By Guest Writer, Melissa Miller

My path to literacy was a lucky, privileged one, as I was raised by a librarian. Mom worked at a business school library and was a very active volunteer at our local public branch. She read to me, presumably starting when I was still in the womb. Though I certainly can't remember that far back, I know I was reading on my own before I was three. Our house was chock-full of printed matter…quite cluttered with it, in fact, despite Mom's purported organizational calling. The bottom line: she would never have let me not read.

A quarter-century later, as a graduate teaching assistant in a large urban public university, I found myself emotionally distraught at the overall language abilities of my freshman composition students. ESL students from all over the globe did make up a solid 25% of my classes – but often, their work was better and their English proficiency seemed as high, or higher, than that of many of the American-born students! That part was frankly very disappointing, on a patriotic, sentimental level.

I had to remind myself that not everyone had been raised with my family's background, where education was emphasized or even worshipped as a constant imperative for success. Frustration, despair, pity, even anger ("why are these kids even in college?!") were rotating through my mind, along with a heavy dose of guilt and cognitive dissonance…after all, I liked my students and felt protective of them, at the same time as they made me recoil with existential fear for the future of our civilization. "What a horrible person I must be to have such thoughts," thought I. Until I confided in my fellow teachers and realized: this is just the internal struggle we have to deal with, and the only way to win is by doing the best possible job for our students.

The really difficult thing was that, though it was not technically a remedial course (you could test out, but you also had to test in, so these were probably the middle 60% of the incoming class), I was necessarily under-serving the best of these students at times, because I was essentially being counted on to teach not only college-level skills, but things that had been neglected along the way. It felt like I could hardly go back and inculcate habits I myself had formed from high school, middle school, elementary school, preschool…

But why not? I thought back to the way I felt about reading, way back at the very beginning. There was nothing threatening about it to my little toddler self, it was pure fun. Yet the outside world offered rewards for it. No wonder I continued down that path without resistance. Maybe I needed to encourage my students in that same pure way. But how?

I remembered the summer reading program at that local public library. There was a wall of little colored stickers, a different hue for each reading level, that tracked the number of books we'd checked out (usually hitting the max of 15 per trip) and read (as confirmed by parent or guardian, I suppose). It sounds cheesy, but it worked. Might stickers still be the answer in college? I resolved to test it. Colored dots were passé, of course; I splurged with my limited grad-school budget on some fancy stickers of racecars, dinosaurs, and the like. I offered stickers for journal entries, stickers for answering questions in class, extra stickers for reports on reading serious long-form articles. Surely my students were too cool to be motivated by stickers.

Nope. The whole pedagogical dynamic changed with this silly incentive system. Classroom participation probably tripled. They began to sound excited about their reading, even the (admittedly dry) material in the comp textbook. I've never taught young children en masse (though I've tutored them one on one), but by taking a lesson from childhood literacy education, without dumbing down the content, I revived some of that spark of enthusiasm that makes the difference between drudgery and engagement.

About the Author:
Melissa Miller is a cheerleader for online associate degree programs. Not literally, of course (since online schools don't have varsity football), but in the sense that her writings will encourage you to "B-E aggressive" about your education. Throw your questions to melissamiller831@gmail.com.

Every teacher wants their students to succeed. Not one teacher out there hopes that there students will perform poorly. So… if there was a simple, easy to implement process that would take your students’ passing rate from 50% to 96% you would jump right on it. Right?

Well, here is Shantell Berrett, Reading Horizons Teacher Trainer and Dyslexia Specialist, sharing why a simple strategy called dictation can dramatically boost passing rates simply by tweaking the way information is presented AND how to use this strategy. The best part? It’s so easy to implement:

So… how do you implement this simple and powerful process of dictation?

Step 1: You (as the teacher or tutor) say the word twice (this can be a word you are having the student read, or a word that is part of their spelling or vocabulary list).

Step 2: Have the students’ say the word back twice.

Step 3: Have the students’ write the word once.

Step 4: Have the students’ read the word once (by having them mark the word, decode it, and then read it).

Results:

Here are the results of one teacher that was trained by Jay Kelly (as mentioned in the video), after using this process for just 2 weeks:

•  25 students in her mainstream 6th grade class.
•  18 mainstream.
•  7 receive special services.
•  Normally about 50% (12-13) of students pass the vocabulary tests.
•  The only thing she did differently in this case was to introduce the words using dictation and give the test using dictation.
•  This time 96% (24/25) passed.
•  All 7 special services students passed.
•  The only student who didn't pass refused to say the words back.

The only student who didn't pass refused to participate in the process.

How’s that for powerful results? From 50% passing rate to 96%! And the only student who didn’t pass refused to participate.

We'd love to hear the results of any teacher that tries this strategy!!

If you want to learn more of these simple, powerful strategies for struggling readers (and all students learning to read)… check out our free 30-day online workshop! >

Reading Horizons is offering a free 30-page Phonemic Awareness supplement available for download!

The free download includes lessons on rhyme, syllable identification, oral segmentation, and oral blending, plus phoneme manipulation and identification of words in sentences, activities, and assessments.

Current research indicates phonemic awareness is the strongest predictor of reading success, even at the high school level. Training in phoneme identification, manipulation, and substitution is essential for students to become successful readers.

In addition to a comprehensive glossary of terminologies, the material includes many ideas for phoneme manipulations, such as: phoneme elimination, blending, sound isolation, phoneme sequencing, phoneme count, phoneme deletion, syllable deletion, and sound-to-word matches.

Our gift to you! Happy Holidays!

I think that it is a mistake to assume that all teachers grasp the terminology of necessary reading strategies required in a successful classroom. Most teachers have not been taught to clearly define or breakdown how to actually teach a student to read. They are provided with the materials to teach but not a systematic approach to actually accomplish the task.

So it is probably naïve of us to toss around phrases like explicit phonics, nonsense words or phonemes and assume that teachers know the definitions of those words. That’s why I thought it might be helpful if I pulled together a quick reference of literacy terms for your review.

Glossary of Fundamental Literacy Terms

Auditory Discrimination - The ability to identify the differences between spoken words and sounds that are similar.

Auditory Processing - The ability to understand spoken language.

Base Words - Words from which many other words are formed. For example, many words can be formed from the base word migrate: migration, migrant, immigration, immigrant, migrating, migratory.

Blend - A consonant sequence before or after a vowel within a syllable, such as cl, br, or st; it is the written language equivalent of consonant cluster.

Cloze Passage - A cloze passage is a reading comprehension exercise in which words have been omitted in a systematic fashion. Students fill in the blanks, and their responses are counted correct if they are exact matches for the missing words. Cloze exercises assess comprehension and background knowledge, and they are also excellent indicators of whether the reading level and language level of the text are appropriate for a given student.

Cognates - Words in different languages related to the same root, e.g. education (English) and educación (Spanish).

Comprehension - Understanding the meaning of text by reading actively and with purpose (for learning, understanding, or enjoyment).

Comprehension Strategies - Techniques to teach reading comprehension, including summarization, prediction, and inferring word meanings from context.

Decoding - The ability to translate a word from print to speech, usually by employing knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences. It is also the act of deciphering a new word by sounding it out.

Direct Vocabulary Learning - Explicit instruction in both the meanings of individual words and word-learning strategies. Direct vocabulary instruction aids reading comprehension.

Explicit Phonics Instruction – Is the reverse of Implicit Phonics Instruction: incorporating blending and building from a single letter to a word. Explicit phonics instruction is essential for students with dyslexia or other learning disabilities.

Dysgraphia - Difficulty writing legibly and with age-appropriate speed.

Dyslexia - A language-based learning disability that affects both oral and written language. It may also be referred to as reading disability, reading difference, or reading disorder. Dyslexia can also cause difficulty with writing, spelling, listening, speaking, and math.

Dysnomia - Difficulty remembering names or recalling specific words; sometimes called a “word-retrieval” problem.

Fluency - The ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with proper expression and comprehension. Because fluent readers do not have to concentrate on decoding words, they can focus their attention on what the text means.

Frustrational Reading Level - The level at which a readers reads at less than a 90% accuracy.

Grapheme - A letter or letter combination that spells a single phoneme. In English, a grapheme may be one, two, three, or four letters, such as e, ei, igh, or eigh.

Implicit Phonics Instruction  - This method begins with a whole word and looks at beginning sounds, ending sounds, and context clues.

Independent Reading Level - The level at which a reader reads with about 95% accuracy.

Instructional Reading Level - The level at which a reader reads with about 90% accuracy.

Learning Disability (LD) - A neurobiological disorder that affects the way a person of average to above-average intelligence receives, processes, or expresses information. LD can impact one's ability to learn the basic skills of reading, writing, or math.

Limited English Proficient (LEP) - The term used by the federal government, most states, and local school districts to identify students who have insufficient English language skills to succeed in English-only classrooms. Increasingly, English language learner (ELL) or English learner (EL) are used in place of LEP.

Literacy - Reading, writing, and the creative and analytical acts involved in producing and comprehending texts.

Morpheme - The smallest meaningful unit of language. A morpheme can be one syllable (book) or more than one syllable (seventeen). It can be a whole word or a part of a word such as a prefix or suffix. For example, the word ungrateful contains three morphemes: un, grate, and ful.

Morphology - The study of how the aspects of language structure are related to the ways words are formed from prefixes, roots, and suffixes (e.g., mis-spell-ing), and how words are related to each other.

Nonsense Words – Using words like baf and carf to determine if students have simply memorized words or if they understand how to decode words.

Orton-Gillingham Method – Coursework that is presented to students through a multi-sensory methodology that encompasses the visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile modalities.

Phoneme - The smallest unit of speech that serves to distinguish one utterance from another in a language.                                                                        

Phonemic Awareness - The ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. For example, beginning readers display phonemic awareness by combining or blending the separate sounds of a word to say the word (/c/ /a/ /t/ – cat).                                                                       

Phonics - A form of instruction to cultivate the understanding and use of the alphabetic principle; that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes (the sounds in spoken language) and graphemes, the letters that represent those sounds in written language, and that this information can be used to read or decode words.                                                                                      

Phonological Awareness - A range of understandings related to the sounds of words and word parts, including identifying and manipulating larger parts of spoken language such as words, syllables, and onset and rime. It also includes phonemic awareness as well as other aspects of spoken language such as rhyming and syllabication.                                                                          

Reading Disability - Another term for dyslexia, sometimes referred to as reading disorder or reading difference.

Response to Intervention (RTI) - Response to Intervention is a process whereby local education agencies (LEAs) document a child's response to scientific, research-based intervention using a tiered approach. In contrast to the discrepancy criterion model, RTI provides early intervention for students experiencing difficulty learning to read. RTI was authorized for use in December 2004 as part of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Slide - Effectively joining consonants and vowel sounds.

Striving Readers Act - Striving Readers is aimed at improving the reading skills of middle school- and high school-aged students who are reading below grade level. Striving Readers supports the implementation and evaluation of research-based reading interventions for struggling readers in Title I eligible schools that are at risk of not meeting — or are not meeting — adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements under the No Child Left Behind Act, or that have significant percentages or number of students reading below grade level, or both.

Syllabication - The act of breaking words into syllables.

Syllable - A part of a word that contains a vowel or, in spoken language, a vowel sound (e-vent, news-pa-per).

Systematic Phonics Instruction – A teaching method that gives students the knowledge required to analyze and identify just about any word they encounter-even to the point of deciphering and reading words they have never seen before!

Vocabulary - Word knowledge. Listening vocabulary refers to the words a person recognizes when he hears them in oral speech. Speaking vocabulary refers to the words he uses when speaking. Reading vocabulary refers to the words a person knows when he sees them in print. Writing vocabulary refers to the words he uses in writing.

Word Attack - An aspect of reading instruction that includes intentional strategies for learning to decode, sight read, and recognize written words.

Did you know that learning disabilities one in seven people? If you want to learn download our free E-Book, Learning Disabilities 101!

Source: http://www.adlit.org/, http://www.ReadingHorizons.com

We are learning that there are certain reading strategies that have been proven to work best with autistic students. For example, autistic learners need:

• Instant Feedback

• Attention Holding Activities

• Physical Engagement

• Positive Reinforcement

• Visual Cues

Additionally there is growing research about the type of reading instruction that works best for those with autism and other spectrum offshoots. If an autistic learner is going to learn to read, three essential components must be in place. They include:

1) Presenting the materials visually

2) Offering simple, concise and minimal directions or instructions for completing a task or applying a skill

3) Taking advantage of phonics-based instruction that systematically and repetitively breaks thousands of words down into their component sounds or phonemes

Today there are online reading systems that meet those requirements plus offer affordable easy-to-administer solutions that can help an autistic child learn to read. Be certain to select a program that is Orton-Gillingham based, meaning that it utilizes a multi-sensory method that is beneficial to all learning styles including visual and kinesthetic learners.

We've seen it time and again. Phonics is best learned when the teaching method is explicit and sequential, represented in a clear, direct manner that starts from simple concepts. To ensure success, the program must build upon the previous skills to ensure constant reinforcement and retention.

Many reading programs on the market today consist of long rules or they are not linear - they jump around from one phonics concept to the next. This approach does not work well with most emerging readers, let alone those with special needs like autism. Other benefits of a solid phonics program is that it can help an autistic student with recall by providing an interactive, engaging process like marking and proving words. Ultimately, the right phonics instruction will help autistic learners develop phonemic awareness and teach them in a way that is cognitive to this type of learner.

To learn more, see Phonic Reading and Spelling with Lewis on YouTube and a listing of the Top 50 Autism Blogs.

Share your unique story about teaching austistic students here!