Reading Difficulties
A tremendous amount of research over the past 20 years has been aimed at understanding reading difficulties, and scientific and educational communities have made an important and very useful discovery:

Studies show that up to 85% of all reading, spelling and writing difficulties are the result of a common cause called a phonological deficit.

Because our written language is based upon oral language, a person’s ability to hear, identify and manipulate the individual sounds within words (phonemic awareness) is vital to becoming a proficient reader. In fact, phonemic awareness is the best indicator for how proficient a reader a person will become; a far better indicator than a person’s intelligence, socio-economic status or where they attend school. When a person over the age of 4 or 5 has difficulties with phonemic awareness, they are said to suffer from a phonological weakness or phonological deficit.

Phonological Deficit:

- Students with a phonological deficit have particular difficulty identifying the sounds that make up individual words, matching the sounds of spoken words with written language and sounding out written words.

- A phonological deficit is neurological in origin. Using brain-imaging techniques, we can see that when a good reader is in the process of reading, a specific part of the brain is active. When someone with a phonological deficit is in the process of reading, different parts of the brain are active – parts of the brain that are far less efficient for reading.

- A phonological deficit doesn’t resolve itself. It also can’t be resolved through traditional classroom instruction or tutoring.

Dyslexia:

- As defined by the National Institutes of Health, dyslexia is simply an unexpected difficulty with reading. “Unexpected” is the key word in this definition: when a student is of average or above-average intelligence, has received appropriate reading instruction, is sufficiently motivated to read and still has difficulty with reading, the student can be diagnosed with dyslexia.

- This unexpected difficulty is almost always the result of a phonological deficit.

The good news is that there is a way to help students who struggle with reading because of a phonological deficit or dyslexia.

We’re proud to provide SpellRead to transform students into confident, successful readers. Parents tell us that SpellRead is a life-changing program for their children – as one of our parents said, “My son Mark was struggling in reading. He is now up to his grade level in reading and wants to read on his own – a huge feat in itself.”

SpellRead – a reading intervention program that is ranked #1 by the U.S. Department of Education for improving reading fluency (US DoE 2007 WWC Intervention Report) – uses a series of intensive, focused, multi-sensory activities to re-train a student’s brain and remediate phonological difficulties. You can learn more about SpellRead on our website: www.lakeside-learning.com.

Repeat After Me, "Phonological Awareness"

To understand phonological awareness, we must first know what a phoneme is. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in our language that makes a difference in a word’s meaning. For example, the word cat has three phonemes, /k/ /a/ /t/. By changing the first phoneme, we can produce the word rat. Changing the second phoneme creates the word cut, and we can create the word cab by altering the final phoneme. Words in the English language are composed of strings of phonemes. This is fortunate because it allows us to create all the words we will ever need by using various combinations of just 44 different speech sounds.

Speech scientists have discovered that the human brain is specifically adapted for processing many different kinds of linguistic information, and one part of our biological endowment allows us to process the complex phonological information in speech without actually being aware of the individual phonemes themselves. This is one of the human abilities that makes acquiring speech a natural process, so that almost everyone in the world learns to speak a language with very little direct instruction. However, because phonemes are represented by letters in print, learning to read requires that children become consciously aware of phonemes as individual segments in words. In fact, phonological awareness is most commonly defined as one’s sensitivity to, or explicit awareness of, the phonological structure of words in one’s language. In short, it involves the ability to notice, think about, or manipulate the individual sounds in words.

One of the early signs of emerging sensitivity to the phonological structure of words is the ability to play rhyming games. In order to tell whether two words rhyme, the child must attend to the sounds in the words rather than to the meaning of the words. In addition, the child must focus attention on only one part of a word rather than on the way it sounds as a whole. As children grow in awareness of the phonemes in words, they become better able to judge whether words have the same first or last sounds; with further development, they become able to isolate and pronounce the first, last, or middle sounds in words. At its highest levels of development, awareness of individual phonemes in words is evidenced by the ability to separately pronounce the sounds in even multi-syllable words or to tell exactly how two words like task and tacks are different.

Acquiring phonological awareness involves two things: learning that words can be divided into segments of sound smaller than a syllable, and learning about individual phonemes themselves. As children acquire more and more conscious knowledge of the distinctive features of phonemes (how they sound when they occur in words, or how they feel when they are pronounced), they become more adept at noticing their identity and order when they occur in words. For example, while children in the first semester of first grade might be able to isolate and identify the first or last sound of a word like man, by the end of first grade, most children can easily, and relatively automatically, segment all the sounds in a more complex word like clap.