The reading wars have been going on for decades. The grand debate of phonics vs. sight word, whole language vs. balanced literacy-- curriculums come and go. Why do we keep doing this?
The answer is simple. Great teachers are constantly discovering differences in their students. They pose questions and then seek answers. This is what life long learners should be doing. The problem arises when educators build theories on the new information discovered, without plugging it into more seasoned information. For example, once a teacher discovers that phonics isn't working for everyone, he/she finds something that does work. This is a fantastic approach and one that should be used often. The fallacy lies in then swinging over to the new approach without seeing the validity in the previous one. AKA: Phonics works for some.
At Excel Achievement Center, we have worked very hard to incorporate brain research in our studies. It is our belief that there must be a marriage between the diagnostic work done in the medical field, and the intervention work done in education. We have discovered that the reason there have been so many pendulum swings in education, is that this has not been looked at as closely as perhaps it should have been.
Now we know that children use their auditory processing (phonemic awareness and phonics), their visual processing (the ability to hold sight words in our memory), and language processing (the ability to gather meaning) when we read. Some children have deficits in one or more of the above processing abilities and thus struggle with reading.
Children with an auditory processing problem can hear things quite clearly, but have difficulty discriminating sounds. The short "e" sound may sound exactly like the short "i" sound to them. This causes difficulties in beginning reading. We know that the parieto-temporal lobe in the brain is the part of the brain that beginning readers utilize the most. This is the part of the brain that assists students with decoding (aka: "sounding out the words). When a student isn't using this portion of the brain and utilizes a different part instead, he/she will initially struggle with reading unless a teacher assists him/her otherwise. Teachers abandoned phonics and went to the "whole word" method when they discovered that some of their students had auditory processing problems. They simply didn't know that this is what it was. Students with auditory processing problems may be able to utilize their visual memories in a much stronger way and simply memorize large lists of words. The problem with this method is that if a student comes to an unknown word that is not stored in his/her memory, the word cannot be decoded. A much better approach is to strengthen the students auditory processing. (See future articles on auditory processing interventions)
When the reading wars swung to the "whole word" method, educators were able to help those with auditory processing deficits, but were not reaching those with visual processing problems. Children with visual processing issues often struggle with visual memory. They are the children who struggle with spelling as well. When these children read, they will often insert letters that don't exist on the page, or they will skip words and endings to words. Sometimes these children struggle with tracking as well and will often lose their place as they read. Their coping mechanism is that sometimes they will skim as they read and learn from context...thus the whole language method was born.
The whole language method focused on the language component of reading. It stressed the importance of the brain becoming active and being emotionally involved as it read. This too is excellent and aligns with brain research. The issue here is that children still need to be able to decode (sound-out) unknown words and build up a bank of sight words so that reading is fluent and more automatic.
The National Reading Panels research of 2000 was vital to the world of reading in education. Their research stated that an effective reading program must include: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency instruction, and comprehension instruction. This research aligns with our findings in that all three types of brain processing must be working in the proper order for a student to be most successful in the world of reading. Phonemic awareness and phonics are an auditory processing skill. Learning vocabulary and comprehending utilize both the visual and language processing parts of the brain. Fluency utilizes all three processing pieces.
How does this information help us? Now teachers can learn to decipher which aspects of the brain are not working correctly and then utilize specific interventions for that part. Now all children can learn phonics. All children can become spellers. We know this to be true from Dr. Sally Shaywitz's research utilizing the functional MRI. Her findings showed that the brain can be rewired when the correct intervention is used.
In the articles to follow, I will provide interventions for each of the three processing problems. In this way we can join together as teachers and eliminate the reading wars all together!
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