A Twitter user asked me to clarify the terms phonemic awareness and phonological awareness.  I am happy to explain, because yes, I know that these terms can be confusing.  Yet, teachers will encounter these two words, and they need to understand them.
 
Phonemic awareness is when a child sees the word cat and immediately begins to break the word down into individual phonemes or sounds. Phonemic awareness teaches students to break words down into letter sounds (decode) and then put those sounds back together to pronounce or read the word (encode) (see Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia, 2003).
 
Phonological awareness is when the child sees the word cat, breaks the word down into letter sounds, can pronounce the word, and can then take that knowledge and work with it.  This may mean that the student can manipulate the word cat by adding or subtracting letters to make new words:  can, cattle, calf.  The student can break words into syllables.  This also means that the student knows what the word means and can use that word in a sentence (for a complete description of phonemic and phonological awareness see Kilpatrick, 2016). 
 
So, phonemic awareness is the identification or decoding and encoding of letter sounds.  It is part of phonological awareness, which is the ability to work with letter sounds, to build new words from a common letter sound (particularly vowel sounds), and to break words into syllables. 

Now, what is phonics?  Phonics methods emphasize the letter rather than the sound.  Phonics education starts with the letter.  With phonemic and phonological awareness, you start with the oral sound and build toward the letter and the word.  Phonemic and phonological awareness give us a totally different teaching method that evidence shows to be superior to teaching the old-style phonics approach.
 
Phonemic awareness, phonological awareness and phonics are not the same, nor do they use the same teaching methods.  Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness, but phonics education is an entirely different approach to teaching letter sounds. 
 
Phonics is a means of teaching the relationship between letters and sounds.  The emphasis is on letters or groupings of letters.  There are between 4 to 6 different approaches used for teaching phonics.  Of these 6 different phonics teaching techniques, systematic phonics is the only phonics method that has shown any success in teaching children to read.  Unfortunately, research also shows that systematic phonics leaves many students confused (Hempenstall, 2016; click on the .pdf link).
 
Systematic phonics instruction entails the direct teaching of letter-sound relationships and uses a specific sequence or learning pattern.  Research shows systematic phonics instruction to be the most effective phonics method, but be careful.  There are many different approaches for teaching systematic phonics.  To be effective, systematic phonics must teach decoding and encoding instead of memorization or a list of rules.

Personally, I have completely stopped using the word “phonics” because the word is being used so many different ways—many of which represent ineffective teaching methods.  Instead, I use only phonemic and phonological awareness and vowel clustering.
 
Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness describes when students are taught to hear and recognize letter sounds, identify letter-sound relationships, and decode and encode phonemes.  A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can be identified. 
 
The word cat is a common example for teaching phonemic awareness.  Neuroimaging research shows that it is much better to teach students to sound out the word cat (one letter sound at a time) than to teach students to memorize or simply recognize the word cat.  The word cat has three distinct phonemes or sounds.  Students need to break words into letter sounds, even a simple one syllable word like cat. It is better to teach students to sound out each letter sound, one letter at a time, even for multisyllabic or compound words.  There are no rules to learn when learning phonemic awareness, and students are never asked to guess at a word or to memorize a word list.  Students are taught to break all words down into individual letter sounds (decode) and then put those letter sounds back together and read or pronounce the word (encode). 

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness incorporates many skills, including phonemic awareness.  Phonological awareness also teaches letter sounds and includes breaking words into syllables.  This is very important when the student is ready to learn multisyllable words or compound words.  Phonological awareness teaches students to work with words.  Students can be taught to add or take letters away to make new words:  the word at can be changed to the word am by taking the letter t away and adding the letter m.  This is a simple example, but the same is true with more complex words:  back, black, sack, stack, act, actor, acrobat.  Building new words with a common vowel sound helps students visualize how words are formed.  Some people will tell you that phonological awareness is just about sound and does not involve alphabet letters or words—wrong.  Phonological awareness teaches the relationship between letters and spoken sounds.  Yes, phonological awareness involves working with the actual written word, breaking the word down into letter sounds, and then understanding how to use that word to express ideas.

Vowel Clustering
 
Vowel clustering incorporates phonemic and phonological awareness by teaching students to decode or break words down into letter sounds and then to encode or reassemble those sounds back into pronounceable words.  Vowel clustering does not stop at simply decoding and encoding.  Vowel clustering also teaches spelling, oral reading fluency, comprehension, and writing.  Vowel clustering has been tested and proven to work with struggling, at-risk, and failing students (Clanton Harpine & Reid, 2009; click on the .pdf link).
 
Vowel clustering teaches both phonemic and phonological awareness by teaching children to decode and encode letter sounds in order to read words (Clanton Harpine, 2011). 

I spoke with a teacher this past weekend who said, “Everyone’s talking about vowel sounds.  I took one look on the Internet, and I’m totally confused.  What is the best way to teach vowel sounds?”

There is a lot of confusion on the Internet.  Some ideas are good, and have been tested and proven to work.  Some ideas have not been tested and do not work; they will only cause struggling students more problems.  Let’s look at some of the bad ideas first.  Then, we will look at vowel clustering and show the right way to teach vowel sounds. 
 
Bad Methods.  Do Not Use.

·         Hand motions or signals—No, I did not make this up.  Hand signals do not work.  It is much better to simply teach the student to break words down into letter sounds.  Teach students to work with letter sounds—not hand motions or signals.
·         A PowerPoint with sounds and action buttons—Computers and tech are all the rage, but research shows that computerized learning is less effective than working with  students in person.  What happens if a student becomes confused or has a problem?  Unless your program is able to teach or understand the student’s problem, the student becomes confused and frustrated.
·         Naturally, worksheets and even digital games are listed—Again, it depends on the game or worksheet.  Worksheets have never proven to be effective teaching tools; they are only for practice once the lesson has been learned.  Worksheets do not teach students who are confused and do not understand a concept.
·         Teaching the most frequently used vowel sounds first, then adding on the other irregular sounds later.  This is an old-style phonics practice that has been proven over and over to be confusing; it is ineffective for struggling students.
·         Word lists with all of the vowel sounds mixed together on one list.  Never.  Teach vowel sounds one at a time.  Do not try to teach a sound for each of the vowels all at the same time.  In other words, do not teach the short vowel sound for all 5 vowels at the same time.  Yes, you may get away with this approach for short vowel sounds, but what happens when you try to teach long vowel sounds?  Letter a alone has 7 letter combinations for the long a sound, plus a sound when it stands alone.  If you try to teach all of these long vowel sounds for letter a at the same time that you are teaching all of the long vowel sounds for e, i, o, u, then you have a group of completely, totally confused students.
·         Picture cues for each sound.  What happens when stories do not have picture cues?  If you have not taught your students to work with the letters and sounds instead of relying on pictures, they are lost and confused.
·         First letter in a word—This is a faulty concept often used in whole language:  ten, to, take, time….  The problem is that the brain does not sort, organize, or conceptualize new words by the first letter.  To build vowel cluster pathways in the brain, you must teach vowels in clusters.
·         Songs—Fun but not always useful for decoding and encoding letter sounds.  Students must learn how to break words down into letter sounds and then put those sounds back together and pronounce or read the word.  We do not have a song that teaches decoding and encoding.
·         Tongue twisters—Again fun, but how do you teach vowel sounds with tongue twisters?  There are 7 different letter combinations just for the long a vowel sound.  How can you teach these combinations with a tongue twister?  We need to stop looking for cutesy ideas and look for actual ideas which will help students learn to read.
·         Mixing vowel clusters—Be careful: some methods introduce ir, us, aw, ue, ay, ou, ie, ea, oy together in the same lesson.  Yes, these are vowel clusters, but they do not fit together.  You cannot just pull out a list of random vowel sounds and say that you are teaching vowel clusters.  Vowel clustering organizes vowel sounds in visual and auditory patterns to make it easier for students to learn. 

The Right Method
 
Many teaching methods talk about vowel clusters, but it is the way you teach vowel clusters that makes the difference.  Vowel clustering teaches the vowel sounds in sound clusters for each vowel—one sound at a time.  For example, all of the letter a sounds must be taught before going on to the next vowel.  This allows students to develop a complete understanding for letter a before adding the next vowel sound.

his is the second in my series about vowel clustering.  I previously mentioned that it is important to use phonemic awareness teaching methods—teaching that alphabet letters represent sounds. Research shows that phonemic awareness methods are much more effective than teaching students to memorize “look say” word lists (see my blog post on 6/23/17 on whole language) or phonics rules (see my blog post on 7/9/17 for the danger of phonics methods being used in schools).  Phonemic awareness is even more effective than the “balanced literacy” approach that some schools are using.
 
Vowel clustering teaches both phonemic and phonological awareness by teaching children to decode and encode letter sounds in order to read words (Clanton Harpine, 2010). All of my reading programs teach phonemic awareness (learning letter sounds) and phonological awareness (learning to work with letter sounds).  Phonemic awareness teaches children to recognize that letters of the alphabet represent sounds.  Phonological awareness teaches children to work with letter sounds to build multisyllable and compound words.  Vowel clustering teaches students to decode or break words down into letter sounds and then to encode or reassemble those sounds back into pronounceable words.  Vowel clustering has been tested and proven to work with all students, including struggling, at-risk, and failing students.
 
So far in our series on vowel clustering, we have established that
·         Letters represent sounds.
·         We read primarily using lower case alphabet letters.
·         Vowels are a key factor in how a word is pronounced.

The next question is how do we teach students vowel sounds?  Vowel clustering teaches all of the vowel sounds in clusters.  The traditional phonics approach was to learn the short vowel sounds for a, e, i, o, u, and then to learn the long vowel sounds for the same vowels.  The critical difference here is that when using phonics, beginning students are only taught long vowel sounds with silent e, such as:  cake, tree, ice, tone, use.  Yet, looking just at the long vowel sound for the letter a, we see an immediate problem with the phonics method.  There are seven different letter combinations that can be used to make the long a vowel sound:  ea, ai, ay, ei, ey, eigh, and silent e.  Of course, the letter a can also make the long a vowel sound when it stands alone, as with the word apron.  So, if you are only introducing students to the long a sound through silent e, you have created a problem and confused struggling students, especially when you come along later and introduce irregular vowel sounds.  Irregular vowel sounds that are thrown in later is how most students get lost while learning vowels. 

Instead, it is much better to teach students all of the sounds for the letter a in a cluster before going on to the next vowel.  Remember, we are training the brain, building pathways in the brain; therefore, it is important to organize the way we teach so that the students can organize how they learn.  We want to work with the brain, not against it.  If we teach in a haphazard fashion, struggling students become confused.  Vowel clustering presents a visual picture through use of a vowel clustered word wall, an auditory learning technique through oral reading and spelling of new words as they are matched to their letter sound on the vowel clustered word wall.  This enables students to see and hear the letter sounds.  Vowel clustering also teaches handwriting because it is very important that students write the words correctly as they practice reading, spelling, and matching letter sounds on a vowel clustered word wall.
 
Vowel clustering is an easy method to teach.  If you have questions, contact me by clicking the e-mail envelope on the top right-hand corner of this page.

One of the trainees in my reading clinic sent an excellent question to me.  She asked, “Once the student knows the at sound (at, bat, cat, …vat) should I then go to multisyllable words with the at sound or should I introduce other simple short a sound words first:  lap, can, ask…)?
 
Answer:  Always stay with simple one syllable short a sound words until the student is very familiar and comfortable with simple one syllable words before going to multisyllable or compound words.
 
Example:  Teach at words:  at, bat, cat….
 
Then teach, ap sound words:  cap, lap, map…  Hold off on apple, happy, clap, or other ap sound words that are more than one syllable or combine multiple consonant sounds.  Teach simple words first, then move up the ladder to more complex words.  You are teaching students how to read, spell, and write words—all at the same time [see my blog on the 4-steps for 2/14/18] .  So, keep it simple.
 
Next, teach an sound words:  an, and, fan, …. 
 
Teach am sound words:  am, bam, ram….
 
Teach ad sound words:  add, bad, fad, sad….
 
In this way, students get the idea that the vowel sound is staying the same, even when the consonant changes.  Again, you want students to learn to work with words but not memorize.  We are training the brain to recognize letter sounds, not memorize patterns or rules.  Once you have established this principle with the student, and the student can read, spell, and write these simple words, then you are ready to move up to more complex words:  an, and, sand, stand… 
 
Some students will move up faster than others.  Do not move up until the student is ready.  Help students see how words change sound before teaching multisyllable or compound words:  apple, happy….
 
You use this same approach for each vowel sound—step-by-step, but remember, teach all 7 sounds for the letter a before starting on the next vowel sound.
 
If you are interested in ready-to-use curriculum that teaches these principles, I do have a book available that I use with my workshops.  Contact me.

A parent of one of my former students at my South Carolina reading clinic asked me what she should do to help her son get ready for school this fall.  Yes, it is July, and a new school year is right around the corner.  School supplies already fill the stores’ shelves, but over 64% of children and teens across the nation will need more than just school supplies to be ready to start school in the fall.  According to the Nation’s Report Card, 64% of fourth graders could not read at the fourth-grade level when they were tested, nor could they read at grade level in eighth grade, and they still couldn’t read at grade level in 12th grade when they graduated (see earlier blog post from 1-2-18 on reading failure).  What do these students need in order to be ready for a new year in school?  They need a totally new approach in reading (Kuppen et al., 2011; Oakhill and Cain, 2012).
 
The student mentioned above had failed for four years before entering my reading program.  He is making progress but still working on catching up.  Some students who fail three years or more can overcome such failure in one year.  We have had students move up four grade levels in just one year at the reading clinic.  Other students need more time.  So, the first thing every parent, teacher, and/or tutor must realize is that every student is different, has a different set of reading needs, and learns in a different way.  I recently featured a blog series on the 12 different teaching methods that we use at the reading clinic.  I encourage you to review those 12 teaching methods.  Using a variety of teaching methods gives every student a chance to learn.  When we only use one teaching method, we are sentencing many students to failure. I do not expect the schools to start using a more effective method for teaching reading this fall.  Teachers are locked into teaching whatever administrators and policy dictate.  I’ve had several teachers say that they wish they could use my vowel clustering method, but it’s not allowed.
 
Even if the schools are locked into using a failing whole language approach for teaching reading, parents, tutors, and yes, even teachers can use vowel clustering and help children and teenagers learn to read (Foorman et al, 2015).   I am working on a new book, Why Can’t We Teach Children to Read?  Oh, but Wait, We Can.  And yes, we can, my reading clinic has nine years of data showing that we can take failing students and return them to the classroom at or above their age level in reading.  No, the new book will not be ready for fall 2018, but if you need help, An older book on vowel clustering is available.  In the meantime, I am starting a new blog series on vowel clustering to help parents, tutors, and teachers work with students who are struggling with reading.
 
The first principle is that letters represent sounds.  The brain focuses on letter sounds (Moreau, 2015).  There are 26 letters in the alphabet and 40 different letter sounds (phonemes).  These letter sounds are made through 250 different letter combinations or spellings.  Quite simply, our letter sounds, pronunciation of words, and spelling of words are confusing. 
 
We read mostly using the lowercase alphabet.  Therefore, students must be able to recognize the lowercase letters and know the sound(s) those letters represent.  Because the vowels—a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y represent so many different sounds, they present the hardest part of learning to read.
 
Vowels are also the central factor in how a word is pronounced.  For example, the simple letter a uses seven different letter sounds but 22 different letter combinations to make those sounds.  If you’re using phonics rules, you lose most children who struggle when you introduce irregular vowel sounds.  If you are strictly using whole language and memorization of word lists, you lose many struggling students if they cannot memorize.  Vowel clustering does not require memorization, does not have any rules to memorize or learn, and does not limit itself to learning a list of words each week.  Vowel clustering teaches how to break words down into letter sounds and then put those sounds back together to pronounce or read the words.
 
Start with the word at.  See how many words the student can build from the base word at:  at, bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, sat, that, vat.   Keep the sound constant—the at sound.  :  If the student is ready to advance, then begin building  multisyllable and compound words that use the at sound: atom. cattle, atmosphere atom. cattle.  Be careful, do not advance too quickly.  A student who cannot read cat is not ready to tackle cattle. 
 
The important principle is to not change the vowel sound.  Teach one vowel sound at a time. We are training the brain to recognize, hear, and read the at sound.   So, you must only use the at sound.  You cannot throw in the word apple or cab.  Yes, they use the short a sound, but we must train the brain to letter sounds, one sound at a time, and one letter combination at a time.  Once the student has learned the at sound, then study words with ab for cab or ap for apple or an for ant.  Each of these sounds uses the short a sound.  Do not mix sounds.  There are 7 sounds for the letter a.  If you need help, contact me.
 
Word lists and phonics rules do not teach letter sounds (Foorman et al., 2003), and children who cannot memorize word lists cannot memorize phonics rules (Shaywitz, 2003).  I have worked with children from the Bronx to the projects in Chicago.  Yes, every child can learn to read, and we can teach the children and teens who are now failing.  Poverty is not a deterrent if we use the correct teaching method, but we must change how we teach children and teens to read.  Vowel clustering is a new method that has been tested and proven to work.  If you have questions, contact me by clicking the email button (envelope) at the top right corner of this page.

If you're interested, my book Group Interventions in Schools: Promoting Mental Health for at-Risk Children and Youth talks about the mental health effects of reading failure.

Once again we find an online blog using and interpreting the Nation’s Report Card incorrectly.  This time we have, Dr. Marion Blank, a world-renowned psychologist and expert on the development of literacy and language in children, saying that the Nation’s Report Card shows “37 percent to 40 percent of fourth graders to be reading “below basic levels.”
 
No, Dr. Blank.  Please reread the Nation’s Report Card again.  The problem is much worse than how you describe it. 
 
What the Nation’s Report Card actually shows is that in 2017 only 37% of fourth grade students, 36% of eighth graders, and 37% of twelfth graders scored proficient or above in reading (National Center Education Statistics, 2017).  To be labeled proficient, the student must be able to read at or above grade level. Read the fine print very carefully.  Be careful in reading these statistics because many, like Dr. Blank, believe that the Nation’s Report Card says only 37% cannot read; that is not what the statistics show.  What it says is that only 37% of fourth graders across the nation were able to read at a fourth-grade level.  That is less than half. 
 
The eighth grade statistics were even worse — only 36% could read at the eighth-grade level and only 37% could read at grade level by the time they reached twelfth grade.  That means that over half of fourth graders, eight graders, and even half of twelfth graders could not read at their respective grade level when tested.  We must learn how to read statistics correctly, especially those who claim to be experts.  Yes, we all make mistakes, but the children and teens who are suffering across the nation right now from reading failure cannot afford any more mistakes.  The children and teens across the United States and around the world, need the people in power to correct their mistakes and start using methods that work.

Also see my post of 1/2/2018.  

For a student to comprehend a story or text while reading, the student must have word knowledge. The student must be able to decode and encode the world’s letter sounds, and the student must know the word’s meaning (Perfetti & Joseph, 2013).  Without word meaning and understanding, there is no comprehension.  The student must also understand the world’s phonological form, not just the definition of what the word means (Safura & Perfetti, 2017).  The student must be able to recognize the word’s written form (how the letters are shaped) and recognize the letter sounds used to pronounce the word. 

Decoding and encoding skills are essential to comprehension.  Many students today are being told that they have comprehension problems, when in fact they have decoding and encoding problems.  If you are teaching from a memorized word list, you are not teaching decoding and encoding.  Students can never become effective readers as long as we rely on whole language or “look say” teaching methods.  We have the ability to teach students to read and it’s past time that we do so (see my blog post posts from 6/5/17 and 2/5/17). 

True reading comprehension means understanding the meanings of words and then being able to integrate and use those word meanings to understand a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire text.  Safura and Perfetti (2017) call this process the “word-to-text integration process.” 

• First, learning to recognize and pronounce the word. 
• Then, learning the meaning of the word, and finally, integrating that meaning into the overall understanding of the sentence being read and its association with other sentences in the text. 
  
• Then, and only then, do you have comprehension. 

Reading and comprehension strategies taught in the classroom can never be effective unless we also teach identifying letter sounds (encoding and decoding) and word meanings (Landi et al. 2013).  Neurobiological studies in reading show that comprehension is intertwined with single-word reading, comprehension of a written text, as well as listening comprehension (Landi et al., 2013).  Yes, vocabulary and definitions of words are essential to effective reading and successful comprehension (see my blog post from 5/10/18).  Classroom instruction should begin with: 

(1) phonemic awareness, teaching letter sounds.  Students must learn effective decoding and encoding skills.  Memorization does not work. 
(2) The second step is teaching vocabulary and word meanings.  Teachers must take the meanings of single words and then
(3) teach the meaning of that word(s) in a sentence.  Students learn the definitions of the word, and then how to use the word in a sentence (see my blog post of 2/14/18). 

Then finally, children need to know how to put the sentences together and connect the word meanings and sentences into a total text.  This is much more effective than simply reading a story and answering questions.  For example, how often do you stop a student and ask if they know the meaning of a word in a story?  No, students just keep on reading, ignoring the fact that they have no idea what they are reading.  I worked with a group of students once who could read very well, but then, when I ask what they had read, they had no idea.  How often do you ask if the student knows the meaning of a word in a test question? 

A parent brought a school paper to me once, and said, “She failed this.”  I turned to the student and began asking what different words meant on the page, especially from the questions.  The child did not know any of the words.  She could not read or pronounce the words, nor did she know the words' meanings. How can we expect students to comprehend if we have not taught them the meaning, definition and usage, of the words we are giving them?  Don’t just assume that the student knows what you are talking about.  Ask! Find out, what the student understands.  If students do not know the meanings of words, they cannot comprehend. 

Once students have moved from words and sentences to full text passages and stories, then students must be taught (4) to evaluate what they are reading while they are reading.  Students should be taught to ask questions in their head as they read:  What is this story about?  Who is the main character?  It’s like reading a mystery story and asking: Who did it?  A list of questions at the end of a story will not teach this type of internal mental evaluation.  Sometimes students must be encouraged to stop and look up the meaning of a word and then reread a passage instead of just continuing.  Training the brain to monitor what you’re reading as you’re reading is a learned skill, and if we will follow these four simple steps in teaching reading comprehension, we can improve the way students read and comprehend.

Phonemic awareness means being able to identify letter sounds.  Phonological awareness stresses helping children learn to work with letter sounds.  The National Reading Panel (2000) emphasized that phonemic awareness is essential if you want to teach students to read.  Memorization, “look say,” or whole language techniques do not work (see my blog posts from 6/5/17 and 2/5/17). 

Phonological awareness includes learning to break words down into syllables, to identify combined phoneme sounds, to identify words with similar and dissimilar sounds, to blend or split segmented sounds, and to manipulate sounds by changing letters in words and thereby creating new words.  I use word games to teach phonological awareness (see my blog post from 1/27/18 for a more complete description of phonemic and phonological awareness).  All of my reading programs include word games to help children understand and identify vowel sounds in words.  Word games are just another approach for teaching phonemic and phonological awareness to the students.  My word games include vowel-clustered flash cards, letter tiles for spelling, complete the sentence games, and add a letter/take away a letter type games to enhance reading ability.

One of my most successful and popular word games is called Match the Sound.   This game is played with word walls at a bulletin board, or on a table, or even on the floor.  Match the Sound is simply another teaching method used to strengthen phonemic and phonological awareness.  Where some children learn best by practicing words in a puppet play, other children respond best to the game approach.  We absolutely never include competition in our word games, and we do not offer extrinsic prizes or rewards.  We play the game as a team, and we play the game for the fun and enjoyment of playing a game together. We work together; there are no winners or losers. 

At my Reading Orienteering Club after-school program, we turned the bulletin boards into word walls.  The children would take turns reading a word out loud and then matching the word to its vowel sound on the word wall.  This was just another approach for helping children learn how to practice letter sounds, read new words, and spell. Again, the words were always presented in vowel clusters and correct manuscript style writing and formation of letters was emphasized. This helped the children to identify the different vowel sounds and to be able to read what they had written.  The 4-steps (see my blog post from 2/14/18 for a description of the 4-step procedure) help them learn each new word.  The children were not told that they had missed the word; instead, children were told that the word was tricky.  As a team, they then used the 4-steps to capture the word and learn the new word.  Correct manuscript handwriting style was also encouraged (see my blog post from 4/12/18 for the importance of handwriting when teaching reading).

We need to be extra-careful when we talk about teaching reading. A new Microsoft ad talks about helping at-risk students learn to read by “breaking words into syllables” and improving reading speed:

“Help all students improve comprehension and reading speed with free Microsoft Learning Tools that reduce visual crowding, enable text highlighting and voicing, and break words into syllables.”  

As I mentioned in my May 24th blog post, fluency is more than mere reading speed.  Comprehension is more than merely answering questions (see blog post of 5/10/18).  Teaching a struggling student to read takes more than simply breaking words down into syllables, highlighting words, and enlarging the print size.  If we want to teach children to read, we must teach letter sounds (see blog post from 1/27/18).  Highlighting words on a computer screen is not bad, but children who struggle to read need to be taught that letters represent sounds. 

Struggling students need more.  If you really want to teach struggling students to read, you must teach letter sounds, especially vowel sounds (Shaywitz, 2003).  Simply breaking words into syllables does not teach letter sounds.  Even if you are able to teach a struggling student to read a simple story by practicing the words over and over, you still have not taught the student to read.  Until the student can transfer the knowledge that you teach to any story, any book, you have not actually taught the student to read.  It is not fair to pretend to teach a student to read when we actually have the research, the knowledge, and the evidence to show how to teach struggling students to read.  At my reading clinic, students sometimes move up 4 grade levels in reading in one year, able to read many things, not just one story.

Many students struggle with reading fluency.  Schools often teach that fluency is the speed with which you read.  Children are often timed while they read, and sometimes parents are even encouraged to time their children as they read at home.  Shaywitz and Shaywitz (2007) report from their research that timing children can be harmful.  Reading fluency has absolutely nothing to do with how fast you can read (Shaywitz, 2003).  Reading fluency is instead how smoothly the child reads, how accurately, and whether the child understands and can comprehend the material (Wolf & Katzir-Cohen, 2001). Shaywitz (2003) explains that repetition, rereading the same oral passage over and over is the best way to teach reading fluency.  Fluency training should start the minute children begin learning to read. 

Unfortunately, most children do not want to sit and read the same story over and over.  To fill this need, we incorporate puppet plays into our program design.  Children read and practice reading a puppet skit to present during their make-believe TV show, and they will eagerly reread the same skit several times to practice and be ready for the show.  So, our program includes puppetry as a fun way to help children practice fluency, grammatical sentence structure, reading with emphasis and expression, and conveying ideas to an audience.  For an audience to be able to understand what they were saying, the children often had to speak more slowly rather than seeing how fast they could read.  Puppet plays provide an excellent way for children to practice fluency and also brought parents and family in at the end of the session to witness the children’s weekly improvement and accomplishments. 

Reading comprehension and listening comprehension engage different processes in the brain and must be taught separately.  First, students need to comprehend what they read.  The second kind of comprehension is listening and comprehending while someone reads aloud to the student.  There is also a difference between listening to someone read a story out loud and simply listening to someone give oral directions.  So, the third kind of comprehension comes into play when we listen to directions spoken orally.  Each form of comprehension involves different brain cells and requires that different mental processes be engaged (Block, Schaller, Joy, & Gaine, 2002).  Neuroimaging studies have shown that while the brain uses similar regions of the brain for reading comprehension and listening comprehension, the brain engages and uses these regions of the brain in diverse ways.  The brain uses a unique set of processes for each aspect of comprehension:  cognitive processing, executive functioning, and working memory (Baker, Zeliger-Kandasamy, & DeWyngaert, 2014).

The first problem is silent reading.  In school, lessons often emphasize silent reading and answering multiple choice test questions after a story (Ness, 2011), but comprehension is too complex a process to be taught by simply previewing, reading a story, and answering a set of questions (Pardo, 2004).  Research has shown that students need intrinsic motivation, decoding/encoding skills, vocabulary knowledge, and self-monitoring skills in order to be able to comprehend what they read (Block, Schaller, Joy, & Gaine, 2002).  Self-monitoring skills are especially important because students must stop when they do not understand what they are reading.  Many children just keep reading or skip over words that they do not know.  If students are reading silently, how can you tell whether they have trouble processing what they are reading or are failing to comprehend because they do not understand the meaning of the words that they are reading?  If students do not know the meaning of the words used in a test question, how can you determine whether they did not comprehend the meaning of the story or simply did not understand the meaning of the words in the test question?  We cannot teach comprehension through silent reading and answering questions at the end of the story.
 
The second problem is that, too often, students are not taught vocabulary words or the meaning of words.  Students will never be able to comprehend what they are reading if they do not understand the meaning of the words that they are reading.
 
A third mistake in teaching comprehension is that schools often do not teach oral listening comprehension.  Too often, educators do not check to make sure that students in the classroom understand oral directions or understand when stories or passages are read out loud.  We need to be teaching students to comprehend what they read as well as what they hear being read or spoken to them.
 
At the Reading Orienteering Club (ROC), we emphasize three different kinds of comprehension.  The workers at the workstations READ the directions to the children rather than simply explaining what needs to be done.  This helps the children understand what they are being asked to do, but also develops their listening comprehension skills.  Oral explanations and clarifications are also used at the workstations—teaching comprehension from oral directions.  Therefore, both types of listening comprehension must be taught.  Students must listen and comprehend directions that are read orally by workstation helpers.  Then, they ask questions when they do not understand.  Oral explanations and clarifications from the workers at the workstations then allow children to engage their listening skills and comprehension while both listening to oral read directions and oral spoken directions. 
 
Reading comprehension is also taught at the ROC.  Read and Spell word lists and vowel-clustered stories are interspersed throughout the workstations to give children practice reading lists of words and also reading the words in the context of a story.  
 
One workstation is totally devoted to reading.  The children read out loud to a volunteer.  The reading workstations employ the progressive step system (Steps 1, 2, 3) so that each child can read a beginning chapter book.  We want children to practice decoding and encoding words contained in oral passages (stories), but we do not want the stories to be above the child’s ability level.  Everyone starts at Step 1 and works their way up. 
 
We do not use multiple-choice test questions for teaching comprehension.  At the ROC, the children are asked:  Who, What, When, Where, and Why?  Who was the story about?  What happened in the story?  When did the story take place?  Where did the story take place?  And why is this a good or a bad story?  Would you recommend for someone else to read this story?  At the ROC reading clinic, we want the children to fully engage their thinking and analytical processes so that they truly understand and comprehend the stories that they read. 
 
We also use the 4 steps (explained more completely in my 2/24/18 blog post).  The 4 steps are to (1) break the word down letter-by-letter, sound-by-sound, learning to pronounce the word correctly; (2) practice spelling the word out loud and then write the word correctly on paper; (3) give a definition for the word by looking the word up correctly in the dictionary, and (4) write a sentence using the word, making sure the word is used correctly and that the sentence is grammatical.  Children too young to write a sentence can give the sentences orally.  All children write the words correctly on manuscript writing paper, making sure that they are shaping their letter correctly.  Writing is one of the stages in learning to read (see 4/12/18 post).

The children are encouraged to read both fiction and nonfiction.  They even pretend to have their own TV show and became TV reporters.  They report on the books they read, or give factual information about a topic being studied, such as outer space or the ocean.  The TV shows give an extra challenge to students who are ready to take on harder reading material.  The progressive step system allows struggling students to be full participates in the TV show.  They work with age/ability appropriate reading material or become puppeteers. All students can learn to read and comprehend what they read, but we must start at the beginning and teach the decoding and encoding of letter sounds.  We must emphasize phonemic awareness.  Then, we must take letter sounds one step further, we must pull the sounds together into words, sentences, and stories.  Comprehension begins with letter sounds and ends with word meaning.  Students cannot read and comprehend what they read if they cannot decode and encode letter sounds into words.
 
Teaching both reading and listening comprehension is essential for effective reading.  Leading researchers in comprehension are stating that we need interventions that teach encoding, decoding, and comprehension (Cutting, Eason, Young, & Alberstadt, 2011).  At the ROC reading clinic, we teach encoding, decoding, and comprehension at the same time.

 
Parents (and even teachers) are confused as to why we spend so much time teaching handwriting in my reading clinic.  The simple answer is that emphasizing handwriting helps children improve their reading abilities.  Research shows that just looking at and identifying letters on a chart does not help children learn to read or enhance their reading ability (Li & James 2016).  Even practicing using letters on a computer, iPad, or other electronic device does not improve letter recognition or reading skills (James & Engelhardt 2012).  If children are to receive any benefit for reading, then the children need to write and correctly shape the alphabet letters (Dinehart 2014).  Handwriting differs from typing.  Keyboarding or typing involves selecting letters.  Neuroimaging research shows that shaping the letters by hand requires the student to engage language, working memory, and cognitive processing skills (Gimenez et al. 2014).  Handwriting engages the brain and requires the student to manage and remember the letter symbols.  Visual, typing, or oral practice does not.  Although it uses a different section of the brain, handwriting facilitates and uses phonemic and phonological awareness.

So, we teach handwriting from day one as we teach phonemic awareness or letter sounds.  If children are to learn to read, they must also learn to write legibly.  Scribbling does not count and does not teach the brain to identify and recognize the letter sounds.  I use tracing sheets.  I have the children trace the letters at first to learn the shape of the letters.  Then we say the letter sounds.  We use three or four different colors of colored pencils and trace over the letters several times.  By tracing the letters with colored pencils, the children can tell when they’re on the dots and when they are off the line.  I use tracing sheets that have the arrows so that children can learn to make and shake their letters correctly.  I tell the children, “we are training your brain.”

If the letter is not written correctly, the child erases and tries again.  We start with simple words for handwriting the same as we start with simple words for reading and spelling.  These three processes are taught together.  If we are teaching words that use the at sound; we first trace and write the letters.  Then, read, write, and spell words that use the at sound:  at, cat, fat, rat, mat, hat.  Repetition helps children learn to make their letter shapes, just as repetition helps children learn to read and spell.  We then add these new written words to one of our creative art projects, such as a paper towel tube rocket.  We say to fuel a rocket we need 25 new words.  These words can be as simple as at, cat, bat.  Or the words can be multisyllable or compound words using the same phonemic sound:  acrobat, astronaut, afternoon.  Each child works at their individual ability level, regardless whether it be with beginning sounds or more complex sounds.

Teaching block-style handwriting is essential for teaching reading.  We cannot have effective reading without effective handwriting.

LD Online recently stated on their website that  “36 percent of the nation's fourth graders cannot read at a basic level, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.” [3]  This is wrong.  While their website offers many good suggestions, their citation and understanding of the Nation’s Report Card is wrong.

The National Center for Education Statistics through their 2017 Nation’s Report Card actually says that 37% of fourth grade students, 36% of eighth graders, and 37% of 12th graders scored proficient or above in reading (see my 1-2-18 blog post for the exact scores). To be labeled proficient, the student must be able to read at or above grade level.  This means that LD Online should have read the results correctly and reported that approximately 63% of children across the nation (all races combined) were unable to read at grade level by 4th grade.  It is significantly different to say that approximately 63% of children across the U. S. cannot read at grade level by 4th grade.  The 2017 scores are lower than the reading scores were in 2015.  So, reading failure is getting worse, not better.   Also see this link to Petrilli’s evaluation of the most recent scores. 

In schools and in many after-school programs, motivation takes the form of extrinsic rewards, prizes, or even food.  Such extrinsic rewards have been proven to be ineffective (Deci & Ryan, 2016).  In all of my reading programs, I use only intrinsic motivation, that is internal motivation, motivation that comes from within.  The children read because they want to read, not because they are required to or want to obtain a prize or reward.  We wanted to kindle in each student a desire to read and enjoy reading.

I use hands-on projects to help generate intrinsic motivation (see ch. 8; Clanton Harpine, 2008).  It is not possible for a teacher, parent, or tutor to motivate a student, but you can create a motivating environment (see ch. 6 in Clanton Harpine, 2015).  The group-centered format is perfect for creating an intrinsically motivational environment.  At each session in my reading programs, the students travel from workstation to workstation to practice vowel clustering by reading, decoding, encoding, and working with the words being introduced that day.  Workstations with individualized rotation increase intrinsic motivation and individualize instruction.  Individualized instruction is essential for intrinsic motivation. 

Each day, a different vowel cluster is taught at the workstations with both my Camp Sharigan (Clanton Harpine, 2011) program and my Reading Orienteering Club (see ch. 4, Clanton Harpine, 2013) after-school program.  To increase intrinsic motivation, the students use the words they are learning to work with and place these words on puppets, rockets, and a variety of other hands-on projects.  Completing a project helps struggling students learn organizational skills and learn to read and follow directions.  The students work hard to complete their projects.  The hands-on puppet projects are used for a puppet play at the end of the week at both Camp Sharigan and the Reading Orienteering Club. 

These hands-on projects become teaching tools and are also motivational tools to encourage students to want to learn.  They are not simply arts and crafts projects; they are a teaching technique placed within a supportive group-centered prevention program that focuses on both teaching and counseling.  I want to undo the harms of reading failure.   I want to encourage children to try again and believe that they can learn to read.  Intrinsic motivation works hand-in-hand with vowel clustering because students must have skills if they are going to believe that they can read and then build an internal desire to read.  A progressive step system of learning is essential in rebuilding an intrinsic desire to learn.
 
Click on images to go to Springer website where chapter downloads are available. The books are also listed on Amazon.