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
4.4 General principles – Part 2
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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
Third point, multisensory.
Usually when you teach you use the verbal, the oral modality and the visual modality.
This is what I do now with you.
However, in the 30s Samuel Orton, (who) was a medical doctor,
realized that the connection between the auditory and
the visual in dyslexic was not easy to set up.
And so he devised, he together with Anna Gillingham,
devised a new method to teach reading and spelling and writing to
children with dyslexia which uses other entries to the brain, other modalities.
So, you have the auditory modality, the visual modality, and
you can add two other modalities, the oral-kinaesthetic modality,
which consists in letting the child feel what is happening in his or her throat and
in the mouth when they are pronouncing the sounds of words, isolated sounds.
And for dyslexic learners this is very important because they,
by feeling what is happening in their throat and
their mouth, and be(ing) aware of what is happening with their tongue, their teeth,
their lips, is going to give them some clues to be able to
build better phonological representations of the phonemes.
So this oral-kinaesthetic modality is very important.
And the fourth modality which you can add is the manual-kinaesthetic modality.
This is, obviously, the touching, the feeling, but
also the muscular movements which the child makes when drawing,
when tracing the letters of the alphabet, or letters of words.
So, what you want to do really with the multisensory method is to link,
if possible, simultaneously, the auditory, the visual,
the oral-kinaesthetic, and the manual-kinaesthetic.
And we are going to see, later on,
a few techniques to teach in a multisensory way.
Now let's move on to the characteristics of multisensory methods.
They must be structured and sequential -
I have already talked about that.
So, we introduce the simpler concepts before the more complex things.
Cumulative, which means that each point,
each new teaching point, builds up on the previous one.
Multisensory methods should be based on phonological analysis.
The child needs to have a thorough understanding, and
the child must be able to manipulate consciously the sounds of words,
the phonemes, the rimes, the onsets, the syllables, and
must be able to break spoken words into those phonological units.
Multisensory methods also need to be thorough.
Each step must be thoroughly mastered before going to the next step.
This insistence on what we call over-learning is especially important for
dyslexic readers
but it's very important for all children, I believe.
The multisensory method must be memory-training.
So you must use some little activities,
which we are going to demonstrate to tell you about, which are training memory.
And in some schools, I can tell you, they do this every morning ... ... it's
a warmup exercise to start the day, and children love these kinds of activities.
Multisensory methods also need to be metacognitive, and
we are going to come back to metacognition.
Metacognition, in simple words, is thinking about your own thinking.
'How do I do this?
When I read text, I may ask myself some questions like,
'oh, what question does this paragraph answer?
What will come next?
Have I understood properly?'
This is metacognition.
And the last
characteristic of multisensory method is that they should be diagnostic.
As a teacher, you will see the progression of your learners and
you will adapt your teaching strategy
depending on the reaction to the activities that you propose.
A few words on the steps which are followed by multisensory methods.
So you start by teaching phonological awareness and phonomical awareness.
Simultaneously, you teach the grapheme-phoneme correspondences.
In other words, the alphabetical principle.
Next, you start with rules which are built up with respect to positional constraints.
For example, 'a' is usually spelled 'ai', as in the word 'rain',
in the middle of words, but ay at the end of words, (as) in 'tray'.
So, you teach regular spellings from the most frequent to the less frequent.
If we take, again, the example of 'a', you are going to
teach the letter 'a' as in 'acorn', 'ai' as in 'rain'
before 'ei', as in the 'reign' of a king or a queen,
and 'eigh', as in 'eight' or 'eighty'.
... and then you go on with rule involving changes in spelling,
for example, the contrast and difference between 'hoping' and 'hopping'.
Next, you teach the common suffixes and
prefixes like 'ness' (as) in 'usefulness',
'un' (as) in 'unnecessary',
're' (as) in 'refill', 'ly' (as) in 'badly'.
These will help the children to segment longer words into more manageable chunks.
And finally, you teach the Greek and Latin elements.
You introduce them like 'tele', 'ology', 'pre', 'ex', etc.
Finally, multisensory methods must be metacognitive, and
I've already mentioned metacognition as a characteristic of the multisensory method.
So, as I said,
metacognition is the ability to make what I would call a 'reflective pause'.
And you should induce your students, when they read a text,
or at other moments, to make that reflective pause,
because we never reach a result and correct answer with magic tricks.
We use progression, we process the information in
certain ways, and we use strategies.
So, metacognition is to induce the children to
be aware of the strategy which work(s).
'When I was tackling that problem last time how did I succeed?' for example,
and the strategy which did not work,
'let's not use that because I failed the last time I use this strategy.'
Often the dyslexic learners will not spontaneously do metacognition, so
I really encourage you to induce the children to take that pause and
reflect on their own thinking.
Just imagine the multiple tasks that a dyslexic
must carry on in a comprehension exercise.
Read, without too many approximations.
Keep enough elements in memory
and we know that they have a weak memory, usually.
Identify the knowledge to use for responding.
Remember the steps of the process.
Overcome difficulties reading the answer sheet and search for
the correct spelling of each word.
Cope with time, which is very difficult for them, etc.
... ... ...
... ... ... also dyslexics know they have a weaker memory.
And we know, as I told you already, that stress is the enemy of memory and
if they don't' feel self-confident because they know they have a weak memory,
it's going to become worse for them in evaluations.
So what can you put in place to help metacognition?
The golden rule is to remember that dyslexics will take more time
than non-dyslexic to automatize processes due to a weak memory,
both for storing things in long-term memory, and for
retrieving the things, for example, in an evaluation.
This is not due to laziness or inattention.
You need to keep this in mind.
They will always be slower at retaining,
at memorizing the processes, the steps to do something.
Every now and then you propose a reflective pause.
And what is important also, I suggest, in evaluations
you let the dyslexic child have a little card with the steps to follow close to,
so that he can look at this card and follow the correct steps.
Concretely, you can propose an exercise of problem resolution.
Then you are going to question the children.
You are going to ask them, 'how did you reach the correct answer?'
And you're going to make them aware that there may be several paths,
... ... to come to the right answer and the right solution.
Then you may even assign a path to the name of the child
who does it this way, and this child becomes an expert
and then when you introduce the next exercise of the same type,
that person becomes a resource person for the other children and
especially for the dyslexic learners.
And remember, metacognition is very useful for dyslexic learners;
they don't do it spontaneously, and
the dyslexics are always much better orally than in writing.
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