Reading is an essential life skill

A year ago, a family called me in desperation. Their sixth-grade son, Max (not his real name), was reading at a low kindergarten level. A school system immersed in disproven Whole Language teaching had taught Max to guess based on first letters, what made sense in the sentence, and the length of the word. Ultimately, they had neglected to teach him phonics, so we began with him scarcely knowing the sounds of individual letters, much less the sounds they make when combined. He knew nothing of syllables, spelling rules, or morphemes. Furthermore, with a diagnosis of dyslexia, he struggled severely with recognizing and manipulating the sounds of language, a key underlying language skill for reading and writing. To top off his struggle, he contended with inattentive ADHD and a host of added cognitive weaknesses. 

My peers and mentors felt his progress would be limited and slow in coming. We started with the basics: phonemic awareness drills using David Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success. Max’s parents practiced these increasingly difficult drills several times a day with their son. Our reading instruction relied heavily on Orton Gillingham methods. Max was a sponge for the rules, absorbing logical, systematic instruction.  However, he continued to struggle when it came to applying his knowledge automatically and fluently. I began to fear that my mentors were right and the ceiling to our success would be markedly lower than I had hoped. 

I reached out to Michael Hunter at Readsters, who provided invaluable guidance on how to break Max’s sound-by-sound laborious reading strategies, which placed a huge load on his working memory. Intermediate resources from Wiley Blevins and the late Karen Leopold drew us closer to our goals, by switching the focus to common syllables and extensive instruction regarding word parts, including Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek. For a time, we swam through the history of the English language, surrounded Max with prefixes, roots, suffixes, and combining forms. We drilled morphemic awareness the same way we had done with phonemic awareness initially. Finally, we brought all these gems to our current landing place in Anita Archer's Rewards program. Max is about to graduate out of Archer's intermediate-level materials. He is reading at a fifth-sixth grade level on his fluency scores. It is joyful to watch him accurately dispatch multisyllabic words like reorganizational and impossibility. Not simply reading these words but spelling them with increasing success. 

Max's parents berate themselves for not having sought support sooner outside of a school system which failed their son. Max certainly experienced a dark journey through elementary school. One that is in stark contrast to what I witness now. He is a student with a deep desire to learn and an unabashed glee at his progress. I am so empowered by the resources of the dyslexia community that rely on proven reading science research. Nothing competes with the joy Max shares by grinning and waving like he's going to explode with excitement at the end of each Zoom session. It is never too late to save a person from the depths of illiteracy with reliance on the right tools.