What Drives ARL?

 What have I learned about reading as a consequence of all the discussion, debate, and controversy generated in the past twenty-plus years?

Educators have been constantly at odds as how best to teach children to read. The battles have been intense and, in some cases, nasty. However, in the last several years, we have been presented with excellent research which gives appropriate direction for assuring that our children can and will read. Without extensively referring to this research, I will briefly discuss what I've learned and what has driven the direction of the ARL program.

Preschool children profit remarkably by having parents who will read to them. Specifically, if the parent will read nursery rhymes daily it will help the children hear and start to process the first and most basic blending system needed for later reading. Exchanging the initial consonant to make a new word is the easiest of the three blending patterns. i.e. - mat, cat, sat. The language centers of the developing brain readily respond to the rhyme. If the children have not had this experience, and unfortunately too many have not, then the pre-school teacher, the kindergarten, and first grade teachers need to include nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss and other similar stories immediately.

Phonemic awareness needs to start as soon as children come to school and needs to continue throughout the primary grades with daily lessons. These activities may be as brief as one minute in grades 2 and 3, but they need to be completed, without fail, daily! For less language-mature children - any having difficulty learning to read or write, any who are classified as having learning handicaps, the hard-to-teach, or the cognitively handicapped - daily lessons should continue throughout grades 4-8 or until they read and comprehend on grade level. If we persist, children will not stop reading at third grade level, but will continue to grow and realize their potential. Too often I'm told by both teachers and administrators - "Oh, we did that phonemic awareness stuff in kindergarten." The statement, which is not an exaggeration, indicates that the speaker does not understand the manner in which children learn.

What is now referred to as phonemic awareness was called an "Auditory Motor Program" by Jerome Rosner in his 1973 program and has been referred to as "Language Processing and Blending" by myself. Whatever the name, it is precisely what I have written into the "GUIDE FOR READINESS & READING: LANGUAGE PROCESSING & BLENDING." It is also what I was able to base the ARL program on as it started in the 1972-3 school year. Teachers who are reading the present research and using the GUIDE are aware of the accuracy of this statement.

Guessing, memorization, and picture context cues only provide minimal assistance for the hard-to-teach children in learning to read. Hard-to-teach children are not good guessers-part of what has made them hard-to-teach is that they have poor memory skills, and there are never enough context cues when there are several sentences. If required to rely on any/all of these strategies, they will soon become overwhelmed and quickly discouraged. All three strategies are too unreliable to use consistently for decoding. Further, there is no way that this is effective as we move beyond one syllable words. These children are very aware that they are not keeping up with the other children and they develop anxiety, anger, and seek needed attention in ways which result in labeling - ADD, ADHD, LD, and Emotionally Disturbed to name a few. They aren't "emotionally disturbed," they are emotionally disturbing and it is caused by their lack of academic success. The belief that these children will "catch up by the time they are ten" comes dangerously close to being child neglect. By ten, these children have been referred and labeled.

Children, all of them, need to acquire the processes which are critical to reading. They all profit immensely from phonemic awareness training; they need to stay as long as needed with the programs emphasizing the manner in which they are able to process language; they need to learn their sound/symbol relationship to the automatic level (it may take several years for the hard-to-teach); as they enter first grade, they are able to accelerate there acquisition of new words through Keys (word families) and the Keys will assist them throughout school for spelling, reading, and writing; the teachers need to extend word knowledge, fluency, and build pre-comprehension awareness by reading aloud to the children daily; and the teacher needs to be a diagnostic teacher, one who is aware of the stages inherent within the process of reading and where each child fits into that sequence.

As a psychologist, I've been clearly impressed by the enormity of the reading problem. I've also been struck by the fervor and vigor with which each discipline of reading is presented. Too often it is an either/or approach. My experience has been that there are excellent ideas in each of the three basic approaches - phonic, linguistic, and whole word (read the last also as either look/say or whole language). I believe that we have tended to try to teach a program or a belief system rather than focus on the child. Our focus should be on how children learn, not on phonics, linguistics, or whole word only.

A quick example: There are a group of children in each first through third grade who clearly have difficulty immediately and automatically blending in all three ways. If the reading approach for these children is linguistic, they will demonstrate much more success than if required to read a phonic, whole word, or trade book approach. However, each year I'm bluntly told by too many first grade teachers that they will not use a linguistic series - "I don't like them. They aren't good literature. They are boring." Not to the child, just to the teacher. We need to teach children the way they learn, and it may not be the way we prefer! (It's not the way I prefer either. The stories are also boring to me, but the children are excited about their success and are not doing readability scales on the book.) The competent teacher provides literature to all of the children every day by reading aloud to them. She also makes certain that she teaches all to read.

It is worth noting that the children with reading deficiencies who are properly placed in resource rooms, Title I programs, or Special Education classes invariably are able to interchange the first consonant long before they are able to interchange the medial vowel or the final consonant. These children need a linguistic entry into reading. Asked to cope with a very well organized and developed phonic program or the inherently unstructured whole word approaches, they will fail. Am I aware of the controversy which results from such an "arrogant" statement? Am I ever! However, for years I have asked educators, who contest the comment, to show me a youngster, now 18, 19, or 20, who was/is a hard-to-teach individual, who was taught through strictly a look/say, a Whole Language only, or a strict phonic approach, and who now reads better than the 3rd to 4th grade level. The response is usually, "It happens", but they cannot give me names.

All special education teachers, reading teachers, and resource room teachers, when focusing on reading, need to first utilize a linguistic approach. When the child is able to blend all three ways, and it may take three or four years of instruction before they are automatic with all three, then shift into the look/say materials. Where and when this advice has been followed, the hard-to-teach have a better opportunity to read to their cognitive ability.

My conclusion: we need all approaches to reading, but we need to sequence them properly. Children first imitate sounds and gradually put together those which are reinforced by people with whom they have contact. The more the parent will talk with the child, the earlier and better they will start to respond. Step one: learning sounds = phonics, age birth to 18 months approximately. Step two: when they start putting words together, they also respond to the rhyme and start rhyming on their own as they play with language. Word families = linguistic, age about 2-4; (there is no doubt that they hear the sounds and rhymes long before they are able to produce them, there is also no doubt that I'm simplifying the process in order to save space). At the age of two, we hope that both boys and girls are using at least two word sentences - by the age of four they know thousands of words in each language to which they are exposed. There is a virtual language explosion occurring during this period of life. Parents should be reading daily to their children, talking about what they read, and modeling for the child. Step three (the steps overlap): reading literature = whole word, reading aloud, ages birth to five. There is much more to be said about the entire process, but I hope you have the idea.

In ARL, I emphasize phonemic awareness from day one of school. See the GUIDE, p44. Research clearly states that children are first able to hear the phonogram within a word (a word family), and experience shows that most are able to do this in kindergarten. They are also able to sing the alphabet, and letter names are learned long before sounds. I ask the teachers to discuss beginning sounds in the children's names, animals, holidays, etc. It may be too early for some children to learn sounds, but they are exposed to them every day throughout the year. In January, the children start writing more than just their name and they start focusing on the sounds of the letters. They are learning the rhyme, syllable segmentation, the name, sound, and how to write the letters, they search for words which begin with each sound (hundreds are found and listed), they are working with both phonic and linguistic concepts. They are read to daily and the writing process is encouraged.

We need to teach basic phonic skills. The letter sounds, the rhyme, specific word families, the basic punctuation skills, the short vowel combinations all come first. As the letters are presented they need a careful order of presentation of the vowel sounds, they should use predictable books early and for as long as the child needs it-and with the hard-to-teach, avoid relying on too much memorization. The avoidance of memorization leads to greater reliance on a linguistic approach for 15-20% of the children. The mature children of first grade will quickly move into more interesting and challenging reading material. After several years of inaccurately overplacing children, I finally understood that the children tell us which reading program they should be in by how well they process language. Phonemic awareness exposure is not enough. Extensive and, yes, exhaustive training must be done for this 15-20% along with careful choice of an appropriate reading program. If we are not alert to their language problems, their lack of phonemic facility, they will be placed in the wrong program with referral for other placement looming. Over the years we have learned that a two minute test, the "Language Processing Assessment" (McInnis) will identify these children. Most do not need to be labeled, they need to be taught. If we as educators are patient, they will acquire the necessary processes for reading.

Many educators still feel that children who don't do well on some auditory screening evaluation will not profit from phonemic awareness training. In 1977, Norris Haring & Barbara Bateman wrote in their classic text "Teaching the Learning Disabled Child:"

"The only sure way to prevent a child from learning to read is to preclude all opportunity to make the appropriate associations between written letters and the sounds they represent." (p128)

My experience has been that all children who are able to speak, to use language adequately, who are close to age appropriate with language, who are not aphasic or apraxic, are able to learn the basic phonemic awareness skills and can be taught to read. For those with limited cognitive ability, I certainly don't expect them to become great readers, however, they are able to read at a level commensurate with their potential. If a child can speak, he/she is an auditory learner. This child did not learn to speak through a visual or kinesthetic modality, he/she learned by listening and imitating sounds. It is certainly accurate that some children profit more than others from phonemic awareness training, that many more reinforcements are needed for some children, that these children test our patience, but these are the children most in need of language training. If this training is neglected, the gap between the areas of strength and weakness become greater and we confirm the children as learning disabled. A further quote from Haring & Bateman:

"The trend toward placing the full responsibility for teaching on the program and the teacher is accelerating rapidly. One of the greatest hindrances to its total acceptance is the unquestioning belief of many educators that no one program or method can successfully teach all children. This faith derives from years of observing inadequate teaching of a thousand types, which indeed did fail with 10 to 35 percent, or even more, of the children. Educators prematurely have accepted the inevitability of failure for millions of American schoolchildren."

Twenty one years ago these very fitting statements were clearly presented, along with many others-the text is a gem. Where have many educators been?

One of the most critical concepts learned in the past 26 years is that hard-to-teach, but often bright children, will not read beyond 3rd to 4th grade if they have difficulty blending as they interchange the vowel sounds (Levels J and L, "Language Processing Program") and they will also have difficulty with changing a consonant within a blend (Levels H and K, LPP), and they will usually have difficulty with Levels E3 and E4, LPP. Youngsters in grades 7-12 who are reading at the 2nd through 4th grade levels have demonstrated this problem rather persistently. They have also demonstrated that they can recover and profit from training. This is further evidence that the 2nd through 6th grade teachers should continue the one-minute phonemic awareness activities. The earlier the activities are introduced, the more likely the youngster will not be as far behind his/her peers. Educators need to understand the importance of early intervention, they need to understand that there is one group of 15-20 or even 30% who need to have the phonemic awareness activities extended throughout the entire elementary school experience, they must have the persistence needed to overcome the problem, and the need to stay with proven programs.

Language, or lack of it, is one of the biggest impediments to learning for many children who are labeled. Children are exposed to language in many ways: TV, radio, parents, etc. However, they enter school without the necessary language for instruction. The language of instruction, LOI, has been a consistent part of the ARL program since 1972. Children very readily acquire, and understand, the language concepts of counterclockwise/clockwise, horizontal/vertical, above/below, before/after, etc., as they are presented in kindergarten. We have found that the LOI assists children in attending to detail, developing organizational skills, learning to think before they act, and developing prerequisite language and skills needed for math and science. Another observation of many has been that when the children have language with which to label their environment, they are less apt to be impulsive or distractible. This results in fewer children being referred for labeling.

My experience as a school psychologist with children who are unable to contend with the pace, demands, and conceptual complexity of the academic content of the grade level, has clearly indicated that these children know they are not able to cope. "We want the children to be risk-takers - to be confident enough to take a risk." I hear this comment often as I'm certain all have. But I am perplexed by those who advocate, and insist, that all children be immediately required to read only "good literature." They need material presented which challenges them at their cognitive level. Children who are overwhelmed, who are aware that others their age are able to cope when they can't, and who are called on (often in a well meaning and kindly manner) are being humiliated in front of their peers. Failure doesn't promote academic risk-taking behavior. It does promote misbehavior (negative attention seeking behavior - ADD, ADHD, Emotionally Challenging) and too often leads to a failure syndrome which is extremely difficult to overcome. The children have a self-concept which says "I can't" rather than "I can." If we want them to be academic and intellectual risk-takers, and certainly I do, then we need to provide an atmosphere which allows the freedom to try. Success is the best therapy for both children and adults. Academic success is predicated on the ability to read. We can't afford, literally, to let any of our children fail to read. As Dr. Lynn Searfoss, Arizona State University, has stated: "75 to 80% of all children not reading on grade level at third grade drop out of school."


HAS ARL BEEN SUCCESSFUL?

The crucial test for any program is how well it works. Do the children involved in the program score higher than before the implementation of the program? Are we able to reduce the number of labeled children? Can we reduce the number of children in the Title 1 program? Let's take a brief look at the results in three schools:

Second Graders Reading

One critical landmark for predicting success is how well children read as they enter second grade. The children who are reading at pre-primer level as they enter second grade rarely catch-up! These children are more likely to be labeled by the end of third grade. There are many educators who have read the widely disseminated "research" of Shepherd & Smith which vigorously attacks the use of an extra year to help the immature children. The extra year being either a repeat of kindergarten or first, or a pre-first program. I would accept the premise that repeating children from second grade through twelfth is inappropriate and is only successful if the individual child has a good excuse, such as illness and missing a great number of days. However, an extra year of continuous progress between kindergarten and first grade has worked well. Reading by the second grade, and the results of a properly organized pre-first program, are described by two reports as cited below.

The first report is by Dr. Ellen Ashburn, Language Arts Coordinator and Title I Coordinator, Reading, PA School District, titled "Comparison of the Percentage of Students Entering Second Grade Reading at Grade Level from Fall of 1993 to Fall of 1997:"

"Since 1992-93 reading level placement for the coming year of students at each assigned grade has been collected from each elementary school. This year a comparison was done between 1993 and 1997 of the percentage of students who are reading at grade level as they enter second grade. This comparison was done to determine what effect the Assured Readiness for Learning early intervention program has had on increasing reading levels of second graders. By 1996-97, all first grade classes district-wide had been instructed with the Assured Readiness for Program. The results showed the following:

* In Title I schools, the average gain in reading levels for second grade placement was 34% more students reading at grade level in 1997 than in 1993. (NOTE: The district's poverty average has increased by 20% since 1993.)

* Therefore, although the district's poverty level has increased by 20% since 1993, with the Assured Readiness for Learning early intervention program the district's reading level for second graders has improved by 34% in the schools serving the most "at-risk" students.

* Across the district, the average district-wide gain was 27% more students beginning second grade at grade level in 1997 than in 1993."

Dr. Ashburn, the building principals, the reading teachers, and the teachers are to be commended for the success experienced by these children. The district has started a pre-first program. They use proactive remediation techniques, phonemic awareness is a daily part of each lesson at each grade level, the language of instruction has been utilized, the matrix and blindfolds used daily, and the results reflect the teachers dedication. Good job!

 
Pre-First Data

A second program which I would cite for excellence is occurring in Riverhead, NY. Jean Lapinski, Assistant Superintendent, reported on February 27, 1996 on the efficacy of the pre-first program. She reported that

"In looking at our present eighth grade pre-firsters, 82% remain at or above grade level in reading and 81% in math; of our present ninth grade pre-firsters, 80% (reading) and 82% (math) remain at or above grade level; and of our present tenth grade pre-firsters, 93% (reading) remain at or above grade level. Considering the many other factors that can influence a child's performance in school, those results speak very positively for Riverhead's pre-first program."

Indeed, they do speak highly of the program. Graduates of their pre-first have been on the Honor Roll, the National Honor Society, graduated with Regents diplomas, and have earned academic scholarships to college. When children are chosen for pre-first for the appropriate reasons (it should not be a dumping ground), an appropriate program is provided, and placement is in first grade following the pre-first experience (all gained is lost when they go from pre-first directly into second), it is a positive experience for the children.


A Basic Skills Program

A problem for schools that experience a large turnover of students throughout the school year, is how to successfully integrate the new entrant without disrupting the existing classroom. This problem is especially critical for the children who enter with limited academic skills. In Amityville, NY, starting in September, 1997, a unique Basic Skills approach has been implemented. In the first report to the Board of Education regarding the program, Kathy Arzt, Supervisor of Elementary Curriculum, presented the following data. The goals and intent for the Park Avenue school are stated below:

* "Remediation in the area of English language arts for all new students who are two or more years below grade level in reading.

* Since August there are 92 new students in the school: 38 third graders, 35 fourth graders, and 25 fifth graders. From this group the participants for the Basic Skills class were chosen.


Basic Skills Data:

* 21 students enrolled in the first eight week cycle.

* 66% of the students showed progress.

* 35% of the students showed an increase of 6 months or more in reading comprehension within eight weeks.

* 9 new students entered since October.

* 8 students moved into regular classrooms.

* 5 students have been referred to the multi-disciplinary team.

* 1 student moved out of the district."

During the eight week cycle the emphasis is on phonemic awareness, learning the sound/symbol relationship, acquiring the language of instruction, daily use of the blindfold and the matrix, basic math skills, and learning cursive writing There is a daily infusion of literature by both the teacher and a retired volunteer reading teacher. There are two adults working with the children, the sessions are language arts intensive, and are in a very warm, supportive environment. These children are experiencing success. When the classroom teachers receive them in the classroom they are ready to compete and adjust without stress, and feel they are competent. More children are cycled into the class each eight week period. The teacher and her assistant have done a great job. The School Board is encouraged by the results and plans are under way to replicate this type of class at the high school level for those who transfer in without English speaking skills.


Second Graders Reading; the use of Pre-First instruction; and Basic Skills for new students. These different types of problems, all with developmental and remedial implications, have each been addressed successfully by the extensive use of the ARL program.

-Dr. Phil McInnis


McInnis ARL
2452 Route 364, Penn Yan, New York, 14527, US

All site content Copyright 2000-2005 McInnis ARL. You must obtain written permission to use any content on these pages.