OnTrack Reading

During the summer of 1998 I managed to acquire a few paying clients of my new reading business based primarily on recommendations of the mother of the three brothers I had taught earlier.

In subjective terms, what I observed about nearly all of the children I worked with that summer is that their confidence grew, as did their reading performance. However, guided by Diane McGuinness’s comment that reading instructors are somewhat notorious for avoiding objective testing, I did do pre-testing and post-testing of their reading levels.

What I found was not particularly encouraging. Even though the children clearly were more comfortable in decoding words and had much better underlying phonics skills, they did not advance more than a few months when they were retested. And remember, I was working with them for a few months, so they should have advanced that much just to stay even.

The real story of these early clients was only clear a year later. Two different parents decided to have me work again with their children. In both cases, their measured reading level had jumped a full two years since the last time I’d seen them! This was, incidentally, similar to the experience with each of the three brothers, all of whom finally started to make normal gains in reading ability after completing instruction (even though they still lagged compared to peers.)

And, remember, all of these were children who had lagged significantly in reading ability, making at best a half-year’s gain over each complete school year. The message contained in all this is that it is possible for an untrained person can use the curriculum in Reading Reflex to make a significant difference in their child’s reading ability.

In addition, both children who returned later retained the training they had received in their phonics skills of 1) blending, 2) segmenting and 3) phoneme manipulation. They also retained most of the code knowledge they had learned the year earlier.

In fact, one of the strongest reasons for obtaining a copy of Reading Reflex is the excellent job the authors do in the area of essential reading skills. While I have, over time, developed most of my own materials to use with my clients, I still use the basic code materials from Reading Reflex to instill the essential skills of blending and segmenting, and I use them almost exactly as instructed in the book.

Over the past several years I have concluded that there are two primary causes of poor reading, or dyslexia, if you prefer. The first cause is not dyslexia at all, but is instead the result of using reading curricula that are insufficient for teaching the necessary skills, imparting the necessary code knowledge and, above all, convincing children that English spellings are based on the individual sounds in words. This topic, phonics, will be given due consideration as this website is developed.

The second cause of poor reading actually is dyslexia, as I interpret the term. Next I’ll briefly describe the training I underwent to be followed by an unexpected turn in my journey of helping children overcome their reading problems and how it eventually shaped my views on dyslexia.

Next: My Training, or return to the OnTrack Reading Home Page