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Weeks 5 Summary: More on Practical teaching approaches Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing University of London, UCL Institute of Education & Dyslexia International This week, Dr Goetry demonstrated the multisensory teaching of reading in classrooms, assessing phonological awareness via genration, substitution, concatination [and five others which are...], helping students with comprehension an d compostiong. His students appeared to be first graders, and the class ran through a number of exercises. First, they touched letters while blindfolded, trying to sound out the word presented with them. In the next lesson, they used legos or checkers or other counters to count out syllables: three for “kangaroo”, etc. Or, they put a hand below their jaws, and counted out the number of times that their jaws hit the top of their hands for “go ril la”. Then they clapped out “a lli ga tor. Next, they were given a list of words on paper, took a pencil, and

Weeks 4 Summary Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing University of London, UCL Institute of Education & Dyslexia International As Dr. Goetry laid out early in this week, the opacity of the language matters. In 2003, Seymour and research collaborators compared reading acquisition in European first graders across 15 different languages, and the results were as follows: 34% of English speaking children can read words and pseudowords correctly. In French, it was 79%, Italian 95%, and German 97%. Not surprisingly, children taught with the phonics method did 20% better than those taught with the “whole word” method. He references the studies that show that “whole word”, or the global method, is more successful in higher socioeconomic strata, while no such difference in success rates exists for phonics methods. Dr. Goetry spent a lot of this week discussing effective teaching of reading. He gave the following requirements for effective teaching: it

Summary of Week 3 of the Coursera Course Helping Students with Dyslexia Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing University of London, UCL Institute of Education & Dyslexia International Dr. Jenny Thomson discussed auditory and visual issues, stressing the difference between pitch (frequency) and loudness (amplitude), and how that can affect dyslexic students. She mentioned that the visual stress of reading is an issue discussed in the UK and Europe, perhaps more than elsewhere. The balance between attention issues and dyslexia can sometimes give contradictory recommendations. For example, a dyslexic child can often perform better in comprehension when read to, because he doesn't have to alott all of his attention to decoding. On the other hand, if the child has attention issues, she might need the reading to be in front of her, so she has someplace to anchor her comprehension. A child who is both dyslexic and has attention issues  might  do bes

Below is a summary of information I found most useful from the University of London's Coursera course,  Reading capabilities can be represented in simplified form by quadrants, where one axis represents language comprehension, and another represents decoding.  This gives four general categories:  children who have no difficulty at all children with difficulty decoding, but not comprehending (“dyslexia”) those with difficulty comprehending, but who can read the text on a mechanical level (“specific comprehension deficit”) and those who struggle both with comprehension and with decoding. Dr. Goetry talked about the importance of asking parents and grandparents about their own relationships with reading, because dyslexia and its diagnosis were less common than they are today. How well does the child distinguish left from right? Is she ambidextrous? Are rhymes difficult to provide? Are multiple directions difficult to follow? Is time difficult to estimate? Does t