Despite our vigorous approaches to literacy education across schools and districts, too many children continue to struggle with learning to read and write. The short term consequence is tremendous frustration – by all stakeholders. Despite the fact that Curriculum Directors, teachers and students are all working incredibly hard, approximately one in five students in Rhode Island are still struggling. The long term consequences are disastrous: impeding the development of a child’s self-confidence and motivation to learn while significantly impacting future opportunities. While there are no easy answers or quick solutions for optimizing reading achievement, a growing body of research supports the use of explicit, sequential instruction for supporting struggling readers and writers. Current research, much of it supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), converges on the efficacy of explicit structured language teaching for children who struggle with literacy development. Young children in structured, sequential intervention programs (who were also trained in phonemic awareness) have made significant gains in decoding skills. Studies in clinical settings have demonstrated similar results for a wide range of ages and abilities.
Studies through the NIH, Learning First Alliance, and the National Hasbro Center on Learning Disabilities support early identification of children with reading difficulties and intervention programs that explicitly and intensively teach phonemic awareness and the study of language. Dr. G. Reid Lyon, Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at the National Institute of Health (NIH), has directed, developed and managed research in reading development, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, behavioral pediatrics, language and attention disorders, and human learning and learning disorders. The following excerpts are from his statement to the Subcommittee on Education Reform, Washington, D.C. on March 8, 2001: Children with reading problems can overcome their difficulties only if they are identified early and provided with systematic, explicit, and intensive instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension strategies. Early identification, coupled with comprehensive early reading interventions, can reduce the percentage of children reading below the basic level in fourth grade from the current national average of 38% to less than 6%. The National Reading Panel found that intervention programs that provided systematic and explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics and direct instruction in vocabulary and reading comprehension strategies were significantly more effective than approaches that were less explicit. At least 20 million school-age children suffer from reading failure, but only a small fraction of these children receive special education services. By putting in place well designed, evidence-based early identification screenings and early intervention programs, the number of children suffering from reading failure would be reduced by at least two-thirds.
(www.cdl.org/resources/reading_room/measure_success.html)All of the literacy-based courses offered by the Hasbro Center at Dunn provide participants with training and curriculum to practice systematic, explicit and intensive instruction in a variety of literacy components. The additional and unique layer of pedagogy that is embedded in each Hasbro Center course is the multisensory piece. Multisensory teaching is simultaneously visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile to enhance memory and learning. Links are consistently made between the visual (what we see), auditory (what we hear), and kinesthetic-tactile (what we feel) pathways in learning to read and spell. This added layer of instruction allows teachers to reach a greater number of children – who may respond differently to each modality of instruction, but will have a greater chance of finding a pathway to learning that matches their neurological strengths and affinities. The multisensory focus also results in content that is exciting, high-interest, and fun for teachers and students to implement together. The Multisensory Literacy courses offered by the Hasbro Center cover the continuum of components essential for teaching students to read -- phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary development, reading fluency, reading comprehension, written expression, handwriting, and spelling. There is real potential for this information to have a transformational effect on the struggling readers in our schools.
