I had a discussion with a school based SLP today about a child I had conducted an independent assessment for recently. She mentioned that the school uses the 'Read Naturally' program for reading fluency but the reading specialist was saying that he has such good memory for words that he easily memorizes the passage auditorily and fails to really decode. I felt that his phonological awareness skills were so far behind and weak at the phoneme level that perhaps they should re look at increasing the intensity there for awhile again and not focus on fluency at the paragraph level as yet but according to her his phon. skills were much worse before as he could not even manipulate at the syllable level previously. They are also using Project read as a decoding program. He has memorized so many activities in the 'curriculum' that I felt the reason he could do some rhyming activities or decode etc was because he had memorized so words especially in the higher frequency syllable shape patterns. He was also a fantastic guesser at reading comp. tasks as he is smart in that sense of using contextual info to guide him and a very strong vocabulary. I am just worried that they are sticking too much to a'curriculum' and not differentiating or modifying it to work with his strengths and weaknesses appropriately. He is entering 3rd grade but really struggling to read even at a late Kinder. level. He came out way below basic in our recent CA state testing. There was also this resigned feeling that he is always going to struggle with phonological awareness skills. He is already pulled out 4 times a day for nearly half a day at school for reading, math work in the learning center/special ed resource room. I was just wondering if anyone has any suggestions for me to bring to the IEP team next week and perhaps refocusing the intensity in certain areas before others.
1 comment
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Sandie Barrie-Blackley Yen~
I see this sort of thing a lot, too. It is often not always obvious to teachers that accuracy has to come before fluency, but it does makes common sense, and if you can get them think about it, they usually get it.The TOWRE is a useful (and quick) test that shows a comparison of a child's
efficiency reading memorized ("sight") vs. novel (phonological decoding) words. Looking at the errors a child makes on this test (and not just their score), it is usually pretty obvious there is trouble. After 3rd - 4thgrade there are so many infrequent, novel words in every content area that a child with weak decoding skills is going to have his/her fluency disrupted constantly by his/her lack of word-reading (decoding) accuracy. There is very good explanation of that relationship here , on the Scholastic Website.It sounds like these educators don't believe that this child's phonological awareness (and decoding) skills can be improved, For example, Gillam & Loeb (2010) review the research on treatments for improving auditory processing skills. Their research suggests four elements predict improvement:
1. intensity
2. active attention
3. feedback
4. rewards
I thought about you.... and this issue.... on Tuesday when I saw my client, whose mom really “got” the message about the importance of intensive practice and worked really hard over the summer to get “intensive” treatment included on her daughter’s IEP. The child’s IEP now calls for a small group session with a reading teacher, five days a week for 40 minutes a day. This reading teacher apparently uses the Wilson Method. So, that sounded great to me. BUT…Mom told me yesterday that of the 20 school days so far this year this teacher has actually met with this group only twice. (The plan is intensive, but the reality isn’t!) We started Lexercise with this child yesterday…..
It can be hard to get a handle on how much actual practice a child has gotten. Even if you know the number of sessions a child has had you still don't know how much actual practice the child got. I have watched group therapy sessions during which an individual child didn't respond once! Without some kind of continuous data monitoring, tracking actual practice is just not possible.
Good luck. Let us know how this goes since I think we all face this challenge.