method is exceptionally effective, and it builds confidence because it is so straightforward and easy to use. Over time you will see your students’ code knowledge increase as well, since you will continually be pointing out the sounds represented by the various letters and digraphs in the vocabulary words.

The word lists containing 2-syllable, 3-syllable and 4-syllable words organized by vowel sounds are done. Today I’ve added the last five PDF files covering the /oul/ (as in could), /oy/, /aw/ and /err/ (as in merry) sounds plus the /u/ sound spelled with the digraph ou. They are all located in the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.

I’ll start on the consonant sounds next, and they will come in handy because I need to generate a list of words using the markers ck, tch, dge, dg and x for the Junior High Phonics Course that I’ve started laying out in the Guide.

On another note, I was browsing various websites to see how they handled vowel sounds and I couldn’t help notice how many curricula have been designed which seem to have lost sight of the fact that reading and writing are tools, and not an end in themselves. It appears to me that hours of valuable class time would be wasted if students were being asked to spend time on many of the activities of the sort described on the sites I visited.

I firmly believe that we best learn how to use a tool when we use it for the purpose it was intended. Yes, we need to understand the intricacies of a tool well enough to maintain and use it properly, but we do not need to study the tool itself in depth. We need, instead, to use the tool for the purpose it was intended. When it comes to reading curricula, it almost seems as if we spend more time studying a word and how it is put together, how it looks, how it feels, etc., than we do using the word productively. Words exist to convey meaning, and we need to get right to that as soon as students understand their rudimentary construction.

This is why, I think, the Spalding Method is such an effective language curriculum. It gets to the meat of the matter in a hurry, while overlooking none of the essentials for understanding the tools themselves. But it doesn’t get lost in the tools. Once letters and sounds are understood, and words are constructed based upon them, the curriculum gets down to the business of writing and reading, and in that order, writing before reading. In that way, writing and reading take their rightful place in a child’s mind as a tool for conveying meaning.

But enough of that. The completed word lists organized by the nineteen vowel sounds in the OnTrack Reading curriculum are here on the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.

I’ve begun to build the Junior High Phonics Course now and have completed the first six lesson plans, which are titled:

Lesson 1: Introducing the Main Rule
Lesson 2: First Vowel Sounds
Lesson 3: Applying the Main Rule
Lesson 4: Learning the Rule of c
Lesson 5: Segmenting and Digraphs
Lesson 6: Testing the Vowel Sound

They can all be accessed from the Page titled Table of Contents.

Each lesson is theoretically structured to last about ten minutes, but these are untested lessons in that regard, so expect surprises on the time requirements. I would appreciate hearing back from anyone who actually attempts teaching this proposed course, so that I can improve on the lesson plans and fine tune the timing.

Also, a warning. I’ve given this all considerable thought and do have substantial experience following essentially what I’m recommending in the one-on-one teaching environment, but I am writing this up in here as a first draft effort and I will likely make structural changes if I realize I missed something along the way that needs to be covered. In other words, these lesson plans will probably change over the next month or so until I get everything sorted out properly.

As one example, it occurs to me that many older students are terrible segmenters. In other words, they can’t accurately tell you the component sounds in a word. Segmenting is easily taught, especially to older students, but it does need to be a step in the process somewhere along the line, and not too far into the lesson plans either.

So, keeping these cautionary words in mind, take a look at the additions to the Junior High Phonics Course by going to the Table of Contents.