Helping Children with Reading, Writing and Spelling Problems

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Helping Childrenwith Reading, Writing and
Spelling Problems

• Christine.Merrell_at_cem.dur.ac.uk

www.cemcentre.org
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Beginning to Read

• Children need different types of knowledge
• Global and cultural awareness
• Vocabulary and basic understanding of language
• Conventions of print
• Phonological awareness

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Reading an Interactive Compensatory Process
Word recognition/decoding
Comprehension
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Viewing Regions

• You are reading a sentence and deciding
• if you can skip a word

• Brain makes predictions
• Strong understanding of context helps brain to
  fill in words
• not directly fixated on

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Viewing Regions

• There once lived, in a
• sequestered part
• of the county of
• Devonshire, one
• Mr Godfrey Nickleby a
• worthy gentleman, who,
• taking it into his head
• rather late in life that he
• must get married, and not
• being young enough or
• rich enough to aspire to

the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an
old flame out of mere attachment, who in her
turn had taken him for the same reason. Thus
two people who cannot afford to play cards for
money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for
love.
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Viewing Regions

• Holsten, before he died, was destined to see
  atomic energy
• dominating every other source of power, but for
  some years
• yet a vast network of difficulties in detail and
  application kept
• the new discovery from any effective invasion of
  ordinary life.
• The path from the laboratory to the workshop is
  sometimes a
• tortuous one electro-magnetic radiations were
  known and
• demonstrated for twenty years before Marconi made
  them
• practically available, and in the same way it was
  twenty years
• before induced radio-activity could be brought to
  practical
• utilisation.

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Problems with Literacy Acquisition

• Dyslexia
• Found across the whole intelligence range
• Continuum of severity
• 3 males 1 female

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Types of Difficulties

• Phonological deficit
• Visual memory
• Speed of processing

These can overlap
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Teaching Decoding
Holistic Approach Whole Word Identification
Direct Phonics Instruction
Useful for building large sight-vocabulary
Recognition of 100 high-frequency words Enables
reading of 50 of all text
Large demands on visual memory and no strategies
of tackling unfamiliar words
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Word Recognition Decoding
Synthetic Phonics Part to whole building up
word and blending sounds e.g. s/t/o/p stop
Analytic phonics Relating whole to
part, looking at onset and rime
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Review by Torgerson, Brooks and Hall (2006) Does
systematic phonics instruction enable both
normally-developing children and those at risk of
failure to make better progress in READING
ACCURACY than unsystematic or no phonics?
Effect Sizes 0.45 and 0.21 respectively
Yes
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What about the impact on READING COMPREHENSION?
Not clear Not statistically significant
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SYNTHETIC phonics vs ANALYTIC phonics on reading
accuracy
Not clear
Effect Size 0.02 (not significant)
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Word recognition decoding

• Linguistic phonics
• Improved reading performance of primary school
  pupils
• Qualitative improvement in post-primary pupils
  confidence
• Cost effective

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Word recognition decoding

• Phonics programme with whole word element
• E.g. Jolly Phonics
• Letter sounds
• Letter formation
• Blending sounds
• Identifying sounds in words
• Tricky, irregular words

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Word recognition decoding

• Sound Linkage by Peter Hatcher
• Young children with significant and persistent
  problems
• Dyslexia, Speech and Language
• A Practitioners Handbook,
• Edited by Snowling and Stackhouse, 1996,
• Whurr Publishers (www.whurr.co.uk)

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Word recognition decoding

• 15 minutes to develop awareness of sounds in
  words
• Identifying first sound in words
• Discriminating sounds
• Blending and segmenting
• Reading CVC words

• 15 minutes to develop spelling
• Tracing and writing letters
• Writing initial sounds
• Initial and final sounds
• Whole CVC words

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Comprehension

• Good readers use
• Cognitive strategies
• Re-reading difficult parts
• Utilising background knowledge
• Adjusting reading speed
• Some children use these spontaneously, others
  have to be taught

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Comprehension

• Knowledge of text structures
• Vocabulary
• Background knowledge
• Fluent word recognition and decoding
• Task persistence
• Ability to understand verbal communication

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Knowledge of text structures

• Organise mixed up sentences/paragraphs of
• a story

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Knowledge of text structures

• Select a short story
• Insert unexpected sentences
• Pupil finds those sentences
• Review and discuss answers

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Knowledge of text structures

• Use a TELLS advance organiser
• T Study the story title
• E Examine and skim the story
• L Look for important words
• L Look for words that you dont understand
• S Decide whether it is fact or fiction

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Knowledge of text structures
Self monitoring

• Child to restate what happens in each
• paragraph of a story, as s/he is reading it.

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Knowledge of text structures

• Use a story map
• Setting (characters, time and place)
• Problem
• Goal
• Action
• Outcome

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Vocabulary Knowledge

• Underline two interesting words per paragraph
• Explain why these are interesting
• Use fluorescent marker pens for underlining

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Task persistence

• Encouragement, praise, rewards, especially
• effective for children with ADHD

Cross-age peer tutoring www.fifepeerlearning.org
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Impact of Spelling Difficulties

• Spelling problems

Slow writing poor quality
Poor note taking and exam performance
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Spelling

• Children move through a series of developmental
  stages
• E.g. Non Phonetic Stage
• Used before children realise that letters
  represent speech sounds
• thhz3te meaning sad stories and happy stories

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Spelling

• Semi Phonetic Stage
• Start using letters to represent syllables/words
• we lkrnhs, meaning we like our new house

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Spelling

• Phonetic Stage
• Begin to include basic vowels. Still have
  difficulty with some consonant blends.
• we wet ona nachr chral
• meaning we went on a nature trail

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Spelling

• Phonological approach is first necessary step
• Moving to visual approach

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Spelling Errors

• 60 words account for 30 of misspellings by
  children in Years 3 to 6
• an of all saw off too two was
• came come hour into its kept knew know said then
  they went were when
• again a lot could heard might right still their
  there tried until where
• always bought caught friend houses inside myself
  opened people police school thats turned
• another decided outside running started stopped
  thought through
• because suddenly sometimes

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Spelling

• 10-category system for error analysis
• 1 Inappropriate use of spelling pattern or rule
• 2 Shortening
• 3 Articulation (if error corresponds to childs
  pronunciation)
• 4 Doubling a single consonant
• 5 Letter order reversals

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Spelling

• 10-category system for error analysis
• 6 Morphological errors
• 7 Homonym confusion (e.g. there and their)
• Single in place of double consonant
• Omission of silent letter
• 10 Spacing error (omission or insertion
  between
• words)

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Spelling

• Make a list of incorrectly spelled longer words
• List correctly spelled words of same length
• Compare lists to identify problems
• Implications for spelling are then apparent