Learning to read - seems to be no structure to it

[grumpypants]

I'm a bit frustrated at the moment - ds (5) is in Y1 and brings home two books a week, one to read to me, and one to have read to him. There is just no continuity to the books he is meant to read and he is just not reading as well as i thought he would be by now. Older ds also couldn't read (worse than this) buy the end of Y1 and we hired a tutor for Y2 - he is now a free reader (Y3) and has a brilliant reading age.
The school read in groups, and apparently use several reading schemes.

Any thoughts?

I'm so not joining you guys in the SN conversation . This particular ds has none identified, and I could witter on forever about the other one.

I'm a SENCO on holidays so best not

Virtually all children, whatever their difficulties, unless they are connected with sight or hearing, can learn to decode. 'Sight' word learning greatly restricts their functionality.

One of the problems is that Msz would appear to be in a minority still - ie professionally knowledgeable about her subject. Most teacher training establishments do not cover phonics except in a very perfunctory way and many do not like teaching about the basic necessary skills. It's more boring for lecturers who are 'too posh to teach skills' to reach down to that level, and so they concentrate on higher learning skills. This is why so many children get left behind. If you cover all the basics to automaticity, there is no need for the plethora of materials that pour onto the market in a ceaseless stream.

Parents can be much more open-minded, instinctive and intuitive than those that they turn to - and then they get caught up in the vortex of 'dyslexia' treatments. The much more complex issues of Autism, Asperger's etc. do of course need professional guidance, but there are very, very few 'dyslexic' children if they receive the right instruction from the start and are allowed time to practice their fragile new-found skills.

'The much more complex issues of Autism, Asperger's etc. do of course need professional guidance'

Sure, they might need it, but they rarely get it. I do wonder about the teacher training tbh. My Dad taught at a Teacher training college and he said that every time he tried to fail a student teacher his decision was overruled by the college to meet targets.

Jolly Phonics DVD (wot I imagine many parents use) is disgraceful. DS' teacher is fantastic at phonics (except for the fact that she has been told that it won't work for ds) but I have come across a few early years people who really haven't got it.

allchildrenreading - what do you think of children with GDD? would you teach a child of 6 with a mental age of about 4 to read using phonics?

I have taught a child of 6 with a mental age of 3 to read using phonics. She now attends a Special School where they were surprised.

Yknow mrsz I really didn't like your attitude and tone earlier but it really, really comes over how devoted you are to your profession and the children you teach. I hope you are proud of what you achieve.

That was perhaps arrogant of me ...I was one of a team of devoted people who worked together to teach this little girl. She reads the words but has a limited understanding due to language delay.

It comes over anyway, not just in that last sentence. I loved teaching children to read and that comes through in your posts too, including and possibly especially in the ones I thought of as bolshy. I imagine that you will try dozens of different ways for different children until you find the one that fits.

Thank you

S'alright ..can't help but think rather sourly of some of the blank teachers my poor eldest was subject to in comparision. But there we are. He'll be alright he's a love.

Learning to read is about developing both lexical and sublexical cognitive abilities.
Unfortunately we are caught up in a world of program marketing war which only addresses on of these areas of cognitive development. There is no scientific support that any single type of teaching program is the one size that fits all, if anything it is just the opposite.
Dyslexia is learning disability or a Reading Disability, which has three cognitive subtypes, auditory, visual, and attentional. And these cognitive deficits are clinically or medically diagnosable. So dyslexic children have a cognitive deficit or disorder which creates problems using a man made communication system the visual notation of speech. And some of dyslexics due to the cognitive nature their disability are not able to use phonics and are not cognitively able to phonetically sound out words.

So what is really required is an Educational Research Council to scientifically investigate all the various claims of the various teaching programs made by the program makers, so see if they match the neurological learning needs of the various cognitive needs various groups of children may need.

once more in English please!

spanieleyes

I am dyslexic so I do not always know waht others may have miss understood, so may be if you be more specific about you require further information about

Apologies dolfrog, but some of your sentences don't make sense. I gather you would like further research into the variety of teaching programs available and how they match the needs of children with differing disabilities. The difficulty we have is that there is plenty of research available, but no-one seems to agree with much of it!

spanieleyes

Reading is about being able to decode the graphic symbols used by a society to represent the sounds of speech. There are different writing systems developed by different cultures, and their are different languages in each writing system. Each writing system requires a different set of cognitive skills to enable the decoding of the writing system. So for instance it is possible to be bilingual in both Japanese and English and to be only dyslexic in English

There are two cognitive processes involved in the task of reading, the lexical and the sublexical. The lexical is a whole word process, and the sublexical is a phonics process. Unfortunately the marketing needs of both whole language and phonics program makers fail to recognise that we all need to develop both cognitive abilities to enable both good decoding skills and goos comprehension skills.

With regard to dyslexia, there are two types of dyslexia. Developmental Dyslexia, which has a genetic origin, and has three cognitive subtypes: auditory, visual, and attentional. So auditory processing problems, visual processing problems , attention problems or any combination of the three can cause the dyslexic symptom. Alexia or acquired dyslexia is the result of a severe brain injury, stroke, dementia or progressive illness and is about loosing the ability to read. It has been from Alexia that the Psycholinguistic models of how we learn to read have evolved.

And i was suggesting that we need an Educational Research Council run on the same lines as the Medical Research Council to initially collate the existing international neurological research about how we learn to communicate, and store information, and then carry out further research to advise those who run the UK education system. And to research and clarify the claims made by program makers who wish to sell their products to our schools.

Wow! How do you know this amount of detail? I am one of those sadly lacking teachers who is attempting to teach children after teacher training which never touched on SEN.

UnSerpentQuiCourt

This has come from having to advocate for my sons who have Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) which is the cause of their and my dyslexia. And the only way to get the message across is by finding the research papers that explain these complex issues when you have to take on the education system.

I have a 3 web pages that list my PubMed Research paper collections. Communications and Neurology collections (including reading), Dyslexia and Related Issues by topic, by year of publication, and by my favourite leading researchers, Invisible Disabilities which includes the disorders which can cause dyslexia.

Noting articles for further reference.

UnSerpentQuiCourt

you could create an online account at CiteULike where you can create your own research paper library, and join Research paper sharing groups such as these.
LanguageAndBrain - library 880 articles
Developmental Dyslexia - library 374 articles
Special Education - library 88 articles
Human Memory Systems - library 98 articles

Bonsoir - on a list serv with which I am involved the history of two adopted sisters and their mother's determination to teach them to read has been chronicled over a lengthy period. The girls are the only known children in the world with both a nuclear DNA mutation and a mitochondrial DNA mutation. Both have severe and multiple special needs, most especially the older girl who ?looks and acts more like (a child with) an IQ in the 60s but tests out at 38 with scores ranging from 20-120 . ' She also has severe epilepsy, the most severe stutter in her speech therapist's opinion, and sight and hearing problems. At the age of 12 she had become a book-work and was the best reader in her year in the Special School she attends. Her younger sister, with an IQ in the 60s, learned to read at a quicker pace.
Downs Syndrome, Williams Syndrome, and children with ADP have all been taught to read. Instruction needs to be very focused indeed.
I'm ashamed to say, that even after a good google, I can't find a definition for GDD. Can you enlighten me?

allchildrenreading

GDD I think is Global Developmental Delay, which has yet to catch on in the USA where most the information Google locates is found, and where most research regarding the related issues has been done.

The real problem has been to identify how children actually learn to read, which is not really about the actual teaching program being used. the Neuroimaging research of the last decade has identified the various cognitive processes involved in the task of reading, and no single teaching program can be considered to be a one size fits all based on neurological evidence.

Global Developmental Delay is a general term used to describe a condition that occurs during the developmental period of a child's life. It's one of those "labels" that covers a huge range of conditions. Many of these children have a delay of about three years (as was the case with the child I taught) and results in significant limitations in communication, self-care, awareness of danger, cognitive ability. Common signs may be

delayed acquisition of milestones: the child is late in sitting up, crawling, walking
limited reasoning or conceptual abilities
fine/gross motor difficulties
poor social skills/judgment
aggressive behaviour as a coping skill (as was the case in another child we taught who was diagnosed ASD but GDD was also suspected0
communication problems

dolfrog - "GDD I think is Global Developmental Delay, which has yet to catch on in the USA where most the information Google locates is found, and where most research regarding the related issues has been done."

Yes, GDD = Global Developmental Delay. I am fascinated to learn that GDD is not widely recognised in the US. Is it specifically a UK term?

It's quite common for different labels to be used in this way. My own LA doesn't recognise dyslexia and uses the umbrella term SpLD.
As GDD can have a number of causes including Down's Syndrome, CP, FAS labels vary.