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Tom's parents were desperate. Their 13 year-old son, whose IQ test showed him to be of superior intelligence, still couldn't read. He had been through sight word reading programs, various language arts programs, programs that drilled him in phonics, private tutoring sessions - nothing had worked. For years Tom's elementary school teachers had labeled him as lazy - which his parents readily believed. It seemed like such a logical explanation. But after the anxious parents became involved in drilling Tom with flash cards (both for sight words and later for phonics) they saw how hard their son tried. They realized that the problem couldn't be laziness. So what was it? In an effort to find out what was wrong with their obviously intelligent son the anxious parents, after spending years listening to the school experts, sought out their own testing experts. Many dollars later they had an additional thick dossier of test results. The conclusions of these extensive examinations again produced the labels of learning disabled, dyslexic, and a new set of alphabet abbreviations. The reports also determined that Tom had a deficit in phonemic awareness. This last label came as a surprise to the exasperated parents. How could Tom lack phoneme awareness when he had been exposed to years of phonic drills? "That can happen." they were reassured. "And nowadays we know how to deal with this kind of deficit. We will start Tom on a program that teaches phonemic awareness." So for the next twelve months Tom was drilled in how to take words apart according to their phonemes. A year later a discouraged Tom still wasn't reading. Nor had his phonemic awareness improved to a meaningful extent. He still had difficulty hearing what sounds compose a given word. And again, it wasn't as though Tom hadn't tried. By now the parents were frantic - concerned that without literacy their son would be unable to function in our information age. They gathered together the years of test results and expert opinions into what had become several thick dossiers and sought the help of a clinical colleague of mine. He, being well read in the neurological literature, was familiar with the research specifying phonemic awareness as the necessary precursor to reading ability. He also agreed with the findings that labeled Tom dyslexic and learning disabled because, as he told the parents, they made sense. Then he described to them the research demonstrating that children with dyslexia have brain patterns that are different from those of fluent readers. And how Shaywitz at Yale, using the functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), had shown that when dyslexic students try to determine the sounds that compose a word, certain parts of the brain don't light up the way they do for fluent readers. The parents were told again that the skill of phoneme awareness, which requires that words be taken apart according to the phonemes that compose them comes easily to fluent readers. However, this is not the case for the learning disabled or the dyslexics; which is the explanation why students lacking phonemic awareness cannot learn to read. In order to learn to read these students must be taught phoneme awareness. "Then why after being drilled for a year in phoneme awareness is Tom still unable to read?" said the by now angry parents. My clinical colleague's explanations had failed to make sense to them in light of what they and Tom had been through. As they put it, "After a year of being drilled in phonemic awareness Tom still is no good at it. And yet he's an excellent musician. According to his music teacher he has perfect pitch. Why if someone has perfect pitch should he have difficulty recognizing the sounds that make up words? And why despite having trouble recognizing the sounds that compose words has Tom become fluent in French within a few months after the French exchange student arrived in our house? phonemic awareness wasn't necessary for him to learn a foreign language. In fact our French exchange student says 'Tom sounds just like a native. He doesn't even have an American accent.' And you sure can't say that about the rest of us." My colleague who is a good listener concluded that the parents had raised some interesting questions. And he knew that the statement "But reading is different" wouldn't sound like an adequate explanation to them. Was there some way to bypass Tom's problem? At that point, he told me later, he remembered reports in scientific journals, symposia at Annual Meetings of the American Psychological Association, and the book IN SEARCH OF THE IQ CORRELATION, about our successes in teaching the severely retarded to read. He said to himself, "Surely, if such a truly handicapped group can learn to read with comprehension, superior Tom should have no problem succeeding." And that's how I became familiar with Tom's story. Tom's story in many ways is similar to my own. I still have difficulty being sure of the exact sounds that compose a word; which is one reason why I still cannot pass a much-used Reading Readiness Test. According to the test I'm not ready to enter first grade, not ready to be taught reading. Then how come I'm such a proficient reader and have a Ph.D. to prove it? Because, when I taught myself to read at age twelve I didn't know that phoneme awareness is the necessary prerequisite for learning to read. Instead I used the process of word building to teach myself reading. And I also combined word building with a technique that years later I would call "code approximation." This combination of word building and "code approximation" demands contextual involvement, thereby bypassing the problem that in English there are extensive variations among possible letter sounds. It is this last factor, the lack of consistency in the pronunciation of letters and letter combinations in English that makes phoneme awareness such a demanding and confusing skill. There are some languages where this is not the case, for example Italian. So what happens when Italians learn to read? Do they have the problem with dyslexia the way we do? Dr. Eraldo Paulesu of the University of Milan showed that Italians do not usually have the reading difficulty seen in French and English dyslexics; even when on trying to read nonsense words they have the pattern of reduced left-brain activity associated with dyslexia. Since there are no symptoms it is difficult to diagnose dyslexia in these Italians. Without the manifestation of impaired reading how do you know if someone is dyslexic? The answer is you don't, because by definition dyslexia is the inability to read. The explanation as to why so many English and French students are dyslexic while Italians are not is that in Italian specific letter combinations almost always stand for the same sounds. These findings are considered an important piece of evidence demonstrating that phoneme awareness is essential in learning to read and that its inability is a function of "a widespread network of regions (in the brain) critical to this ability malfunctioning." (Science News 3/7/01). Have you spotted the logical weakness in the assumption that Dr. Paulesu's findings support the theory that phonemic awareness is the prerequisite for learning to read? If the reason for reading difficulties is that identical letter combinations can produce different sounds, then how can the correct sound be determined? It is only through the context of the sentence or the paragraph. Therefore it is not phonemic awareness that is the prerequisite for learning to read English, but contextual involvement. For it is the context of a sentence or a paragraph that tells you the exact sound of letter combinations, that gives you their phonemes. The skill this requires I eventually called "code approximation." The word "read" is a good example of the importance of "code approximation" and how it works. "Read" is pronounced red or reed depending on the tense of the verb. Only in the context of a sentence or paragraph do you know which phoneme applies. And have you noticed that the statement claiming that dyslexia is a "disruption in the brain regions responsible for reading" is an assumption, not necessarily a fact? The assumption of a disruption, i.e. a defect or a pathology being responsible for dyslexia has permeated the popular media as well as the neurological literature. A recent report in SCIENCE NEWS (vol. 159, p. 205) refers to the observed difference in brain patterns as the "neurological flaw in dyslexia." But why would a difference in brain patterns necessarily signify a flaw, in other words pathology? Surely, differences in brain patterns can be just that - differences. Nor need these differences be of significance in the real world. Our research demonstrated that the difficulty some people have in taking words apart according to their phonemes can be bypassed with the technique I used on myself as a child - word building. Superficially, phonemic awareness and word building appear so similar that one can easily ask, "where's the difference." Both require a knowledge of letter sounds. But there the similarity ends. They are cognitively vastly different. For while word building requires only the approximate sounds of alphabet letters or diphthongs, phonemic awareness demands the interpretation of the exact sounds that compose a word. And very important, at the end of the process of building words with approximate letter sounds the student has the word, whereas taking a word apart according to its phonemes still doesn't yield the word. That's why you often see a confused expression on the faces of students who have dutifully taken a word apart according to its phonemes but now don't have a clue as to the end product - the word. All that work, and they still have nothing. The difference in the cognitive requirements of word building and phonemic awareness has meant that word building, when properly taught, is so easy that even four-year olds can master it. Phonemic awareness, on the other hand, is out of reach for many children and some adults who are then labeled learning disabled and/or dyslexic. When I taught myself to read at age twelve I bypassed my difficulties with phonemic awareness and instead zeroed in on how to build words with the letter sounds. At the same time I realized that you can't count on the exact sound a letter will make. But since I wasn't any good at making the fine sound discrimination required for phoneme awareness that didn't matter. And so my lack of ability for phoneme awareness - the inability that according to the Reading Readiness Test meant I wasn't ready for first grade - actually helped me learn to read. Realizing that letters don't always make the same sound, (which in English they don't) I used the power of context and focused on building words that made sense in the sentence. It worked. In a matter of weeks I had become a fluent reader both for meaning and enjoyment. Years later, when I developed the Ball-Stick-Bird reading system I used the understandings I had gleaned as a twelve-year old and added the additional knowledge gained through decades of research in child psychology. And so word building became something quite simple. Let's take as an example the word "antenna" that appears in the first book of the reading series. This is what you say when you teach word building to students:
Usually by this time the student who is building words in the context of a story has figured out what the word must be. If not, one continues with the procedure. Note: The above approach means that the student has to keep only one word-component in memory while adding another letter or diphthong.
I called this procedure with its emphasis on story context "code approximation." My intention was to help adolescent "dyslexic" students, like myself, learn to read. It certainly did exactly that - in record time. If you think that such an approach would only work with older and very bright children - that's what I thought. So it was most unexpected when "code approximation," which I was certain made advanced cognitive demands, was surprisingly easy for the severely retarded and normal four-year olds. Their successes were an important insight into the power of contextual language and how fundamental story cohesion is to human learning. Eventually, these findings led me to develop a new theory of cognitive organization - "story as the engram theory." Of course the stories have to be interesting. In order for language comprehension to truly help in word building the words the student deciphers must tell a tale that's exciting - intriguing. To facilitate this process I made use of developmental linguistics. The first two books tell their story in short sentences consisting mostly of nouns and simple verbs in the present tense. In this way only a few linguistically simple words have to be deciphered in order for a student to be drawn into the story. And so, already in the first lesson the student uses the power of meaning to read, thereby avoiding the bane of reading teachers - word calling. As the student becomes proficient in the later books, the more complicated parts of speech are introduced and the sentences become more involved. With these and other techniques based on perceptual and developmental psychology, numerous students, who never developed phonemic awareness, have become fluent readers in record time. Their success demonstrated that contrary to the conclusions of many experts, the much-heralded phonemic awareness is an unnecessary requirement for literacy. Further, as in the case of Tom, attempts to teach phonemic awareness can be counterproductive. Which it would also have been for me. A few weeks after the clinical colleague had Tom's parents get in touch with me he was finally reading beginner books. It had turned out to be so easy. And Tom, being a very bright 13 year-old, understood the simplicity of the solution to his reading problem. He was angry. "Why wasn't this tried before? All those experts - they made it look like it was all my fault." I tried to explain to him that even scientists can make mistakes. But he continued to be angry. It was not long thereafter that the story of Tom had a very happy ending. Several months after completing the Ball-Stick-Bird reading series the delighted parents called and said that Tom was deep into Einstein's popular book on relativity. "He's making up for all those wasted years!" Then a few weeks later Tom had the last word. After finishing Einstein's book he relayed the message, "That's what real science is about." |
