The Three Pillars of Poor Reading
Does your child have dyslexia or display symptoms of it? Does your child’s oral reading make you cringe? Does your child guess at more words while reading?
That’s because a lot of bad reading habits have set in.
Kids with dyslexia learn differently than other kids. That doesn’t mean they aren’t smart. By definition, kids with dyslexia have average or above average intelligence. It does mean they need a different way to be taught so they can decode and read with confidence.
Decoding is the Backbone of Reading
Decoding is the backbone of reading. It is the process of translating print into speech by quickly matching a letter or combination of letters to their sounds. In addition, to decode you must be able to recognize the patterns that make syllables and words.
More simply put, decoding is the process of sounding out words.
Children with dyslexia struggle to decode words. It’s as if decoding is like a foreign language to them. And to make matters worse, these kids are usually only provided with traditional reading programs that cater to the masses instead of being given reading programs that make sense to them – programs that speak their “learning language”.
A Lot of Kids Have Dyslexia
Did you know that twenty percent of children in school have dyslexia? And most of these kids don’t ever receive the kind of help they need. Even if they do qualify for Special Education and receive an IEP (Individualized Education Plan), it’s rarely targeted exercises to improve processing abilities. Instead, these kids customarily receive a watered-down version of the same traditional reading programs that didn’t work for them all day long.
It’s no wonder that forty-eight percent of our prison population is dyslexic!
But here’s the good news. Kids with dyslexia can be taught to decode and to decode well.
The problem is that the wrong approach is taken. We know these kids learn differently, yet traditional programs continue to try to teach kids with dyslexia as if they learned like everyone else! Flashcards, phonics worksheets, and “drill and kill” methods simply do not work for kids with dyslexia.
Bad Habits Set In
If your child struggles to sound out words, then most likely a whole slew of bad decoding habits have set in. This is because your child wasn’t taught the right way from the start.
Kids with dyslexia are usually hands-on or tactile learners. This means they learn by doing instead of seeing or hearing. Since kids with dyslexia are so smart, they often slip through the detection and intervention cracks. By the time someone notices what’s going on, too many bad habits have set in.
Children with dyslexia need to move to learn. That’s because “doing” is their learning language! When forced to learn primarily through visual and auditory means, they shut down. They don’t understand what’s being taught.
That’s when bad habits set in.
Skills are Missed
Because teaching methods weren’t correct, skills were missed. Instead of learning all letter sounds, including long and short vowel sounds with automaticity, some of them weren’t mastered. When your child goes to read, there’s a pause and it slows down the flow of learning.
Another thing happens. Kids with dyslexia can usually blend one or two letters together, but after that, if not taught correctly, they falter. They sometimes panic at too many letters. Or letters might be reversed, upside down, slanted, moving, or wiggling.
When panic sets in, decoding skills fly out the window. Kids with dyslexia resort to bad habits. They don’t know what else to do, because they lack strategies to decode words. They’re also usually weak in phonemic awareness, and this causes another big problem.
Phonemic Awareness Helps Kids with Dyslexia
Research tells us that kids with dyslexia do better when they have strong phonemic awareness skills. According to Wikipedia, phonemic awareness is defined as a part of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest mental units of sound that help to differentiate units of meaning (morphemes).
For decoding to be strong, phonemic awareness must be strong. The two are linked tightly together. Your child must have the ability to recognize and manipulate phonemes if decoding skills can be used with ease.
So…What’s a Phoneme?
Phonemes are any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in our language that distinguish one word from another. They are small units of sound that words are built upon. Examples of phonemes are “ut”, “ag”, “im”, “us”, and “op”. There are forty-four phonemes in our language, and as you add combinations of letters and syllables onto these phonemes, words are built.
Kids with dyslexia understand phonemes. They “get” them instinctively. Yet unless they are taught to become familiar in a way they can understand, they fail to use and manipulate them, and this equates to poor decoding skills.
Teaching Phonemes the Right Way
If taught to use phonemes with color, large motor movement, pictures, brain-based learning, cross-lateral movement, and a multi-sensory approach, then these kids can soar. Reading scores are raised. Fluency increases, and comprehension climbs.
Grades are improved, because reading is the most important subject of all, carrying over into all subject areas.
The Three Pillars of Poor Reading
If your child has dyslexia or struggles to read in any way, then The Three Pillars of Poor Reading have most likely popped up at one time or another.
If you’ve heard your child guess at words while reading, stammer, stutter, lack expression, take a long time to read a word, or lack the ability to sound out words, then The Three Pillars have probably reared their ugly heads!
There are three main pillars of poor reading. They are guessing at words, memorizing words, and engaging in trial and error reading. All are simply bad habits that can be corrected with the right reading system and the right teaching methods.
Even if your child is older and is deeply embedded in using these bad habits when reading, keep in mind that any habit can be changed in as little as three weeks!
Guessing at Words
The most common bad habit made while sounding out words is guessing at words. This is when your child starts to decode or sound out a word. Since decoding strategies and phonemic awareness are both weak, panic usually sets in. Your child takes a wild guess at the word.
Sometimes, the guess is correct. More often than not, the guess is incorrect.
Guessing Correctly Isn’t What it’s Cracked up to Be!
When your child guesses correctly, the bad habit is reinforced or rewarded. That false positive is just enough to keep your child heavily engaged in the guessing game.
If the word is read incorrectly, someone usually corrects your child. This is enough to slow the flow of learning. There’s a little pause, and fluency scores drop because of it. Attention is taken away from the word, and it takes a split second to get back on task.
Either way, the outcome is the result of more bad habits setting in – sometimes for life if proper interventions aren’t taken.
Here’s what usually happens when your child guesses at words while trying to decode. Your child will be humming along just fine until…a new word pops up.
A confusing word. One that doesn’t seem to look right, to make sense. Usually, it’s a multi-syllable word, and fear sets in. Your child doesn’t know how to sound it out. The word has too many letters. Or the letters are wiggling or moving. They look too strange.
So…your child ends up saying the first word that comes to mind – usually a random guess.
Strategies are Important
To decode words, there must be a strategy involved, a way of reading new and unfamiliar words. There must be a system to sound out words or guessing ensues.
Guessing at words directly affects comprehension in a negative way, because the wrong word was read. This changes the meaning of the entire sentence.
Fluency scores are also affected, because wrong words are deducted from fluency scores. There’s also a pause that happens when your child guesses at a word. There is a digging through memory bank process of trying to figure out what that word might be. This impedes not only the flow of learning but also contributes to those stutters and stammers, slowing down your child’s fluency scores.
Memorizing Words
The second Pillar of Poor Reading is memorizing words. This is where your child attempts to memorize words instead of sounding them out or decoding them.
At first, this seems like a reasonable strategy, because at least there is a bit of strategy involved here. But it isn’t a very strong one. The reason is that our language has over one million words in it!
That’s a lot of words to memorize!
Of course, we don’t regularly use all of those million or so words. But we do regularly use around thirty thousand words. Even that’s an astounding amount of words for a child to try to memorize.
The problem of memorizing words as a form of decoding comes from weak or compromised visual and auditory processing skills. Kids with dyslexia usually struggle in this area, so trying to memorize words is just too difficult for them.
Traditional Methods Don’t Work for Kids with Dyslexia!
This is why flashcards are so hard on kids with dyslexia. Holding up a word on a card and asking them to memorize it without some form of movement or participation makes absolutely no sense to them. They answer wrong time and again. When they do answer correctly, it usually doesn’t stick.
In addition, kids with dyslexia are meaning driven. They rely on meaning to navigate an often “topsy turvy” world. Kids with dyslexia don’t perceive the world like other kids. Images and sounds are often distorted or skewed. It often takes them longer to process information because of this. And it also makes them cling to meaning.
Meaning is how they navigate their days. These are the kids who love science and thrive on hands-on science experiments yet deflate when told to read a science passage and answer questions about it. They know about the meaning of the hands-on experiment because their hands were involved. But the reading passage has little or no meaning for them.
Desire for Meaning is Strong
This desire for meaning is what tricks them into trying to memorize words. They see a word they don’t know and strain for it’s meaning instead of trying to decode it, to sound it out letter by letter with automaticity.
Automaticity is when your child does something without using conscious thought. It’s an automatic process. The bigger process of reading relies heavily on your child’s ability to use automaticity. Decoding, even more so. Other skills that require automaticity are driving, riding a bike, and typing.
Grasping at Straws
When decoding skills are weak or missing, your child will grasp at straws, and because meaning is so important, memorizing words and their meanings takes place. But it’s just too hard to learn so many words, and mistakes are made.
Once again, reading comprehension and fluency are affected because the words are read incorrectly.
Using Trial and Error Reading
The third Pillar of Poor Reading is using trial and error reading. Trial and error reading is when your child randomly applies reading and spelling words instead of decoding a word letter by letter.
Once again, this doesn’t seem like a big deal, as opposed to guessing at words. With trial and error reading, there is a bit of strategy involved. But this particular pillar is a slippery slope that pulls down kids with dyslexia.
When Panic Sets In
When your child starts to decode a word and is weak in decoding skills, then panic sets in. Your child randomly tries another decoding or reading rule that worked in the past. Random is the key word here.
With trial and error reading, there’s no real way of repeating what really wasn’t learned. Your child can’t replicate the rule, because the rule wasn’t actually learned in the first place.
The problem gets worse because once again, your child receives a false positive when engaging in trial and error reading. When your child gets a word correct using this bad habit, the mistake sets in. Your child is rewarded for learning the wrong way.
It makes your child want to continue doing this again and again, just wildly applying any desperate rules learned along the way in any random place.
When words are read incorrectly, once again reading comprehension and fluency scores are affected in a negative way. Scores drop. Grades plummet. Homework becomes a battle.
The Good News…
Here’s the good news.
The Three Pillars of Poor Reading are just bad habits. Children with dyslexia develop these bad habits when decoding skills are weak. When they come across words they don’t know how to sound out, they panic and make bad decoding decisions. They guess at words, memorize them, or engage in trial and error reading.
But bad habits can be changed.
The first thing your child needs is a reading or decoding program that speaks in a “learning language” that can easily be understood.
This program needs to be rich in large motor movements, cross-lateral movements, predictability, multi-sensory, and uses color, pictures, and brain-based learning.
But this isn’t enough.
How it Happens is Important
The process of teaching the units of sound – phonemes – must be in a specific way. First, letter sounds must be strong – all twenty six letters of the alphabet including long and short vowels. And they must be known with automaticity.
Next, two-letter words need to be mastered with automaticity, too. Traditional reading and decoding programs either fail to teach or don’t spend enough time on decoding two-letter words. This is a big mistake for kids with dyslexia.
Most kids with dyslexia are right-brain dominant. This means they are creative and learn best through pictures, color, rhythm, music, and learn from the “whole”. Because of this, they are weak in the left-brain dominant skill of bit-by-bit thinking.
Bit-by-Bit Thinking is Hard for Kids with Dyslexia
Decoding relies heavily on bit-by-bit thinking, so kids who are right-brain dominant are at an immediate disadvantage. If given the correct way to decode two-letter words, this bit-by-bit thinking isn’t necessary, because the process of knowing how to sound out two-letter words is internalized.
Once these foundational decoding skills are in place, your child is able to sound out three-letter words. This isn’t so hard now that two-letter words are strong. Only one letter is added to the decoding process, but it packs a wallop.
This is the true building of a decoding foundation!
Now your child is able to build onto these basic three-letter words and set the stage to eventually sound out multi-syllable words.
Reading Automaticity is Important
This is when automaticity in reading sets in and grades soar. Homework quits being a battle because your child has the necessary skills to read directions independently and understand what to do. Fluency increases because words can be sounded out and comprehension scores are on track because meaning isn’t changed.
When your child decodes the words that are written in text, then meaning isn’t changed. That’s the biggest reading gift of all!
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