Reading Problems
A Brief Summary and Overview
This summary of Reading Problems, their symptoms and
activities to help your problem reader is based on information from the
following two sources:
1. "The Alphabetic Principle and Learning to Read" which can be
downloaded from the main website of the Educational Resources
Information Center (ERIC) of the US Department of Education by Clicking Here and
searching for the title.
2. "Dyslexia Basics" an article by the International Dyslexia Association which can be viewed by Clicking
Here.
Essentially all children, even children with reading problems, are quite fluent in
speaking their native language when first encountering the language in
print.
The vast majority of children when placed in a speech environment can
hardly be prevented from learning to talk. This is the result of the
human trait of being able to co-articulate various sounds such that
complex combinations of sounds are possible. Lower primates and other
animals cannot accomplish this co-articulation and thus cannot learn to
talk, that is, speak a language.
The fact that essentailly all children can learn to talk but a significant percentage of children have early
reading problems leads to the question - What is required of a child in
reading a language but not in speaking or listening to a language?
The following is at least a partial list of answers to the above question:
- Discrimination of visual shapes of letters
- Learning to identify letters
- Learning to associate letters with the correct sounds
- Mastering phonemic awareness - associating the correct sounds to combinations of letters and words
Comprehensive studies have shown that the most prevalent difficulty
that problem readers have is the last one - mastering phonemic
awareness: discerning and associating sounds to combinations of letters
and words.
A Swedish Study with kindergarten children concluded that: "The most
powerful predictors of later reading and writing skills in the entire
battery turned out to be those requiring phonemic awareness,
specifically the analytic ability to manipulate phonemes in words. Poor
readers showed no particular deficiency in non-linguistic tasks such as
sorting musical tone sequences, but were consistently deficient in
phonological and phonemic abilities."
I am not trained as a reading educator nor am I knowledgeable in reading
disabilities. I refer you to the above references for further reading
into these areas. The reference on dyslexia discusses the definition,
symptoms, potential causes, prevalence and treatment of dyslexia.
However, from my personal experience seeing the effects of applying
systematic phonics instruction with my own children and grandchildren
and from the extensive reading I have done on this topic, I believe that
the vast majority if not all children will benefit from the type of
systematic phonics instruction we provide and reference here on this
website.
If you want to learn more about what the NICHD has documented
as the best way for Learning to Read Click Here to access our page on
Teaching Reading.
If you want to better understand the foundation and approach we
use in the Reading Activities we provide and recommend on this website
Click Here to access our page on Learning to Read.
If you want to start your child down the road to improved reading Click Here for Phonics Lessons -
Reading Lesson #1.
Click Here for our Reading Activities page
Return from Reading Problems to Homework-Help-Secrets
|
