Early Signs of Reading Difficulty

By: Susan Hall (2009)

Parents are often the first to suspect their child has a reading problem. An expert alerts parents to some of the earliest indicators of a reading difficulty.

A parent may be the first person in a child's life to recognize a reading problem. A parent's observation is critical because some of the earliest signs that foreshadow a reading difficulty can be seen during preschool and kindergarten years.

Difficulty manipulating sounds in words is one of the hallmark characteristics of reading difficulties and can be seen at a young age. Your child might struggle with rhyming, word games, or recognizing words that start with the same sound.

Often children who had repeated ear infections or speech delays during their early years eventually have trouble learning to read. Children who have articulation problems or are late to talk, as compared to peers, should not only receive a speech and hearing screening during the preschool years but should be monitored for possible reading difficulty.

Let's turn to some stories from parents of children who later had trouble reading. What were some warning signs they saw as early as the preschool years?

One parent first noticed her daughter couldn't learn letter and number symbols when she was a preschooler. Despite the mother's extensive efforts to teach her daughter the alphabet, her child entered kindergarten knowing only 2 of the 26 letters.
Another mother noticed just before her son's third birthday that he wasn't speaking at the level of his peers. He had experienced repeated ear infections and later had tubes inserted; his speech improved somewhat, but he eventually had reading problems.
Another parent first began to suspect a problem when her preschool son disliked nursery rhymes. She would leave off the last word to see if he could fill in the blank of the rhyme. Despite having heard the same rhyme many times, he couldn't do it. He just didn't seem to recognize the pattern of similar sounding words that is characteristic of rhyming.
Sometimes parents notice difficulties during first grade because a child who's just beginning to learn to read may have trouble making associations between sounds and letters. Problems include detecting differences in speech sounds and performing tasks that require this skill, such as:

Pronouncing new words and remembering them
Breaking words apart into sounds
Blending sounds together to make words
Remembering the names and sounds of the letters
A child with weak phonological skills often prefers to guess at unknown words while reading because he is not very good at figuring out the sounds or blending them together. Being able to sound out unknown words is an important skill your child needs in order to read text. Beyond third grade, the text contains more difficult words that often cannot be predicted from context clues or limited pictures.

If you ask your first grader to read aloud to you and he resists doing so, this may be a warning that there's a problem. Children who struggle often find reading is such a belabored process they avoid it.

By the middle of first grade your child should be able to read at least 100 common words, such as the, and, and is, and know the letter-sound associations well enough to read words in simple books. Watch for these warning signs as you listen to your child read aloud:

Doesn't know the sounds associated with all of the letters
Skips words in a sentence and doesn't stop to self-correct
Can't remember words; sounds out the same word every time it occurs on the page
Frequently guesses at unknown words rather than sounding them out
You can also look at your child's writing for clues about reading difficulty. By the end of kindergarten a child should be writing words that contain most of the consonant sounds in a word, even though the vowels will often be missing or inaccurate until later.

These warning signs can be helpful to parents who suspect learning to read isn't progressing smoothly. However, just because your child is struggling doesn't necessarily mean there is a serious problem. Learning to read is a complex process that doesn't occur overnight for most children; it takes time and plenty of direct, systematic instruction.

It's important not to panic if you see some of these warning signs in your child. Lists of early warning signs can help you be on the lookout; however, there is no precise list of surefire signs of a reading difficulty. Each child is unique and may exhibit only some of the signs. Knowing what to look for can help you decide whether you need to investigate further. Calm and reasoned reactions are the most effective for your child.


Hall, S. Early Signs of a Reading Difficulty. GreatSchools Inc., Retrieved September 1, 2009, from http://www.greatschools.net/LD/identifying/early-signs-of-reading-difficulty.gs?content=739.

The Trouble With Bright Girls

Successful women know only too well that in any male-dominated profession, we often find ourselves at a distinct disadvantage. We are routinely underestimated, underutilized and even underpaid. Studies show that women need to perform at extraordinarily high levels, just to appear moderately competent compared to our male coworkers.

But in my experience, smart and talented women rarely realize that one of the toughest hurdles they'll have to overcome to be successful lies within. Compared with our male colleagues, we judge our own abilities not only more harshly but fundamentally differently. Understanding why we do it is the first step to righting a terrible wrong. And to do that, we need to take a step back in time.

Chances are good that if you are a successful professional today, you were a pretty bright fifth grade girl. My graduate advisor, psychologist Carol Dweck (author of "Mindset") conducted a series of studies in the 1980s, looking at how Bright Girls and boys in the fifth grade handled new, difficult and confusing material.



She found that Bright Girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up; the higher the girls' IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts rather than give up.

Why does this happen? What makes smart girls more vulnerable and less confident when they should be the most confident kids in the room? At the 5th grade level, girls routinely outperform boys in every subject, including math and science. So there were no differences between these boys and girls in ability, nor in past history of success. The only difference was how bright boys and girls interpreted difficulty -- what it meant to them when material seemed hard to learn. Bright Girls were much quicker to doubt their ability, to lose confidence and to become less effective learners as a result.

Researchers have uncovered the reason for this difference in how difficulty is interpreted, and it is simply this: More often than not, Bright Girls believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable, while bright boys believe that they can develop ability through effort and practice.



How do girls and boys develop these different views? Most likely, it has to do with the kinds of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children. Girls, who develop self-control earlier and are better able to follow instructions, are often praised for their "goodness." When we do well in school, we are told that we are "so smart," "so clever, " or "such a good student." This kind of praise implies that traits like smartness, cleverness and goodness are qualities you either have or you don't.

Boys, on the other hand, are a handful. Just trying to get boys to sit still and pay attention is a real challenge for any parent or teacher. As a result, boys are given a lot more feedback that emphasizes effort (e.g., "If you would just pay attention you could learn this," "If you would just try a little harder you could get it right.") The net result: When learning something new is truly difficult, girls take it as sign that they aren't "good" and "smart," and boys take it as a sign to pay attention and try harder.

We continue to carry these beliefs, often unconsciously, around with us throughout our lives. And because Bright Girls are particularly likely to see their abilities as innate and unchangeable, they grow up to be women who are far too hard on themselves -- women who will prematurely conclude that they don't have what it takes to succeed in a particular arena, and give up way too soon.



Even if every external disadvantage to a woman's rising to the top of an organization is removed -- every inequality of opportunity, every chauvinistic stereotype, all the challenges we face balancing work and family -- we would still have to deal with the fact that through our mistaken beliefs about our abilities, we may be our own worst enemy.

How often have you found yourself avoiding challenges and playing it safe, sticking to goals you knew would be easy for you to reach? Are there things you decided long ago that you could never be good at? Skills you believed you would never possess? If the list is a long one, you were probably one of the Bright Girls -- and your belief that you are "stuck" being exactly as you are has done more to determine the course of your life than you probably ever imagined. This would be fine, if your abilities were innate and unchangeable. Only they're not.

No matter the ability -- whether it's intelligence, creativity, self-control, charm or athleticism -- studies show them to be profoundly malleable. When it comes to mastering any skill, your experience, effort and persistence matter a lot. So if you were a Bright Girl, it's time to toss out your (mistaken) belief about how ability works, embrace the fact that you can always improve and reclaim the confidence to tackle any challenge that you lost so long ago.


Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D..Motivational psychologist and author
Posted: March 1, 2011 07:36 AM

Can you say, "Phonological Awareness"?

To understand phonological awareness, we must first know what a phoneme is. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in our language that makes a difference in a word’s meaning. For example, the word cat has three phonemes, /k/ /a/ /t/. By changing the first phoneme, we can produce the word rat. Changing the second phoneme creates the word cut, and we can create the word cab by altering the final phoneme. Words in the English language are composed of strings of phonemes. This is fortunate because it allows us to create all the words we will ever need by using various combinations of just 44 different speech sounds.

Speech scientists have discovered that the human brain is specifically adapted for processing many different kinds of linguistic information, and one part of our biological endowment allows us to process the complex phonological information in speech without actually being aware of the individual phonemes themselves. This is one of the human abilities that makes acquiring speech a natural process, so that almost everyone in the world learns to speak a language with very little direct instruction. However, because phonemes are represented by letters in print, learning to read requires that children become consciously aware of phonemes as individual segments in words. In fact, phonological awareness is most commonly defined as one’s sensitivity to, or explicit awareness of, the phonological structure of words in one’s language. In short, it involves the ability to notice, think about, or manipulate the individual sounds in words.

One of the early signs of emerging sensitivity to the phonological structure of words is the ability to play rhyming games. In order to tell whether two words rhyme, the child must attend to the sounds in the words rather than to the meaning of the words. In addition, the child must focus attention on only one part of a word rather than on the way it sounds as a whole. As children grow in awareness of the phonemes in words, they become better able to judge whether words have the same first or last sounds; with further development, they become able to isolate and pronounce the first, last, or middle sounds in words. At its highest levels of development, awareness of individual phonemes in words is evidenced by the ability to separately pronounce the sounds in even multi-syllable words or to tell exactly how two words like task and tacks are different.

Acquiring phonological awareness involves two things: learning that words can be divided into segments of sound smaller than a syllable, and learning about individual phonemes themselves. As children acquire more and more conscious knowledge of the distinctive features of phonemes (how they sound when they occur in words, or how they feel when they are pronounced), they become more adept at noticing their identity and order when they occur in words. For example, while children in the first semester of first grade might be able to isolate and identify the first or last sound of a word like man, by the end of first grade, most children can easily, and relatively automatically, segment all the sounds in a more complex word like clap.

Dyslexia's Special Club

What do Charles Schwab, David Boies, Tom Cruise, Nelson Rockefeller -- and it's suspected even Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison -- have in common?

They are all famous, yes. And also dyslexic.

Of course, considering 15 to 20 percent of the population is affected with a language-based learning disability -- and dyslexia is the most common of these -- purely statistically a handful of dyslexics are going to make it big. But research suggests it goes deeper than that: Experts are discovering a link between dyslexia and success.

In the spirit of raising awareness, the Child Mind Institute, an organization devoted to children's mental health, hosted a lecture series on dyslexia last week in New York City. President of the institute Harold Koplewicz, M.D. interviewed one such dyslexic-turned-success, actor and all-out movie star Orlando Bloom.

"It was a struggle. It was a lot of work," Bloom told the audience at Rockefeller University. "I had to work three times as hard to get two-thirds of the way.

"I was frustrated with that learning disability. It makes you feel stupid."

A great relief came for the actor at age seven, when he was tested and diagnosed with dyslexia, and also told he had a high IQ score. It was a blessing to get that diagnoses, he said. He knew he wasn't dumb.

A blessing indeed it was. The generation before Bloom's didn't fare so well. For decades the learning disability has been misunderstood -- or not understood at all -- and dyslexics knew only that they weren't "normal." They couldn't keep up in class, couldn't spell or read properly. They were called stupid or lazy -- and too often, they believed it.

The 1990s marked a crucial turning point, when scientists discovered the disability was linked to neurological differences in the brain -- differences that had nothing to do with cognition, IQ or intelligence.

Technology became available that enabled scientists to observe the brain while a person read, spoke or processed phonological structures of language -- i.e. what the brain is doing when we "sound out" words, or make links between the way a word sounds and what it looks like on a page. Scientists discovered the sections of the brain that process language work differently in people with dyslexia.

Nowadays, research is showing not only that dyslexics aren't stupid; they're often exceptionally bright in other areas. With reading, spelling and organization a constant struggle, dyslexic children (and adults) are forced to find alternative, innovative strategies to learn.

They often rely on creativity, reasoning, problem-solving and empathy to achieve their goals -- building skills that can serve them well in life beyond the classroom, explained Sally Shaywitz, M.D., co-founder of the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity and author of Overcoming Dyslexia, at the lecture series.

"Creativity is the key for any child with dyslexia, or for anyone for that matter. Then you can think outside of the box," said Bloom. "Teach them anything is attainable. Let them run with what you see is whatever they need to run with."

Growing up, he was able to capitalize on his acting talent, his natural leadership (captain of the school soccer team, of the hockey team ... ) and his "way with the ladies" (he sheepishly admitted he could often get by with "a wink and a smile").

"I'm lucky," he conceded. "I've always been lucky."

But many other children aren't as lucky, and the low self-esteem brought on by dyslexia often takes an unrecoverable toll.

"Obviously, most people don't turn out like Orlando," said Dr. Koplewicz after his interview with Bloom. Many people don't make it through school. They end up with substance abuse problems and addictions, or even in jail, he said.

Youth with untreated dyslexia are more than twice as likely to drop out of high school (36 percent of students) and become unemployed, underemployed or incarcerated, according to the society for neuroscience, 2004.

Children who are bright and talented often won't see it come to fruition because the dyslexia stands in the way. And a big part of that self-esteem. Proper diagnoses can bring peace of mind. It can also mean getting the appropriate attention, extra time and special help needed to manage the challenge.

The earlier, the better: There's a big difference between beginning special training in kindergarten or first grade versus third grade or later. By the third grade 74 percent of kids who are already poor readers will remain so into adulthood, research has shown.

"It's not something that ever goes away," said Bloom. "But you learn how to manage it."

He offered advice to children: First, don't be shy or ashamed. Ask for help. Say, "I have dyslexia. I need some extra time on this test or homework assignment."

Also, don't see it as a problem, but a gift -- a special club. "It's not a disability; it's a challenge," he said. Even an opportunity.

Dyslexic children grow up to be brilliant doctors, lawyers, actors, writers and inventors. Bloom encouraged kids to never give up on their dreams: "Take this obstacle and make it the reason to have a big life."

The Huffington Post Meghan Neal

Reading Program That Gets Results

http://www.lakeside-learning.com

in reference to: Yahoo! (view on Google Sidewiki)

Emergent Literacy

Children begin developing literacy long before they enter school. Unless they are disabled, all school-age children have acquired a fairly extensive oral language vocabulary and a sophisticated syntactic system. They have seen traffic signs and billboard advertising, printed messages on television, and printing on cereal boxes. They can tell the McDonald’s logo from that of Burger King and distinguish a box of Fruit Loops from one of Captain Crunch. They have seen their parents read books, magazines, newspapers, letters, and bills and have observed them writing notes or letters, filling out forms, and making lists. They may also have imitated some of these activities. Their parents may have read books to them and provided them with crayons, pencils, and other tools of literacy. All children, no matter how impoverished their environment may be, have begun the journey along the path that begins with language acquisition and ends in formal literacy. The teacher must find out where each child is on the path and lead him or her on the way.

The concept of emergent literacy is rooted in research conducted a number of years ago. Read (1971) reported on a study of early spellers who had learned to spell in an informal manner. The early spellers were preschoolers who were given help in spelling when they asked for it but were otherwise allowed to spell however they wanted. What surprised Read was that these young children, who had no contact with each other, created spelling systems that were remarkably similar and that, although not correct, made sense phonetically. For instance, er at the end of a word such as tiger was typically spelled with just an r, as tigr. In this instance, r is syllabic; it functions as a vowel and so does not need to be preceded by an e. For long vowels, children generally used the letter name, as in sop for soap, where the name of the letter o contains the sound of the vowel. Commenting on his findings, Read stated, “We can no longer assume that children must approach reading with no discernible prior conception of its structure” (p.34). Landmark studies by researchers in several countries echoed and amplified Read’s findings in both reading and writing (Clay, 1972; Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Teale & Sulzby, 1986).

These revelations about children’s literacy abilities have a number of implications. First and foremost, teachers must build on what children already know. In their five or six years before going to school, they have acquired a great deal of insight into the reading and writing processes. Instead of asking whether they are ready, schools have to find out where they are and take it from there.

As children observe parents and peers reading and writing and as they themselves experiment with reading and writing, they construct theories about how these processes work. For instance, based on their experience with picture books, children may believe that pictures rather that words are read. Initially, children may believe that letters operate as pictures. They may believe that letters represent objects in much the same way that pictures represent objects. Using this hypothesis, they may reason that snake would be a long word because a snake is a long animal. Mouse would be a short word because a mouse is a short animal. As children notice long words for little creatures and little words for large creatures, they assimilate this and make an accommodation by giving up their hypothesis of a physical relationship between size of words and size of objects or creatures represented. They may then theorize that although letters do not represent physical characteristics, letters do somehow identify the person or thing named. They may theorize that the first letters of their names belong uniquely to them. Children need to see that other people’s names may start with the same letters as theirs but that some or all of the other letters are different.

Before children discover the alphabet principle, they may refine their theories of the purpose of letters and conclude that it is the arrangement of letters that matters. Through exposure to print, they will have noticed that words form patterns, and they begin to string letters together in what seem to be reasonable patterns. Usually, the words are between three and seven characters long and only repeat the same letter twice (Schickedanz, 1999). Known as mock words, these creations look like real words. After creating mock words, children frequently ask adults what the words say. The adult may attempt sounding out the words and realize that they don’t say anything and inform the child of that fact. Realizing that they can’t simply string a series of letters together, children may begin asking adults how to spell words or copy words from signs or books. As adults write multisyllabic words for children, they might sound them out as they write each syllable and also say the letters. Hearing words sounded out, children catch on to the idea that letters represent speech sounds. Since the the words they hear have been spoken in syllables as they were written, the children may use one letter to represent each syllable and one letter for the final sound and produce spellings such as jrf for giraffe.

If you have some insight into the child’s current schema for the writing system, you can provide the kind of explanation that will help them to move to a higher level of understanding. For children who are moving from a visual of physical hypothesis about how the alphabetical system operates to a phonological one, sounding out words as you spell them provides helpful information. Providing many opportunities to write also helps students explore the writing system.

Learning the Alphabet

Although it seems logical that students would learn letters by memorizing their shapes, that is not the way it happens. They learn to tell one letter from another and to identify particular letters by noting distinctive features such as whether lines are curved or slanted, open or closed (Gibson, Gibson, Pick, & Osser, 1962). To understand the distinctive features, students must be given many experiences comparing and contrasting letters. When introducing letters, teachers should present at least two at a time so that students can contrast them. It is also a good idea to present letters that have dissimilar appearances – s and b, for instance. Presenting similar letters such as b and d together can cause confusion. It is recommended, too, that upper- and lowercase forms of the letters be introduced at the same time, because students will see both in their writing.