When 80 Gecko Mountain was born, one of our goals was to share what we’ve learned candidly. What we do is inspired by the children we work with.

Myth No. 1: Learning to read is a natural process.

English is complex and seemingly illogical at times. For many children, specific decoding, word-recognition, and reading comprehension skills must be taught directly and systematically. We know from four decades of scientific research that reading is a structured activity that relies on phonics or the ability to manipulate the sound of words. Reading does not develop naturally.

Myth No. 2: Children will eventually learn to read by memorization.

Most children are taught to read by memorizing printed words and connecting one or more of the letters to the sounds they hear when the word is pronounced. Research supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development indicates that children must be aware that spoken words are composed of individual sounds and to be able to link the sounds with the letters to become fluent readers. This means that you cannot learn to read by memorization.

Myth No. 3: Skilled reading involves using picture cues to guess words.

Skilled readers do not need to rely on pictures in word identification because they can read most words automatically. It’s the beginning and struggling readers who are often taught to compensate for weak decoding by guessing an unfamiliar word based on the first letter of the picture. This assumes the picture is clear, unambiguous and actually makes the sound intended by the exercise.

Myth No. 4: Don’t worry, it’s never too late to improve literacy skills and instruction

That is partially correct. Learning to read at any age is possible, but as a high-schooler who has been masking and hiding their struggles, learning to read at a primary level words will feel like a personal attack on their intelligence. It can be very disheartening for the adult who finds reading laboured and exhausting as they struggle with comprehension. Older students can learn to read, improve vocabulary and gain comprehension as long as they are convinced that is a good investment of their time and are motivated.

Myth No. 5: Balanced Literacy curriculum is ideal

Balanced literacy modern redressing of whole language philosophy that assumes learning to read is natural and just needs to be nurtured. Give a kids some good books with some illustrative pictures and the children will learn to read with some minor guidance. It comes from the belief that since humans naturally learn to talk (as supported by research) that humans also naturally learn to read (debunked by research).

Structured Literacy instruction is an umbrella term used by the International Dyslexia Association to encompass evidence-based programs and approaches. Structured Literacy approaches are effective at helping students with learning disabilities in the area of reading, such as dyslexia, learn to read and write. Structured Literacy is explicit, systematic teaching that focuses on phonological awareness, word recognition, phonics and decoding, spelling, and syntax at the sentence and paragraph levels. It turns out that it isn’t just good for those with learning challenges, but for most average students as well.

Ultimately, the ability to read words (word recognition) and understand those words (language comprehension) lead to reading being a more enjoyable activity, which increases the learning potential of the reader.

A good reader will read once while a struggling reader will read three times. First for decoding, second for fluency and third for comprehension.

Phonemic Awarewness

Phonological awareness is ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds in the spoken language.

Skills include:

• Identifying words in a sentence: How many words do you hear in this phrase: Big animals like eating spagehtti.
• Splitting and blending syllables: How many syllables are in table or napkin?
• Rhyming: Find a word that rhymes with bat – mat, cat, fat, etc.

Phonemes are the individual sounds that make up a word. They are the foundation of language.

For example, the word “last” is made up of four phonemes (sounds) : /l/ /a/ /s/ /t/

The word “lash” is made up of three phonemes: /l/ /a/ /sh/

Advanced phonemic awareness concepts are essential to reading and spelling. The ability to manipulate, blend, delete, add and substitute the sounds to voicing the word correctly; a process required to be fluent in reading connected text.

Phonics

Phonics is the letter (grapheme) to sound (phonemic) relationship that is organized, logical and predictable between written letters and spoken sounds. The letter “m” represents the sound /m/.

Vocabulary

Effective vocabulary involves more than memorizing definitions or unfamiliar words. But context to derive meanings, find root morphemes, mapping word derivations, understanding word origins and paraphrasing idiomatic or special uses for words.

Fluency

Fluency is the ability to read words accurately, quickly and with proper expression.

Comprehension

Reading comprehension is the ability to understand what we read and remember the relevant knowledge or information.

Children learn to read from Kindergarten to Grade Three. After that children read to learn.

Most children tend to outgrow letter reversals as they get stronger at reading. Through discovery and building phonics skills they will find that these are actually different characters with different sounds. As experienced readers we take for granted much of this right up until we try to figure out if the character in the middle of that jumble of letters and numbers is the letter O or the number 0.

But what if you child isn’t outgrowing it on their own or even if you want the help them along in their reading quest. Luckily there are things we can do to help struggling readers minding their ‘b’s, ‘d’s, ‘p’s and ‘q’s. First work with one letter at a time. Start with ‘b’ as it is first in the alphabet, ‘b’ comes before ‘d’.  When focussing on a letter engage more than one of your child’s senses. They could trace the letter on a piece of paper or a touch screen while sounding out the sound of the letter. This is called multi sensory learning. Don’t introduce the next letter until they have a good grasp of the previous one. Once they know the difference between ‘b’ and ‘d’ then move on to others like ‘p’ and ‘q’. Do the same with numbers since some kids might confuse ‘b’ and ‘6’; or ‘p’, ‘q’ and ‘9’.

Many people think that letter reversal is a sign of dyslexia, but actually it is quite common in beginning readers. Through exercises and practice most people overcome letter reversal. In fact there is no downside to grabbing some multi sensory activities to help any new readers.  If letter reversal continues it could be a sign of something more than just letter reversals.  If a child is in late primary school and still mixing ‘b’s and ‘d’s there may be some visual discrimination issues. If it turns out the reader does have a language or visual processing difficulty then it is best to be dealt with by a specialist, sooner than later.

Reading level systems are often used by schools to assess and track their students reading comprehension skills. The reading system analyzes books based on sentence structure, vocabulary, even length of the book. Levels are assigned to books, and student assessments are used to determine which “level” is suitable for that child. But each reading level system uses a different algorithm to analyze the text within a book. For example Lexile measures and analyzes semantic difficulty (word frequency or repetition) and syntactic complexity where Accelerated Reader assesses books based on page count, numbers of syllables per word, and average words per sentence.

While these systems may seem somewhat similar, the weight each places on different data points varies and, as such, books are ‘leveled’ quite differently. One might assume that book might at least appear in the same order from one metric to another, but this is not the always the case. Leveling systems and level readers are oh so arbitrary.

Teachers are often mandated by their districts to assess their students, but are these assessments giving the actual picture of decoding, fluency or reading comprehension strengths and weaknesses? While determining a book’s ‘levels’ may vary by assessment methods, determining learner’s ‘levels’ are often non-existent. Before we can assign ‘levels’ to learners it is important to assess their reading skills. What are their abilities in letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, comprehension et al. An effective reading program includes assessments of all of the skills needed to make successful readers. Further without a baseline assessment of learner’s skills how can we measure if they are actually improving or just as important where the instructor should be spending time helping the reader.