Video Transcript:
I'm just going to quickly focus on the areas within the ladder of reading. I really encourage you to look at this as a continuum--a continuum of ease in learning to read. For children who are challenged in learning to read--and not just children with dyslexia but children who have reading disability in comprehension, children who have an intellectual disability, and some children with developmental language disorder--it can be challenging to learn to read, and they are in this red area. Again, I hope you'll go back and look more closely later. I know some people are probably familiar with my infographic or you looked at it during the advertising for the session.
Then in the orange area of the continuum, those children do not have identified exceptionalities (disabilities) but for them, learning to read and spell and write takes explicit instruction and repetition but not as much as children in the red area. But the interesting and sad thing is that there are children in the orange who do not have dyslexia, who look like they have dyslexia in the grades 4, 5, 6 and up because they haven't received the right instruction. For those of you who do teach individually in remediation in schools or privately, you might have somebody come to you and they look like they have dyslexia but they just didn't get what they needed, they're going to advance much more quickly as soon as they get taught some of the basic elements, particularly decoding. They just start to move along, whereas a child with dyslexia is going to need more intense instruction to master the code.
I have the word “code-based” here in the red and in the orange. What the words on the Ladder say for the red and the orange--"A structured literacy approach is likely essential." The way I describe structured literacy is that we are teaching the structure of language in a structured way for these students. These are the five main components of structured literacy, the way that I look at it. It's really important to say right away that we teach phonemic awareness with letters. It should be taught as phonics. There's been a lot of debate about that. There's been a big swing to teaching phonemic awareness (listening only as I describe it), and that's not supported by the research. If you're teaching phonemic awareness (listening only), I encourage you to look at some of the resources on my list today.
So we have the reading, decoding, spelling, encoding – we're teaching the relationship between sounds and symbols. And down here, we have syntax, so think of words and sentences and the way we arrange words. We often don't think about how intentional we are about the way that words are arranged in and we think of things like nouns and verbs and so on. We want to teach those. Morphology, the units of meaning in words, and semantics, that words can have different meanings and the smallest words are often the ones with the most meaning. So this is what we want to teach if we're teaching structured literacy, these components.
In the light green and the dark green, these children will not need as much explicit instruction and I'm going to get to that in in a minute. I've put facets here because I wanted people to know that there are components of structured literacy that are likely to be valuable so teaching about morphology, certainly teaching about syntax, and we want our children to write and so we are going to teach these. A child in the light green is going to go at a faster pace. Even in kindergarten, these children can go at a faster pace. So right away, in kindergarten, we need to be differentiating. In fact, I'll show you research from preschool, showing that we need to be differentiating in preschool. If we don't move along at the pace that these children need, they're actually being delayed. Then children in the dark green who start school already reading, they are going to need more advanced programming and when we have enrichment here, it doesn't mean you're not going to enrich for all children. I put this here because there are specific enrichment programs designed for advanced readers.
