Jill Stowell, M.S.

It's kind of like ping pong.

A report by the U.S. Government insists that the best way to teach reading is to start with phonics. A few years ago, California adopted a whole language approach to teaching reading.

Phonics; No Phonics; Phonics; No Phonics.

Back and forth. Ping pong.

If you have been around education for very long, you realize this political "pendulum" swings back and forth. It doesn't seem to matter which approach is currently "in" and being used, most kids learn to read without much trouble.

With the popularity of commercial phonics programs these days, you would think that all reading problems would be solved - the reading failure would have disappeared by now.

But there are always some children who either can't read or have a lot of trouble learning to read and spell. So despite changes in the school's approach to teaching reading, and despite the popular commercial phonics programs, "Johnny" still can't read.

How Bad Is The Problem? How Many "Johnnies" Are There? Here is what the best research tells us:

• Most students learn to read no matter which approach is taken
• A minority of students (up to 30%, or about 9 out of every class of 30) have some difficulty. This difficulty can range from reading being "hard" all the way to reading being impossible.
• The underlying problem doesn't seem to be any of the normal factors that are blamed (lack of trying, lack of teaching, lack of parent support, low I.Q., laziness, etc.), although these factors can contribute.
• The main problem for these students seems to lie in their ability to "make sense out of phonics."

Phonics, the relationship between letters and sounds, plays a key role in learning to read. Many students "pick it up naturally" whether or not it is "taught" formally.

But 30% of students have a specific difficulty being able to process (or think about) the sounds inside of words. That sounds strange to people who have no problem understanding phonics. It is kind of like colorblindness. If you can see colors, it is hard to imagine people who don't see them the same way that you do. The same is true with phonics.

This is not the same as "hearing." These students can hear just fine. Instead, it is the way the brain processes those sounds. The bottom line is, for these students

And slowing down the phonics program is kind of like someone talking to you in a foreign language - slowly. If you cant understand their words, it doesn't make nay difference how fast or slow they speak - it's still gibberish.

The ability to think about the sounds inside of words is called auditory conceptual judgment.

A Single "Flaw" in Reading Programs Is Cause of Failure
Almost every reading program makes the single assumption that everyone can process (or think about) the sounds within words. In other words, they teach as if phonics makes sense to everyone. This "fatal flaw" in teaching reading keeps some people (up to 30%) from learning to read.

How Does The Problem Show Up?
For some students the deficit is severe and keeps them from being able to read or spell anything. Others find ways of compensating for a while, but eventually hit a "ceiling" and simply don't make any more progress. Still others get through, but it takes all their energy to keep up. They end up working so hard at everything. Homework takes hours and hours. They are always the last one to finish tests - even if they know the material.

Often, parents know there is something wrong, but no one can quite "put their finger on it." They know their child is smart, but why aren't they doing better.

The usual conclusion is that the child is lazy or a behavior problem. Many times, these students are just smart enough to "slip through the cracks" and not even qualify for help at school. But learning is not the comfortable process it is for others. Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem.

It Doesn't Have to Be That Way!
Auditory conceptual judgment can be taught! Through careful, sequential training that activates the seeing, hearing, language, and feeling (tactile/kinesthetic) parts of the brain, children and adults can learn to think about sounds.

This opens a whole new world to a person who previously could not read.

Auditory conceptual dysfunction has been found to be a key and often crippling factor in reading and spelling disorders. But it doesn't have to be that way! Auditory judgment can be trained. Reading and spelling disorders can be corrected by using programs that train this valuable processing skill.