Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

If your child struggles to recognize words, should he memorize the “rules” of phonics? Generally, no. Here’s why.

Many of the “rules” of phonics are not rules, but overgeneralizations. The number of exceptions makes them highly fickle, highly unreliable. Often, they don’t work; they confuse children with reading disabilities. That’s why we put quotation marks around the word “rules” and why it’s often better to teach children with reading disabilities how to pronounce common spelling patterns.

[Exemplary phonics instruction] focuses on reading words, not learning rules…. Words with spelling patterns that occur more frequently are learned more quickly…. Those that include the spelling pattern -ain, for example, are learned more quickly than those with the -oach spelling pattern because many more words contain -ain (e.g., main, pain, rain. vain, stain, plain, retain, maintain, explain) than do -oach (coach, roach, approach). Rather than teach rules, which apply less than 50 percent of the time, we should teach vowel pronunciation based on spelling patterns—that is, the vowel and the consonants that follow in that syllable. Consider the rule ‘When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.’ It applies to words such as meat, clean, goat, and tied, but is violated in the words piece, ground, bread, and deaf…. Teaching a student the rule that when two vowels occur together (as with -ea) the first vowel is pronounced with its long sound and the second one is silent leads to success less than 50 percent of the time. (Caldwell & Leslie, 2005, p. 54)

Even when a rule works, when knowing the “rule” or generalization can help children with reading disabilities to unlock an unknown word, they often have great difficulty applying the “rule.” Even if they’ve memorized it, and can repeat it flawlessly, they ignore it or struggle endlessly to apply it. In other words, knowing the rule doesn’t help them. It confuses them:

Rule-based, jargon-filled instruction is confusing to many children and does not represent what people actually do when they come to an unfamiliar word in their reading, or when they are trying to figure out how a word might be spelled. The traditional phonics rules are descriptions of how the letter-sound system works. They are not what you use when you need to pronounce or spell an unfamiliar word. (Cunningham & Allington, 2003, p. 29)

Despite the above, learning “rules” has helped some children with reading disabilities. And some schools insist that children master the rules. To determine if learning and using “rules” will help your child, we suggest three actions:

1. Request that your child’s reading specialist use diagnostic teaching (also called trial teaching) to assess how well your child learns and applies the most valuable, the most effective, the most reliable “rules.” (Loosely speaking, this is similar to assessing a child’s “response to intervention” (RTI), which some schools use to determine if a child has a “specific learning disability” under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA). Keep in mind, however, that RTI is far more intensive.)
2. Request that your child’s reading specialist use diagnostic teaching to assess if your child responds better to other approaches to phonics, such as the analogy approach: “Decoding by analogy is a strategy in which known spelling patterns are used to figure out unknown words having the same pattern …. Many words are made up of consonants combined with common phonograms [spelling patterns]…. For instance, the word cat consists of the initial consonant … of c and the phonogram … of -at. When we know a word like cat, we can figure out other words having the same spelling pattern, such as sat, rat, bat, and flat, [if we also know the sounds of the beginning letters, such as the s in sat.]” (Duffy, 2003, p. 33)
3. Make sure that your child’s reading specialist and his teacher continuously monitor the effectiveness of whatever approach is used. Two helpful resources for monitoring your child’s progress with decoding and word recognition are Monitoring Your Child’s IEP: A Focus on Reading (that you can download for free from www.reading2008.com) and chapter 7 of Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds.

Resources

Caldwell, J. S., & Leslie, L. (2005). Intervention Strategies to Follow Informal Reading Inventory Assessment. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Cunningham, P. M., & Allington, R. L. (2003). Classrooms That Work: They Can All Read and Write. New York: Allyn & Bacon.

Duffy. G. G. (2003). Explaining Reading. New York: The Guilford Press.

Margolis, H., & Alber-Morgan, S. (2007). Monitoring your child’s IEP: A focus on reading. Insights on Learning Disabilities, 4(2), 1-26. (Can be downloaded for free from www.reading2008.com).

Margolis, H., & Brannigan, G. G. (2009). Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds. Voorhees, NJ: Reading2008. (www.reading2008.com)

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