Guest blog post from, Reading & Other Learning Disabilities: A Blog by Dr. Gary G. Brannigan and Dr. Howard Margolis

Many children with reading disabilities have poor memories. Fortunately, teachers can do a great deal to improve the memory of these children, which, in turn, improves their learning. To do this, teachers must first capture and then keep the children's attention. They must then focus instruction on the acronym REMOS: Repeat It, Elaborate or Explain it, Make it Meaningful, Organize it, and engage in Spaced or Distributed Practice.

In practical terms, the teacher must get the children to:

Attend to What’s Important. Teachers have a good chance of capturing and keeping children’s attention if they're enthusiastic about what they're teaching, make it interesting, use novelty, use words the children can understand, use pictures or multimedia to illustrate what they want remembered, and assign materials the children can read comfortably.

To keep the attention of children with reading disabilities during a lecture, teachers should break the lecture into eight to ten minute blocks. Each block should focus on one concept; the first few minutes should emphasize the main point; the next few minutes should elaborate on it. After each block, the children should take a break. During the break, the teacher might tell a story to illustrate the major concept, or the children might engage in a short group activity, like scripting a podcast, or individually, they might spend five minutes illustrating the major concept. They might even spend a few minutes exercising lightly. To learn more about structuring a lecture to keep a class’s attention, read Brain Rules. In this enlightening book, John Medina describes how and why he divides his lectures into ten-minute blocks.

Repeat It. If you want to remember something, repeat it or lose it. Teachers need to structure their lessons so children with reading disabilities have many opportunities to repeat and practice what they need to remember. Repeat does not mean saying it silently one or two times. If it's important, children should say it six or seven times, maybe twelve to sixteen times, maybe seventeen to umpteen times. However, asking children to repeat what they don't understand often benefits no one. They quickly forget what's not understood, what's not meaningful to them. Elaboration can make things meaningful.

Elaborate on It. To say it another way, teachers should create lots of opportunities for children to talk about it, and talk about it, and talk about it. Children should discuss it. If it’s controversial, they might switch between the “pro” and “con” positions. Talk is important, but it should be meaningful. The more meaningful something is, the more likely it will be remembered.

Make It Meaningful. The more children understand something, the more likely they'll remember it. Teachers can give meaning to an abstract concept by helping children relate it to their lives. To reinforce and extend the meaning of the word practical, the teacher might begin a discussion by asking, “So in your house or near it, what do people do that's practical? What makes it practical? After the discussion, the teacher might ask the children to “take five minutes to draw a picture of someone doing something practical and something impractical.” To make practical even more meaningful, she can have the children share their pictures: “Show your pictures to your neighbor. Tell your neighbor what was practical and impractical in your picture. And tell them why it was practical and impractical.”

Organize the Information. When teachers help children with reading disabilities to organize information—in ways the children find meaningful—they'll remember the information better than if it's random or unorganized. Here's a list of ten words: pineapple, collie, cantaloupe, chihuahua, bulldog, apple, grape, terrier, boxer, peach. If children try to remember all the words as one list, they'll forget most of them in a week. If they organize the words into the categories of dogs and fruit, they'll remember many more of them. Even their mistakes will fall into the two groups: dogs and fruit. Try it.

The teacher must also:

Schedule Spaced or Distributed Practice. When referring to children with reading disabilities, spaced or distributed practice refers to assessing the effects of instruction a day or two after the initial instruction and then re-teaching children what they didn't remember or master. For maximum effect, teachers should repeat the process some three to four weeks later. They should assess what was taught and re-teach what was forgotten. This can have a profound effect on the children’s memory and application of skills.

The good news about gaining and maintaining children's attention and using REMOS is that the principles are straightforward. Teachers can use them—easily. So can parents.

Resources
Medina, J. (2009). Brain rules. Seattle, WA: Pear Press.

Howard Margolis, Ed.D. © Reading2008 & Beyond www.reading2008.com
A version of this column was originally published by Howard Margolis, Ed.D. on www.reading2008.com.  Howard is also co-author of Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds.

Written by guest blogger, Dorit Sasson.

 

There are few things more challenging than motivating a student who doesn’t want to learn. But as all good teachers know, no such student really exists.

After working with remedial learners in the ESL program at my junior high school, I truly experienced the struggle to motivate those borderline students who seemed to be constantly exposed to failure. I also experienced the success that is possible if you put in the extra effort with those students. It was only after experimenting with different learning techniques and personalizing the curriculum to suit my students that I found the key to reaching these reluctant readers.

Roadblocks for Reluctant Readers 

Many of these readers have poor reading strategies; others are discouraged by varying degrees of failure; some are too scared to even look at a text. Many of my students became passive when faced with a reading text. Initially, I tried to simplify their exercises, provided easier language input, gave them a choice in their graded assignments, but to no avail. None of these techniques helped me with motivating them to read even a simple text.

My first roadblock with these reluctant readers was my textbook. Many schoolbooks have far more texts than are needed or texts that may not be suitable in one way or another. Some teachers assign supplemental reading materials to make up shortcomings in the textbook, but those extra assignments can further intimate readers. Because of these shortcomings, I look for ways to motivate my ninth grade students beyond the framework of the text.

It became clear to me that creativity and the choice of text would be the key to success with these students. I have experimented with multiple teaching strategies that have reading and language implications in an attempt to engage students in my ESL classroom.

Here are the 5 foolproof tips I discovered to motivate even the most reluctant student.

Tip 1:  Teach Topics that are Motivating

Interest and topic are key. As Richard Day points out in “Selecting a Passage for the Reading Class,” relating to student interests has serious implications for facilitating second-language acquisition. Most topics in my students standard reading books were culturally and socially removed from their world.

Part of getting students interested in reading is to expand the students’ knowledge on topics they enjoy. After surveying students, music prevailed as a topic that all the students were interested in. After presenting the students with a new, shorter text I had written on Oriental and Middle Eastern Music singers, they were more motivated to read. The students also had sufficient background knowledge on at least one of the themes.

Now that you have wisely chosen a reading assignment, how will you explore the text? What is your reading plan?

Tip 2:  Create Step-by-Step Lessons

Start small by using bits of text such as word clues, titles and subtitles. Important vocabulary used in a pre-reading activity can serve as a lead-in to the topic. Keep the number of unknown vocabulary items for each text to a minimum, allowing you and the students to focus on the goals of the reading course. Those goals are digesting the text and understanding its deeper meanings. Make sure there are enough warm up and pre-reading activities. Encourage predictions whenever possible. Keep reading passages short and visually-appealing.

Richard Day points out that appearance of the reading passage (layout, print and type size) affects readability. Keep the lines short. This will enhance reading speed. Having a short text increases the students’ focus and the text’s readability. Paragraphs in each text should be clearly defined. Make sure the font is clear and attractive. Length is likely a major factor in the frustration in reluctant readers.

Tip 3:  Choose Your Text Carefully

Look at the texts from the perspective of your students. Do your reading objectives match the objectives of the unit? Not all texts are exploitable due to their thematic, lexical, syntactic and structural appropriateness.

Here are some questions to consider:

1.Lexical exploitability:Do the texts offer an opportunity to acquire some new vocabulary? 
2. Structural exploitability: Can students explore text meanings through the structure 
and text conventions? 
3. Thematic exploitability:Does the text have potential to 
aid in the understanding of moral issues through discussion? 
4. Syntactic constructions:Have you seen that structure before? Syntactic constructions in a passage affect its readability. If the texts have structures that have not yet been covered in class, it might be wise to pre-teach the structure or choose a text with fewer new grammatical structures.

If a text is exploited well, it will match up with the objectives of the unit and allow the teacher to accomplish the objectives of the reading lesson.

Tip 4:  Identify and Hone Phonic and Phonemic Skills

In many of my classes, reluctant learners are also remedial learners who have experienced very little success in the reading classroom.

To develop a successful reading program design, you can follow steps to identify and hone phonic and phonemic skills:

1. Take ‘inventory’ and give mini-diagnostic tests at the beginning of the school year. 
2. Design questions based on letter and word levels that give you a clear indication of the student’s decoding abilities. 

3. Target and preteach those sound blends, vowel sounds, and letter sounds that appear throughout my chosen text. Phonemic awareness activities constitute a big part of the lessons for those lower level students who have yet to master basic reading skills. 
4. Word and letter recognition is the foundation for future comprehension. (Purcell-Gates). Once students can decode the words, introduce those words to the students, and then only in short passages. This builds up their confidence and gives them a reason to continue reading. 
5. Finally, present the students with a story that includes as many words from the targeted cluster as possible in a logical context and have them answer questions about the text.

Hopefully, they will be able to decode the appropriate phones and extract the correct meaning in its embedded context. By the end of the unit, the students will have achieved phonemic awareness of this specific phoneme.

Tip 5:  Emphasize Authentic and Meaningful Language Communication

Students remember the targeted words and chunks of language when they are taught in a meaningful way. More often than not, this involves doing something with the language beyond simply digesting it.

Theoretical Underpinnings: 
1. Reading strategies cannot be taught in isolation. 
2. Reading is comprehension. 
3. Comprehension involves the construction of individual meanings. 
4. Learners need to acquire a certain threshold in order to deeper process language. 
5. Meaningful communication is the goal. 

6. Learners need language input from all four modes: listening, speaking, reading and writing recycled and in a variety of methods.

“This teaching first involves students in purposeful (to the student) reading and writing, then pulls out some skills—ranging from decoding to text structure and comprehension—for focused work.” (Pursell-Gates)

Final Note:

Your number one goal should always be creating a meaningful learning experience for students. If you focus on meaningful communication rather than technical, simple reading that only leads to a ‘shallow,’ minimal understanding, you will create that learning experience. Hopefully, you will find that this program is designed to provide students with tools for learning independence and making them less reliant on teachers.

Works Cited:
Day, Richard R. “Selecting a Passage for the EFL Reading Class” ERIC Digests, 1994. 
LaBerge, D & Samuels, S.J. (1974). “Towards a theory of automatic information processing in reading.” Cognitive Psychology, 6, 293-323. 
Purcell-Gates, Victoria. (1997). “There’s Reading…and Then There’s Reading: Process Models and Instruction.” NCSALL, 2, Issue A.

This article was originally published on TeachHUB.com - an online resource center for educators with news, recommendations and resources BY teachers FOR teachers. For daily education articles, lessons, teaching tips and much more, visit http://www.TeachHUB.com today!

One of our most popular questions on our forum has been the question about unstressed syllables. Sometimes is may be hard to explain something abstract but I think that Joan Parrish, one of our certified trainers, says it well.

“In order to understand “unstressed syllable” we need to know what a syllable is. A syllable is the smallest unit of word, or often considered the “building blocks” of words. It influences the rhythm or stress patterns in words. All syllables must have a vowel or a vowel sound, and in most single-syllable words, the vowel sound is very distinct (long, short, r-controlled, etc.). In words that are more than one syllable, typically one of the syllables will have a vowel sound that is neutral, or more muted, and is referred as the “unstressed syllable” in the word. The vowel sound heard in the unstressed syllable is frequently the schwa (short u or short i sound) and is represented in the dictionary with the upside-down e. Stressed syllables are often perceived as being more forceful than non-stressed syllables. An example of the unstressed syllable would be the word, open. It is pronounced "O-pun" and the 2nd syllable is the unstressed syllable in the word. The unstressed syllable or schwa sound in multi-syllable words is not "sloppy" English; rather correct pronunciation for word vocabulary.”

Corrie Triassi, another trainer had this to add.

“I agree with (Joan Parrish). An unstressed syllable is a syllable that is not emphasized when the word is spoken. The vowel sound will not be long or short but the schwa sound. The schwa sound is a vowel taking on the short u sound. When I did some research on unstressed syllables, this is what I discovered...

"Here is another group of words which cause many people to make mistakes. Once again, the problem is to decide whether or not to double the final consonant of the base word when adding a suffix. And, once again, there's a pattern to help you out.
Read the following words aloud and try to decide where you place the stress or emphasis: profit target enter order
begin equip regret commit
You should notice that in the first group of words you stressed the first syllable. And in the second group of words you stressed the second syllable. Here is the pattern which is so helpful:
If the stress is on the first syllable the base word doesn't change:
profit + able = profitable; and enter + ed = entered
If the stress is on the last syllable, double the final consonant before adding a vowel suffix:
begin + ing = beginning; and equip + ed = equipped
(No change if a consonant suffix is added so:
equip + ment = equipment)

This pattern is so valuable that it's worth memorizing it.
Use the pattern to add suffixes to the following: 1st syllable stressed 2nd syllable stressed:

garden + er = gardener
order + ing = ordering
alter + ation = alteration
limit + ed = limited
market + ing = marketing

begin + ing = beginning
forget + able = forgettable
occur + ing = occurring
omit + ed = omitted
regret + ful = regretful (ful starts with a consonant rather than a vowel so you don't need to double the final consonant)"

Interesting information! This gives students a purpose for why it is important to understand where to place the stress in a word...

Children need to discriminate unstressed and stressed syllables by hearing how the word sounds. This is more challenging but it can be done with practice and hearing words pronounced accurately.”

Was this explanation helpful?  If so please leave your comments.

 

Last week I attended the Council for Exception Children Conference or CEC. Here are the top 10 things I learned at the conference.

1. Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education was the keynote speaker this year.  In his speech he said that, “Education is the civil rights issue of our generation”.  View parts of his speech here.
 
2. CEC really is a fabulous organization.  It is so important to have people who are “the voice and vision of special education”.  This is a great conference that Reading Horizons loves to support.

3. Creating a multi-sensory experience is very important for children with special needs.  In the booth next to me there was a company who sold sensory play ground equipment.  They had a sample of their playground and people couldn’t resist touching it.  I guess most people are sensory.

4. Also from Arne Duncan’s speech, “6 million students with disabilities are currently in school and millions of them are thriving.”  It is because of organizations such as CEC and the population of children they serve. 

5. People in Nashville are very hospitable.  I was so surprised with how kind and helpful everyone was that I talked to while I was in Tennessee. Now I know why they call is “southern hospitality”.

6. Teachers who work with secondary students LOVED our new Library component that focuses on comprehension.  Who wouldn’t want to read stories about Jerry Rice, Talk like a Pirate day and Rugby?

7.  While talking to speech pathologists our Pronunciation Tool came up.  They really liked being able to use that tool with their students.

8.  After talking to students who are in the process of graduating, many of them have concerns that they still didn’t have the skills they need to reach their struggling readers.  They were taught how to manipulate curriculum to fit student needs but they were not taught phonics and decoding strategies.  I gave them all a card for our free Online Workshop.  This workshop is free phonics instruction.  This is a great tool for new teachers when they encounter students that struggle with reading.

9.  The conference was held at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel.  I have never seen anything like it.  So amazing I have attached some pictures.

10.  It was great to network with others who share my same passion for helping those who struggle to learn to read.  Knowledge is power and with the ability to overcome reading difficulties we can create powerful learners.

I recently attended the National Family Literacy Conference in San Antonio, Texas.  It was a wonderful conference and I was able to meet people who help to improve literacy for people from all walks of life.  I talked to people would work with K-3rd grade students learning to read for the first time.  Using Discover Intensive Phonics (ages 4-9) is a great supplement to a basal reading program and works great as a Response to Intervention Program (RTI) for the mainstream, Special Education and Tier III programs.  I also met many people working with Adults in a family setting.  Many family literacy programs have resources for the children as well as their parents.  I was able to explain that the beauty of our program is that the same "method" is taught in both the version for children as it is for adults, but the delivery of the method for children has more games and the one for adult is on a more mature level even though they are learning the basics.  The child and parent become unified in their quest to improve their decoding skills.  

At the booth we have a sign that tests a personal ability to explain a spelling rule.  "Why does cat start with a 'c' and kitten start with 'k'?"  Click on my video to find out the answer!  Feel free to post your comments below!

 

Than you for those of you who attended our presentation on "Decoding strategies for developing literacy".  Here is the link to the Online Workshop where you can learn decoding strategies to use in your classroom. We had a great turn out this year.  It was so excited to showcase our new Reading Horizons v5 products.  Administrations, Reading Specialists and Special Education teachers are definitely impressed with the improvements and changes!