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Teaching
the Reluctant Reader (Page 2)
Skill
Problem or Management Problem?
Most learning problems, including difficulty in learning to read, fall
into one or both of two categories. They are either management problems
or they are skill-related problems. Sometimes a skill-related problem
is also overlaid with a behavior or motivational problem. The child has
difficulty reading and consequently resists attempts to be taught to improve.
Each type of problem requires a different solution. Where both problems
exist simultaneously, both solutions are likely needed to solve them.
Management
Issues
Management problems deal predominantly with motivation, the willingness
to perform. The student has the necessary skills but chooses not to use
them or does so half-heartedly. These reluctant readers lose or forget
their materials, can't find their place on the page, are gazing about
when they should be reading or following along, tend to fidget, squirm
and lose their ability to pay attention for more than a few minutes. But
when they do try, they can read quite well.
Motivational issues are usually best resolved using behavior management
techniques. Giving appropriate praise when the child attends to the task,
providing selected activities after a job well done or developing a point
system to allow the child to earn a reward are often successful. Clearly
delineating the expected behavior, the reward, and the process by which
the reward is earned is the focal point of the discussion with the child
who needs to try harder. The reward is only attainable after the hard
work has been done. Grandma's Rule applies—First you eat your spinach,
then you get your cake. If you choose not to eat your spinach, Grandma
may get your cake. Consistency is the key to success with this approach.
Finding an acceptable and appropriate reward is the challenge.
Skill
Problems
Skill problems occur when the student does not have the necessary skill
and despite their most concerted efforts cannot perform adequately. The
solution to this problem is better instruction and/or more practice to
reach a measurable aim. This is a much more complex issue. Much of it
can be resolved with improved instruction and monitored practice to reach
specific levels of performance.
Most skill related problems occur because the teaching is flawed. In turn,
the teaching is flawed because it was never well designed to instruct
the student in the first place. This is particularly true in unstructured
reading programs where the words the child is expected to read are not
carefully taught before the child is expected to read them. The stories
are interesting but the vocabulary is uncontrolled and results in the
child guessing at a lot of words or trying to figure out the story by
interpreting the meaning from a picture. While many fast learners can
survive this kind of curriculum, this approach is lethal for children
with reading problems.
Determining the source of the child's skill problems means examining the
major tasks taught in reading and seeing how well the child performs on
each of those tasks and to see how well the reading program is designed
to teach these tasks. We make the assumption that each task will be taught
and that the child will never be asked to perform a task that we have
not explicitly taught in the program.
Phonics Problems
The first major task in teaching a child to read is to teach them the
relationship between some symbol, a letter or letter combination, and
the sound that it makes. This is generally referred to as phonics instruction.
Parents and teachers do a reasonable job of teaching children the sounds
that various letters and letter combinations make. When there are problems,
it is usually that the child reverses letters like "b" and "d",
or "p" and "q". This failure to discriminate some
sounds, especially "b" and "d" often leads to the
child being considered learning disabled. It may lead to costly educational
assessment, labelling and even placement into special education programs.
Much of this is unnecessary once you understand the nature of the problem
faced by the child.
These four letters become confused, not through any deficit in the child,
but because of the fact that they are virtually identical, except for
their orientation in space. They share every other characteristic. They
each have a stick and a ball. Orientation in space is a dimension we very
rarely use in order to determine what something is or what it is not.
The world teaches us to expect constancy when objects change their orientation
in space. At an air show, a jet plane flying overhead is still seen as
a jet plane regardless of its orientation. It can be diving, climbing,
flipped upside down or in some other orientation. It's still a jet plane.
b
d
p q
But
with these four letters, orientation is the only reliable way to tell
one from another. They also sound a lot alike. They are all short sounds.
"b" sounds a lot like "d" or "p" or "q".
To the extent that letters look alike and sound alike, they are much more
likely to become confusing for the beginning reader. So how do we teach
these sounds so that they will not become a problem?
The only real solution is to space the teaching of these letters out so
that one is well learned before the next one is introduced. You can pair
"q" with "u" because "qu" are almost always
seen together. That makes it look different and more easily learned and
gets rid of 25% of the problem. For other three sounds, you now have to
decide on the order in which to introduce them into the reading program.
Most reading programs include stories. It is fairly difficult to write
a story without using the word "and." This fact might dictate
that you teach "d" before the remaining two sounds. The next
sound should then be separated by a large number of lessons, and should
never appear in a word or in a story until it has been taught. That means
that the vocabulary of every story must be carefully controlled.
This kind of attention to the instructional design of a reading program
eradicates a lot of phonics problems before they begin. Not everyone attends
to this level of careful design. Some programs introduce all of the short
vowels together at the beginning of the program. Short vowels also share
a lot of common characteristics both visually and auditorally. While many
children will still learn from this somewhat sloppy design, such a presentation
adds unnecessary hardship for those who have difficulty learning the phonics
necessary for reading.
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