Research
Program Specific Articles
Industry Related Articles
Research Studies
Barnett Elementary, Payson UT
Scope of Project
Case study conducted by Barnett Elementary School, using the Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself direct instruction method
Tool
Gates-MacGinitie Assessment Pre- and Post-Tests
Data
Vocabulary
Comprehension
Evaluator's Observations
My personal opinion, after using and investigating over 8 different reading, spelling, and phonics programs, is that nothing compares to the Phonics for Home program. It is the most effective teaching tool, for all ages, that I have found and I highly recommend this program to all who have the opportunity to teach children the fundamentals of reading and spelling.
Burlington Edison High School
Institution
Burlington Edison High School, Burlington, WashingtonScope of Work
Reading Horizons used with students participating in special education classesTool
Pre and post measurement tests accompanying Reading Horizons packageEvaluation
Beginning school year 2001 - end of year 2002Burlington Edison High School in Burlington, Washington purchased the Reading Horizons lower leveled literacy courseware in the fall of 2001. A special education teacher put the software to use immediately.Data
Note: Only students who entered the program reading at or below an eighth grade level are shown. Nine students entered above an eighth grade level and had an average gain of 0.3.
Evaluator's Observations
The students served saw above average gains, especially considering past performance. Students who entered the program reading at or below an eight grade level had an average gain of 1.7.
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Program Specific Articles
Dislexya
Signs of Dyslexia (White Paper)
Non-impaired Brain / Dyslexic Brain (Images)
Turning on the Brain
When people with dyslexia try to read, a front part of the brain is over-stimulated while crucial portions in the center and back are under-stimulated, Yale researchers have shown. The diagrams show stimulated during reading.
Source: Drs. Sally Shaywitz and Bennet Shaywitz
New York Times
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Research Substantiates Discover Intensive Phonics for Home Methodology
By Linda Eversole
Summary:
Research cited by Pat Wolfe validates the Discover Intensive Phonics for Homereading program.
Recently a lovely educator shared with me an article written by Pat Wolfe for publication in Educational Leadership. It entertained the interesting fact that some of our current research substantiates the conclusions and practices proposed by educators as far back as the 30’s, including the work of Madeline Hunter, Alfred Whitehead, John Dewey and Barak Rosenshine, to name a few. She made the point that it is possible that the effective teaching strategies of 20 years ago are still relevant today and that we can now look to current cognitive and neuroscience research to help us understand why.
Ms. Wolfe noted three important items that I felt had relevance to the teaching of Discover Intensive Phonics:
First, as an example, she used Hunter’s work relating to the importance of an anticipatory set, a way of helping students attend to the relevant data of upcoming instruction. This emphasis on setting the stage for learning fits precisely with the research on the attentional mechanisms of the brain. “The only way to get information into the brain is through our senses. At any one moment, our sensory receptors (the eye, the ear, and so on) are simultaneously bombarded with an enormous amount of data. If we were able to pay conscious attention to all this sensory information, we would go mad! To keep us sane, our brain immediately starts sifting and sorting through all the sensory input and gets rid of irrelevant material.” You see, there is no such thing as a student who is not paying attention! Since the brain is always paying attention to something, it is just the fact that the student may not be focusing on what the teacher intends.
What relevance does this observation have to Discover Intensive Phonics?
1. Discover Intensive Phonics for Home involves the students in such a way that they are focused on what they are learning. They are the ones spelling the word. They are the ones proving the sounds. Student attention is involved and directed. The brain is constantly searching through existing neural networks to find a way to make sense of incoming data. The direct instruction techniques employed in Discover Intensive Phonics establishes an anticipatory set which increases the possibility that the brain will search through the right networks and attend to the information that is relevant.
Next, Ms. Wolf again referred to Madeline Hunter and a phrase she often used, “Practice doesn’t make perfect; it makes permanent.” What an important caution with regard to allowing students to continue making the same mistake over and over again. If we practice something incorrectly, our neurons don’t know the difference and make the permanent connections incorrectly.
2. While students work with Discover Intensive Phonics for Home at the chalkboard/whiteboard, teachers have the opportunity to observe every student’s work and can offer immediate feedback. Errors are contrasted with corrected work for reinforcement. A students’ spelling, handwriting, decoding and vocabulary are all obvious and observable. Discover Intensive Phonics offers the kind of practice that makes permanent and perfect!
Thirdly, Ms. Wolf emphasized that current research is increasing our understanding of the importance of prior knowledge and why it plays such a crucial role. Information, neuroscience research explains, is not stored in a specific location in the brain. Rather, it is stored in various locations — in the visual, auditory, and motor cortices — and is joined in circuits or networks of neurons. It appears that each time we recall an event or a previous experience, we literally reconstruct it by using the same circuit or circuits we used to store it. Therefore, the more modalities we use to store the information or experience, the more pathways we have available to access it!
3. Discover Intensive Phonics for Home employs the audio, visual, kinesthetic and tactile modalities in the learning experience. The unique marking system employed throughout the course allows students to construct multiple pathways for remembering important encoding and decoding principles.
In conclusion, I would heartily agree that current research is certainly substantiating the conclusions and practices proposed by excellent educators from the past. Charlotte Lockhart, the author of Discover Intensive Phonics for Home, employed scientific principles through her excellent teaching strategies that are currently coming to light through current neurological research. Research only continues to add more luster to an already illuminating phonics program.
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Teaching Adults and Young Adults with Discover Intensive Phonics for Home
The reasons for poor reading skills in adults are many and varied. They may stem from lack of education, transient lifestyles during the early years of schooling, learning disabilities, or dyslexia. For the most part, however, all older students have a need to improve in one or more of three areas: word attack skills, fluency and comprehension.
No program surpasses Discover Intensive Phonics in teaching word attack skills. The presentations are concrete, sequential, and logical—they 'make sense'. Now we all know that it's not an easy thing to 'make sense' of the English language, but Discover Intensive Phonics presents the foundation for reading in such a way that it is understandable and logical. Through hands-on interaction, adults soon find that they can not only read, but spell!
The biggest problem you'll find with adult students is that they want to progress too rapidly. Each lesson needs to be practiced until it is internalized. The program is cumulative, so reinforcement of previously learned skills is automatic, but progressing too fast won't give students time to really understand the application of what they have learned. Make sure that adults receive adequate practice through the Mastery Drill and Practice offered on Reading Horizons computer courseware or through multi-sensory instruction at the board. It is vital that they thoroughly understand each step before they proceed to the next.
Fluency comes automatically with increased word attack skills, and through consistent practice. Understanding word patterns — the likely and unlikely sequencing of letters — allows an adult to comfortably move forward with confidence.
Adults, and especially adults who are poor readers, are generally good listeners and they already have an understanding of much of the vocabulary used in their work place and in the media. So even though Discover Intensive Phonics does not provide specific exercises for comprehension, you will see an automatic increase in comprehension as an adult's word attack skills improve.
Adults and youth can make tremendous progress in their reading skills through the use of Discover Intensive Phonics, in a relatively short period of time—approximately five to six months. If you've never tried teaching this program to an adult, do it! You'll be amazed!
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Using Phonemic Awareness with ESL Students
By Robin Schwarz
Spoken language is noise which the experienced listener sorts into meaningful chunks. A child spends many years perfecting this sorting. In a similar way, a learner of a new language must sort out the unfamiliar sounds into pieces that make sense: phrases or sentences, words, syllables and even phonemes (the smallest sound segments). Reading experts have known for years that difficulty with the sorting process, or phonological skills, is directly connected to the reading and spelling problems of many students. More recently, researchers studying native English-speaking students who were having trouble learning a foreign language found that these students have problems similar to those of poor readers and spellers in that they do not perceive and manipulate the sound system and its corresponding written code effectively. In other words, the at-risk foreign language learners also have weak phonological skills. Moreover, the researchers found that when the struggling foreign language students were explicitly taught the phonology of the foreign language, they were able to learn the target language fairly successfully, and also improve their phonological skills.
This was good news for me as I was searching for a way to help at-risk students in the college-level intensive English program where I teach. Every semester, several of our students, who are certainly capable in many respects, are unable to make progress in their English classes. Typically, they display poor spelling and grammar skills, despite having what I term “lots of language.” In other words, they are not lacking in vocabulary or a general idea of how to express themselves; they cannot, however, control their grammar or get beyond that plateau of “fair” communication, a fatal flaw in writing classes. Usually, their reading skills are adequate for intermediate English as a Second Language (ESL) work, but not for more demanding reading.
When I first decided to find a way to help these students, I began searching the ESL literature for ideas. Because some of our students who had these problems were known to have learning disabilities (LD), having been diagnosed elsewhere before coming to our school, I combed the LD literature. Not much turned up in either field to give me any idea of why the students were having a hard time learning English until I delved into the literature. I decided to try teaching my students English phonology in a much more explicit way than is usually the case in ESL. I also decided to try using some other adaptations in teaching that reportedly had been effective for LD students learning foreign languages in classes adapted to their needs.
Because the foreign language learners who were having difficulties had poor phonemic awareness as well as poor phonological skills, my first priority was clear, direct teaching of the sound system of English.
Another lesson learned from the foreign language research was that the sounds should be taught one at a time in a clear sequence. I chose to start by teaching the short vowels in alphabetical order to match some other ESL materials I had, and I selected appropriate drills or activities.
The process requires lots and lots of repetition. Students with difficulty in the language area require much more time to process information and much more review and practice than average learners.
We continued on to long vowels, and the process became faster because the students had begun to discriminate sounds more accurately and knew what to expect in the activities and practices.
At first, the students, who were of college age or older and many of whom were graduate students, were skeptical of these lessons. When they began to see the results, however, they became enthusiastic and made sure to request handouts missed when they were absent. Those who knew they had made progress, but had not yet mastered the skills, asked if there were some way to have more lessons in a lab or some other classes.
Although there is not much research on teaching phonology to ESL students who are at risk, my students’ experiences clearly demonstrated the benefits of this instruction. Of course, their spelling improved dramatically, and few needed more sustained review and practice to maintain their gains. A more pervasive benefit was that they could perceive individual words in spoken sentences far more accurately than before. This resulted in significantly more accurate dictations and, so the students reported, a noticeably improved ability to follow conversations and proceedings in other classes. In addition to my observations of the students’ increased confidence in many domains, their other teachers reported similar improvements.
Another important benefit of the phonology instruction, though less directly documented outside of our class, was that the students’ decoding skills increased significantly. They amazed themselves by reading multisyllabic words with ease. Finally, overall, the students were able to do much better in classes than students with similar problems in our program who had not had such intervention.
It is my hope that research will bear out these benefits. In the meantime, our university is benefiting from these instruction methods by retaining students who otherwise might have dropped out of classes and by strengthening the foreign language acquisition skills of at-risk native English-speaking students.
Reprinted with permission from the National Adult Literacy and Learning Disabilities Center, Washington D.C., Robin Schwarz is co-author of ESL Instruction for Learning Disabled Adults.
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Study Related Articles
Harvard University Research
JEANNE S. CHALL - Harvard University
Professor of Education and Director of the Reading Laboratory at the Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jeanne Chall, author of Learning to Read: The Great Debate, published updated research in March of 1989 in an article in Phi Delta Kappan.
Quoting Peter Freebody and Brian Byrne of Australia:
“The authors suggest that word-specific associations may serve a student adequately up to about second grade, but that failure to acquire and use efficient decoding skills will begin to take a toll on reading comprehension by grade 3. In contrast, Phoenicians (those who have learned phonics) may be hindered in comprehension performance in the early years, but begin to improve comparatively as they progress through school.”
Study of Reading Disabilities:
“Students ‘at risk’ of reading failure have long been thought to be deficient in phonological processing. According to Isabelle Liberman, “The results of research have, I think…justified our assumption…providing evidence that deficits of phonological processing do, indeed, underlie many of the difficulties that poor readers and spellers have.
Poor readers of all ages and in many different countries have difficulty with ‘segmental analysis of speech/the apprehension of the phonological structure of words.’ Furthermore, dyslexic students are often unaware of how the written symbols map onto speech. But these students CAN be trained to segment and blend.”
Conclusion of the report – “Becoming a Nation of Readers”
“What does the research indicate about the effectiveness of phonics instruction? Classroom research shows that, on average, students who are taught phonics get off to a better start in learning to read then students who are not taught phonics.”
Quoting Marilyn Adams, Reading Research and Education Center at the University of Illinois.
“Perhaps the most influential arguments for teaching phonics are based on studies comparing the relative effectiveness of different approaches to teaching beginning reading. Collectively, these studies suggest, with impressive consistency, that programs including systematic instruction on letter-to-sound correspondences lead to higher achievement in both work recognition and spelling, at least in the early grades, and especially for slower or economically disadvantaged students.”
Phonics lead to early use of good literature and writing skills.
"Currently, the anti-phonics movement has taken unto itself a pro-literature, pro-writing, and pro-thinking stance, as if those who teach phonics and decoding are opposed to these obviously excellent aims. And yet the history of reading instruction teaches us that literature, writing, and thinking are not exclusive properties of any one approach to beginning reading.
Indeed, the change in the early 1970’s to an earlier and more systematic teaching of phonics in basal readers brought with it enlarged reading vocabularies that made possible the earlier use of better, more mature literature.
The same is true of writing. A code emphasis leads to earlier—rather than later—writing. Those students who know the letters of the alphabet write earlier. Also, early readers who know phonics use it for writing and for reading.”
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What Neuroscience Really Tells Us About Reading Instruction
Sally E. Shaywitz and Bennett A. Shaywitz Educational Leadership, February 2007
To read, a child has to develop the insight that spoken words can be pulled apart into the elemental particles of speech (phonemes) and that the letters in a written word represent these sounds (Shaywitz, 2003). Such awareness is largely missing in dyslexic youth and adults (Bruck, 1992); Shaywitz, 2003; Torgesen & Wagner, 1995) Results from large and well-studied populations with reading disability confirm that in young school-age children (Fletcher et al., 1994; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994) as well as in adolescents (Shaywitz et al., 1999) a deficit in phonology represents the most robust and specific correlate of reading disability (Morris et al., 1998; Ramus et al., 2003). Such findings form the basis for the most successful and evidence-based approaches to reading instruction and to interventions for struggling readers (National Reading Panel, 2000)
Effective reading instruction and intervention programs provide children with systematic instruction in each of five crucial components of reading:
- Phonemic awareness (the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes, or speech sounds, in spoken syllables and words)
- Phonics (understanding how letters are linked to sounds to form letter-sound correspondences and spelling patterns);
- Fluency
- Vocabulary; and
- Comprehension strategies
The goal is for students to develop the skills that will enable them to read and understand the meaning of both familiar and unfamiliar words they encounter so that they may learn to read effortlessly and look forward to a lifetime of enjoyment as readers.
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