There are reading problems existing in almost any schools today. There are non-readers who are in our public schools and unless they are personally attended to, they would not learn how to read and how to comprehend what they are reading. But how can teachers holding about 30 or more students be able to personally attend to these non-reading students?
There have been researches done to address the problems of non-reading among students. The research has shown that in order to improve reading scores in schools, only reading methods backed by scientifically based research must be implemented.
One mandate is that Phonics must be a required component of reading instruction as opposed to the Whole Word reading method which was seen to be the cause of the reading crisis. However, years later, there is still a problem of reading crisis every year.
More so, there are phonics methods that actually cause reading disability and dyslexia. Interestingly, the real ambiguity behind the problem is not why some children cannot read, instead why some children can read.
There are some children who do very well at first with “decodable text” readers that can be sounded out letter-by-letter but later they have huge difficulty transferring to real text readers which cannot be sounded out letter-by-letter. To help these students, you should use real text readers right from the beginning, but introduce all words with Phonics.
Another situation is when children successfully transfer from decodable text readers to real text readers but later find it hard to handle the numerous sounds and exceptions that are introduced for many of the letters and letter-combinations. Examples include “a” as in: cat, want, father, away; “ea” as in: neat, head, great, learn, heart. The solution is to teach just one sound for each letter and letter-combination without exceptions. When just one sound is known, they have an immediate response to each letter and letter-combination because only one sound is known. This includes about 90% of the phonics information needed to read.
By: Charito R. Balagasay | Teacher III | Pilar Elementary School | Pilar, Bataan
