This course is for teachers to learn why some children have so much difficulty with reading and writing, often called 'dyslexia', and to learn more about best practice in teaching literacy to all in light of recent scientific discoveries. Participation in or completion of this online course will not confer academic credit for University of London programmes
4.2 Reports on reading
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Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing
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Practical teaching approaches Part 1
General principles of inclusion; structured, multisensory, phonics-based and metacognitive approaches; summaries of recent influential reports of best practice from France, the UK and USA; applying these approaches across the curriculum; learning styles; reading, spelling, comprehension and composition; visualization and mind-mapping
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Dr Jenny Thomson
Dr Vincent Goetry
Hi, now we are going to dig into those four reports which have been set up for
ministries around the world, in the United States,
one was in Belgium, one was in France and one was in the UK.
Just to remind you, those four reports converged to the same conclusion
which is that the key component to learn to read and write are the explicit
teaching of phonological awareness and phonemic awareness.
Simultaneously, you teach the grapheme-phoneme
correspondences explicitly.
And if you think about it, both reinforce each other.
If you teach phonemic awareness, giving the symbols, the letters,
the grapheme which corresponds to this phoneme is going to enhance the awareness
of these phonemes and vice versa, so both reinforce each other.
That's why it's very important to teach them simultaneously.
Those reports point out to the fact that other factors may influence reading and
writing, reading development.
The first study, and it's a quite famous study,
often quoted, is the one of Scarborough in 1990,
who tested children
at four years and a half, and
she looked at the predictors of reading at six years when they started school.
And the best predictors of later reading abilities were phonemic discrimination,
auditory short-term memory, letter knowledge, rapid automatized naming.
Moreover, the prediction of the reading performance of
the children on the basis of the results in these tests at four years and
a half was pretty accurate, i.e., about 80% of correct classification(s).
Now, other factors also intervene.
The opacity of the writing system also influences
the rate of reading acquisition.
In 2003, Seymour and collaborators ... compared reading
development in no less than 15 languages in Europe.
Now, what they found is that in English,
first graders can read 34% of words and
pseudowords correctly.
Let's compare this to other language.
In French, 79% of correct responses,
in Italian, 95%, and in German 97%.
So more transparent languages
induce faster acquisition of reading and
spelling ability compared to more opaque languages like French and English.
Certainly English, which is the most opaque alphabetical language.
And we can make a relationship with dyslexia,
because the influence of dyslexia, the incidence of dyslexia
is bigger in more opaque languages compared to transparent languages.
So in English, we quote rate(s) up to between 10 and
15%, and some studies even say more than 15%.
In French, usually we say 7 to 10%, and in Italian,
2 or 3% of the children are dyslexic.
So you can see that there is a direct relationship between
the degree of opacity of language and the rate of dyslexia.
However, there are dyslexics all around the world, in all languages.
This has been shown in many studies, including in the ideographic Chinese.
The opacity of the writing system also influences the kind
of phonological units which are going to be the most important for the children.
Goswami and collaborators in 1998 looked at
the use of riming units in English, in French, and in Spanish.
In English, think about the English, there are lots of riming families.
Think about a word like 'blap', as you see in the film, 'clap', 'sap', etc.
There are less in French, less riming families in French and
even less in Spanish.
And so what they did is they compared the reading of lists of words
containing riming families or non-riming families mixed up or non mixed up.
And the advantage of the list containing riming families was 15 to 20% for
the English-speaking children, 5% for
the French readers and 0% for the Spanish readers.
So, in other words, the rime is a paramount unit,
linguistic unit, phonological unit in English.
It is less important in French, where the syllable and
the phoneme are more important.
And we also know that for ideographic languages like Chinese,
it is morpheme awareness which is very important.
Now let's dig in the report from Ehri and
collaborators which was set up for the Ministry of Health in the US.
They conducted a meta-analysis on 38 studies involving kindergarten,
first graders and second graders.
So they ran a lot of statistical analysis
to have an idea of the size of the effects of training on literacy performance.
And they showed four things.
First, systematic teaching of the grapheme-phoneme correspondence
is better than any other kind of teaching, whole word, whole language, etc.
This is especially true for dyslexic children, this is the second finding.
The third finding is that it has (a) stronger effect when started
early to first grader, or even before that.
And the fourth thing is that phonemic awareness trainings
impact not only on word identification but also on comprehension.
Another study conducted by Braibant and Gerard
examined 450 children in Brussels.
They found that the methods of teaching reading and spelling, and
writing were good predictors of reading performances,
and these factors were more important than the social
economical background of the children.
The children taught with phonics methods
were reading about 20% better than
the children taught with the global method.
And as I mentioned earlier, the other problem with global
method is that it interacts with the social economical
background of the children, which the phonics method does not.
I wrote a report together with my colleagues in 2006 for
the Belgium Ministry of Health on SLI, Dyslexia,
and Dyscalculia (SLI being Specific Language Impairment).
The result for dyslexia showed that the best teaching methods
are the ones combining the explicit teaching of phonemic awareness,
the explicit teaching of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences.
And this is specific to French,
the presentation of longer word split into syllables.
Now, as I said already, in English, a very important
phonological unit is the rime, so dividing words into onsets and
rimes can be very beneficial for English learners.
If you think about it, the role of decoding in the learning of the word
identification processes is paramount.
Indeed, decoding allows (one) to read all the regular words and
parts of the irregular words.
Think about the irregular words like 'said',
the 's', the correspondence between the 's', and
the 's', and the 'd' and the 'd' are regular.
... ... there are French studies showing that children who score better for
pseudoword reading are the one(s) who have the better overall reading score.
Which means that when they understand the phonological decoding path,
when they use the phonological decoding path,
which is the one you have to use for pseudowords,
you get better score in overall for reading abilities.
And also, these studies show that children who make more mistakes of regularization
of irregular words, for example, reading 'said 'as 'sayeed',
those children who do more error like this at the onset of literacy
acquisition are also the ones who are going to read better later on.
Which also means that when the children understand and
practice the phonological decoding root,
they end up reading better because they store in the long-term
memory the phonological and orthographic representations of words,
which allows the development of the direct access route.
To conclude, all these international reports point out that
the early teaching of the grapheme-phoneme correspondence is very important,
is the key to successful literacy acquisition, and
this explains why the training of phonemic awareness is also very important.
Such training, as you see in the film, should be multisensory,
ideally with tokens, which the children can manipulate.
And this training are particularly beneficial for children at risk for
dyslexia, and for children from lower socio-economical background.
But these techniques and tools, obviously, are very good for all the children.
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