Teaching Reading

Phonemic Awareness Training: A Cart-Before-the-Horse Approach to Teaching Reading?
In the last twenty years, volumes have been written about the correlation between phonological processing deficits and reading disabilities. In the scientific community, many has reached consensus that most reading (and spelling) disabilities originate with a specific impairment of language processing, not with general visual-perceptual deficits, inability to construct meaning from context, or other more general problems with attention or memory. Read more…

Phonics Instruction: Why Phonics Instruction Sometimes Fails
Beginning in the mid 19th century, some American educators, prominently Horace Mann, argued that phonics should not be taught at all. This led to the commonly used "look-say" approach ensconced in the Dick and Jane readers popular in the mid-20th century. Beginning in the 1950s, however, spurred by Rudolf Flesch's criticism of the absence of phonics instruction (particularly in his popular book, Why Johnny Can't Read) phonics resurfaced as a method of teaching reading. Read more…

A Multisensory Approach to Teaching Reading
It means that you will teach a child to read through more than one of the senses. Because the child with a reading difficulty has problems with either visual processing or auditory processing or both, it is recommended that you teach reading by involving not only the visual and auditory senses, but also the use of touch and movement (kinesthetic). Read more…

Concentration: Its Role in the Act of Reading
Attention usually shifts very quickly from one object or one thing to the next. The child must be taught to focus his attention on something and to keep his attention focused on this something for some length of time. Visual perception plays a major role in the reception of the message. Read more…

Visual Perception: Its Role in the Act of Reading
Reading must be regarded as an act of communication. There is a communicator (the author of the book that the reader is reading), there is a message (transferred to the reader via symbols on paper), and there is a recipient of the message (the reader). Visual perception plays a major role in the reception of the message. Read more…

Reading Comprehension Problems
Reading comprehension is the heart and goal of reading, since the purpose of all reading is to gather meaning from the printed page. If a student says words in a passage without gathering their meaning, one would hesitate to call that reading. For many learning-disabled students, reading comprehension is a major problem. There are mainly three causes for poor reading comprehension. Read more...