Multisensory Reading Clinic

Literacy Instruction is the primary cause of the student's Academic Failure

 

The primary cause of the student's academic failure is the way the reading teachers teach our children in our schools today and it starts from kindergarten when the children should learn the sounds of the English language correctly. Their method of instruction is commonly referred to as the whole language approach.

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Whole language approach​

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• is teaching reading and spelling without breaking the English language down into its parts

• presumes that children will learn to read naturally through exposure to literature

• has minimal, incidental, or no instruction at all to learn how to read and spell

• instructs children to look at the pictures such as a children's book to guess unknown words, the reason why when your child is seeing a picture of a house with the print word home, he will read it as a "house" because the word "home" starts with the letter "h"  but sometimes he can also guess it correctly. Fortunately,  you have a way to verify if your child can read. 

• guessing words is the emphasis of the instruction

 

While some of the reading teachers are now adding phonics in their "reading instruction," especially, at the kindergarten level, most of them do not know how to teach the English language the proper way, such as how to explicitly teach the sounds of the English language correctly.  For example, they are adding the short vowel a sound to the sounds of the following letters: c, k, d, f, g, j, l, m, n, r, s, t, and v.

They do not know how to teach spelling either. As you have noticed, your child arrived home with a sheet of spelling list to learn but with no instruction except to " practice these words" for the spelling test on Friday.  This spelling list is mixed up with simple and long words combined with short vowels, long vowels, and vowel team words such as about, got, cake, something, and everyone.  Although your child might score eight out of ten on his spelling test, after a week your child has forgotten how to spell those words and if he needs to learn these words again, he will start to practice writing down these words all over again. With close to a million words and counting, your child is way far behind to be able to learn how to spell independently more so in reading.

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Why your child's reading teacher does not know how to teach?

Effective instruction in learning to read and spell is the missing foundation in teachers' education and the reading teachers have not learned it either from their school's education programs or professional training development.

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Furthermore, our education system fosters an environment of independence and isolation with no accountability. Reading teachers teach independently in their classrooms and they are not held accountable for their actions. They can teach what and how they want regardless of the outcome. They make decisions about literacy instruction from misleading online resources and printed materials and they are relying on their ow instincts about how their students learn. 

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Why can't my child learn to read and spell the way they teach?

• Words become just things to children with dyslexia taught by the whole language approach and if they have not seen the words, they cannot read and spell the words, therefore they also cannot comprehend what they read. They cannot read!

 

to be continued..