Earlier this year, Heidi Hyte, Curriculum Manager and ESL Director at Reading Horizons attended the CEC Conference and was honored by being presented the DADD (Division on Autism and Developmental Disabilities, a unit of the Council for Exceptional Children) Practitioner Presentation Award for 2011. Below are excerpts from Heidi’s award-winning presentation.
“As the key that allows access to many forms of knowledge and information, reading literacy is perhaps the skill most critical to learning” (emphasis added). -The National Assessment of Education Progress
As summarized in the preceding quote, reading is a crucial skill. Because it is so important, the discipline of reading has captured the attention of many researchers. The best approaches to teaching reading, including those put forth by the National Reading Panel (2000), have been investigated.
Educators, in turn, seek the appropriate methods to teach reading. This complex process requires the ability to appropriately orchestrate several different processes to achieve the ultimate goal of reading-comprehension. Struggling readers, however, often lack the foundational skills required to comprehend what they read. Without appropriate intervention, these readers experience alarming consequences.
Research has demonstrated that many struggling readers, including individuals who have dyslexia and developmental disabilities, have trouble breaking words down into letter-sound segments. Naturally, this impedes their reading fluency and comprehension. Research has also revealed, however, that these students “can learn these relationships with intensive phonics training” (Shaywitz, 2003).
Researchers have strongly suggested that students with low reading abilities be explicitly taught phonemic awareness skill and encoding (spelling) strategies that train them to hear sounds and join them to make words.
Explicit training in decoding strategies has been shown to help students develop automatic recognition of phonemic sounds and the graphemes that represent them - a skill that improves reading fluency and comprehension.
Learn more by taking a tour of Reading Horizons Intervention Program>