"Most learning problems are either management problems
or skill-related problems."

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.

home | about us | catalog | reading | math | freebies | links | homeschooling | shopping cart | webcam tutoring