Can You Read This?

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. It deosn't mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a word are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is that the first and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

The paragraph above is a common email forwarding that you mght have already seen! It brings up a very interesting point stating that the human mind reads words as a whole. This might be true for the majority of the population, but approximately 20% of children do not learn to read by the traditional whole language approaches taught at school. Some of these students demonstrate strong reading comprehension, but have a specific glitch in sounding words out (decoding). Because reading is a combination of decoding and comprehension, a student’s decoding skills are vital to the reading process.

To learn to decode a student needs to be able to understand that individual sounds make up words. Thus, a reading disability that is not based in comprehension is occurring at the phonemic level. Simply being able to recite the alphabet isn’t enough. Children need to know that the written letter equates to a sound. Weak readers have difficulty perceiving various sounds and sound blends, and thus have difficulty decoding new words. These students aren’t able to pull apart sounds (segment) and blend them together.

So what can be done if your child has a decoding problem? Twenty years of research demonstrates that we can remediate almost all reading disabilities.

In the 1930s, Dr. Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham developed an approach to reading, a ‘course of action’ if you will, to provide reading instruction. Instruction can vary from student to student based on particular needs, but ultimately, all Orton-Gillingham lessons:

• build upon the association between the sounds and symbols of the English language (letters and letter combinations).


• start with the smallest unit of sound (phoneme)


• allow for the practice of blending sounds to read individual words and bodies of text


• develop automaticity


• isolate certain sounds for spelling


• read text and focus on comprehension


• are multisensory (instruction taps into the visual, auditory and kintesthetic domains) because this approach aids the processing, retention and application of information.

We're committed to the right type of instruction for students enountering reading difficulties. Please contact us if you have any questions!