Spelfabet

How can I get my child’s literacy problem taken more seriously at school?

A parent from the Dyslexia Victoria Support Group tells me the title of this blog post is one of the main questions asked on their Facebook page.

Sad, eh? But teachers are good people, and the system fails them too. How frustrating to have kids in your class who you’ve never been taught how to teach to read/spell, year after year! So let’s just get on with fixing this problem, so we can put this question out to pasture.

Normalising failure

Most teachers are taught and equipped to teach early literacy in ways that set up around 20% of students to fail.  The most common approach is called “Balanced Literacy“, a dog’s breakfast of approaches that contradict each other, don’t make much linguistic sense and aren’t based on the best evidence.

Years of “Balanced Literacy” and its even-worse predecessor, “Whole Language”, in our schools mean that it’s now considered completely normal for about one in five children to not learn to read for a whole year or more, despite trying their hardest. As Dr Louisa Moats says, we need to be outraged about this. (more…)

Alison Lawson clinics

My 2015 blog post about the Alison Lawson clinics has now been superseded by an excellent article in the magazine of the the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Opthamologists called, “The Role of the Opthamologist in the management of dyslexia”.

Its most relevant paragraph says:

“Therapies including the Lawson anti-suppression device, syntonics, applied kinesiology, megavitamins and mega oils, the use of trace elements and psychostimulants have all been claimed to improve the reading of dyslexics. The Lawson anti-suppression device, as used in the Alison Lawson clinics, offers a quick fix with 10 one-hour treatments aimed at stimulating the visual cortex. This treatment is based on the false premise that the visual cortex is responsible for reading. There are no controlled trials to support the claims of efficacy of any of the fringe therapies. Their claim to success is based on anecdotal evidence”.

Please refer to the Spring 2016 edition of “Eye to eye”, the magazine of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthamologists, especially page 57, column 1.

In the face of this clear statement in the magazine of the peak body of Australasian eye experts, I don’t think there’s any need for further comment from me on the Alison Lawson clinics.

However, if you’d like further information, the RANZCO statement on Learning Disabilities, Dyslexia and Vision can be found here. The American Academy of Opthamology’s statement on Learning Disabilities, Dyslexia and Vision can be found here.

Last updated 18/1/2021

Helping teenagers with literacy

The other day our state Education Minister announced $72.3 million extra dollars will be spent over four years helping struggling secondary students, specifically kids who haven’t met Year 5 NAPLAN benchmarks.

Woo hoo to that, I say. But if it’s spent on doing the same sorts of things that didn’t work in primary school, it will be a waste.

Secondary school students with poor decoding skills and very little ability to spell generally need a good initial blast of synthetic phonics to build their awareness of sounds in words and knowledge of spelling patterns, followed up by work on vocabulary, comprehension and fluency. I’ve been doing this type of work for 14 years, in conjunction with the world’s most fabulous integration teacher and aides. We’re yet to find someone we can’t teach to read, including students with intellectual disability, language disorder and English as a second or third language.

Here’s roughly what I’d do and buy if I were a decision-maker in a secondary school with a number of students who have encoding/decoding difficulties.

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Programs for children with learning difficulties

I wrote an opinion piece in yesterday’s online Education Age/Sydney Morning Herald in response to their virtual advertorial last week for the Arrowsmith Program.

My main point was that many programs for children with learning difficulties are nowadays marketed using anecdotes, testimonials and the language and images of neuroscience, but these are not a substitute for independent, peer-reviewed scientific evidence. Parents should ignore them, and instead seek programs based on good science.

I wrote it because I was frankly pretty shocked that a major daily newspaper would run a prominent article about an expensive and controversial program without peer-reviewed research support without seeking comment from independent experts.

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Sound Out Chapter Books

I've been using and recommending High Noon Books' Sound Out Chapter Books since before I started this blog, but recently 18 of them became available as an iPad app, so I decided it was High Time to show you them on video.

The Sound Out Chapter Books are decodable (simplified text) books for older, struggling readers. Most of the stories are about teenagers or young adults, and I've also used them with a few upper primary students.

They're mostly interesting-enough stories, insofar as it's possible to write such a thing using a restricted set of spellings, and there are a couple that my students have wanted to keep reading, to find out what happens, even after the lesson ended.

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How much assessment is enough?

A child recently came to see me with a 30+ page Speech Pathology assessment report.

Before this assessment, she had already had a comprehensive cognitive and educational assessment by a Psychologist.

The only problems the Psychologist identified were weaker than average Working Memory (WM), Rapid Automatised Naming (RAN) and Phonemic Awareness (PA) plus limited knowledge of Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs, or what I prefer to call PGCs, because I work from sound to print).

Her verbal skills were otherwise in the high average range.

When I read the extensive case history in her Speech Pathology report, I scratched my head. There didn't seem to be much need for a Speech Pathology assessment.

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Brain training

I was pretty surprised last week to read in The Age newspaper* that our Premier and state Education Minister launched a pilot of the Arrowsmith program at a Catholic school here in Melbourne, and that there was no mention in the article of the controversy surrounding this and other “brain training” programs.

The Arrowsmith program’s website states that it is “founded on neuroscience research”, the first type of which has shown that “different areas of the brain working together are responsible for complex mental activities, such as reading or writing, and that a weakness in one area can affect a number of different learning processes”. But so what? That doesn’t mean that teaching skills that involve the same brain areas as reading and writing will help reading and writing.

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