11 ways to cure speech problems and dyslexia

Speech problems and other markers of dyslexia

                As shown in my previous blog, speech problems can be a precursor of dyslexia. Some may be caused by hearing-processing in the brain. Some may have roots in inner-ear problems, such as fluid or infections. But again, have hope. True phonics can heal most speech obstacles.

                Young Isaac couldn’t hear well until his adenoids were removed. By then, he was far behind in his speech. So his mom used The Godfrey Method picture-letter phonics-cards to help him learn sounds, to talk, and to bring him up to speed. He has progressed very quickly, which surprised his doctors!

                In his article, Dyslexia: The Disease You Get in School, Dr. Blumenfeld quotes parts of the Academic American Encyclopedia (Vol. 6, page 320). “Clinical definitions of dyslexia include an impaired ability to read or comprehend what’s read. The term “specific dyslexia” refers to the inability to read in a person of normal or high general intelligence whose learning is not impaired by socioeconomic deprivation, emotional disturbance, or brain damage.

Psychologists disagree about whether specific dyslexia is a clearly identifiable syndrome. Those who do, note that it persists into adulthood, tends to run in families, and occurs more frequently in males*. It is also associated with a specific kind of difficulty in identifying words and letters, which dyslexics tend to reverse or invert. Although there is disagreement among “experts” over the causes of dyslexia, there is general agreement that the most effective “cure” is remedial programs that stress phonics.”

                The encyclopedia above and other experts mistakenly deny that speech problems are often related to dyslexia. The scientific data proves otherwise.

                However, we’ve known the specific cause of dyslexia since 1929 when neurology physician, Dr. Samuel T. Orton (a leading brain specialist), wrote his article for the Journal of Educational Psychology, The ‘Sight Reading’ Method of Teaching Reading as a Source of Reading Disability. His warning to educators was quite explicit: this method of teaching will harm a large number of children.

                What did the university educators, professors with the power to change textbooks and policy, do with this truth? They responded negatively to his findings, actually accelerating the introduction and promotion of the new sight-reading methods across America.

It didn’t take long before America began to have a reading problem. Although Dr. Orton developed one of the most effective remediation techniques, the Orton-Gillingham method, his 1929 article is noticeably missing from the dyslexia literature.

                You may ask why I care about such an old study? Truth does not change. Truth may go out of style, but it does not change. Others may hawk some new theory as true, but time always shows the unchangeable truth. What Dr. Orton said in 1929 is still true today.

                Others have raised the warning flag only to be ignored, or worse, attacked. In 1955 Dr. Rudolf Flesch published, Why Johnny Can’t Read, written specifically to let parents know the true cause of the reading problem. He wrote, “The teaching of reading – all over the United States, in all schools, and in all textbooks – is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense.”

Naturally, the educators rejected Flesch’s assertions. Again, “educators” refers to those in power, those who gain money or prestige from publishing new methods. The average teacher is usually a concerned individual, but can’t teach our children properly until the universities change what they teach the teachers to teach.

                Dr. Blumenfeld raised the truth yet again in his 1973 book, The New Illiterates. Not long after, the home-school movement began to swell, and most proponents wisely use phonics with their children.

                Teaching sight-reading uses word-recognition strategies based on putting sight-words in shape-frames, loading the pages with illustrations for each word, having context clues in absurd stories, guessing by context, and phonetic clues (not phonics) for initial and final consonants. Is it any wonder that this causes dyslexia in normal children?

Dyslexia may run in families not because of genetics (other than hearing-processing), but because their parents were taught sight-reading and don’t know how to teach them otherwise. This mass of confusion has been going on for generations. Educators keep changing its name and pushing it again.

By the word-shape worksheet below, it could also be book, back, and a myriad of other words. What a mass of confusion! Speech is hearing; reading should teach the precise sounds of each letter and letter-blend. Reading should be hearing with your eyes, mapped on the left side of your brain. Right-brained sight-reading destroys true understanding, literacy, and self-esteem.

                Do you remember that alleged study by Cambridge that tried to justify sight-reading? See http://scienceavenger.blogspot.com/2007/12/cambridge-word-scramble-study-its-fake.html

Cambridge Word Scramble Study: It's Fake Already!

“It seems the bogus "Cambridge University Study" concerning shuffled words is making the rounds again, and this is one bit of crapola I never tire of debunking. Here is a typical [email] depiction:

"From Cambridge University:

                “Olny srmat poelpe can raed tihs. I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! If you can raed tihs psas it on!!!"

                “That this piece of obvious claptrap continues to impress is testimony not only to the ever-sagging education level of Americans, but also to our ever-growing anti-intellectualism that gives more and more benefit of the doubt to anything that promises to validate ignorance and basic intellectual laziness. It is flawed in every way. I've never been able to confirm that such a study was ever done at Cambridge, but if it was, and this description accurately portrayed their findings, everyone associated with the study out to be booted from serious intellectual circles.

                “If we truly read words as a whole, then why must the first and last letters be fixed? Why can't the entire word be scrambled? And what exactly does "as a whole" mean anyway? How can one see a word as a whole without seeing the letters in it? [A phonics reader doesn’t understand a sight-reader’s lack of understanding.]

                “In a way this is a cheap magician's trick, because the only reason people can read the scrambled words is because they aren't very scrambled. Fixing the first and last letters means 2 and 3 letter words don't change at all, and 4 letter words just swap the middle letters. That's the bulk of our vocabulary. Try making a sentence with very long words, and our ability to read words "as a whole" mysteriously vanishes. To wit:

                ““Bblaaesl pryleas pnmrrioefg sllaimy aeoulltsby dvrseee clbrpmaaoe tteenmrat,” is incomprehensible, because now every word is truly scrambled, with the first and last letters being an insignificant proportion of the total. So sorry all of you that thought you had academic backing to your poor spelling and grammar skills. They do matter, because baseball players performing similarly [poorly] absolutely deserve comparable treatment [disgust].”

POSTED BY SCIENCEAVENGER AT 12:51 PM, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2007

                I might add that it is slow and tedious to figure out the fake Cambridge sentence the sight-reading way, whereas reading by phonics is efficient and immediately understandable. How would you rather read every day? Slow guessing game or efficiently precise?

                When the best practice of millennia (phonics) is available, why do we keep pushing the handicap? Leave it for deaf children – where something is better than nothing, and hearing-processing doesn’t have much real estate in their brain neuron-mapping. Don’t you want your child to pronounce words more precisely than a deaf child?

We make understandable concessions for deaf people, but they're not for everyone else. Should we teach our children to read by Braille, even though they can see, just because blind people do? Absurd. To be taken seriously as an adult, your child needs to be articulate ~ in speaking, reading and writing.

                Dyslexia is a visual-confusion problem caused by sight-words and a hearing-processing problem in brain neurons. Dyslexia itself is not truly genetic, and its biological roots can be healed with phonics. So why does dyslexia seem to run in families? Well, if parents learned sight-reading and struggled, they can't easily teach their own children properly with phonics. So the induced-confusion continues another generation.

                Again, if your baby can read by sight-words now, he'll probably struggle with reading later. Turn off the noise and electronics. Hold your toddler and read to him. Introduce her to early phonics the right way. Let them become all they can be.

More info that can be found on www.amazon.com ~

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, by Siegfried Engelmann, Phyllis Haddox, & Elaine Bruner

Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers, by Samuel L. Blumenfeld

Alpha-Phonics Audio Lessons - Pronunciation CD Rom

The Victims of Dick and Jane, by Samuel L. Blumenfeld

 The Whole Language/Obe Fraud: The Shocking Story of How America Is Being Dumbed Down by Its Own Education System, by Samuel L. Blumenfeld

SYMPTOMS OF DYSLEXIA

                What are the symptoms of dyslexia, and how are they related to sight-reading? In Smart But Feeling Dumb, Dr. Harold N. Levinson wrote them as:

1. Memory instability for letters, words, or numbers
2. A tendency to skip over or scramble letters, words, and sentences
3. Poor, slow, fatiguing reading ability prone to compensatory head tilting, near-far focusing and finger pointing
4. Reversal of letters such as b, d, words such as saw and was, and numbers such as 6 and 9 or 16 and 61. (We teach math, now, the way we teach reading. More in Chapter 10.)
5. Poor spelling [Dr. Blumenfeld, et al]

                These are the same mistakes made by any child trying to learn a vocabulary by sight. It is obvious that if you look at each word as a picture, you can look at it from right to left or upside down as easily as from left to right or right-side up. The sequence of letters seems arbitrary with no rhyme or reason. Yet to a phonetic reader, the sequence of letters is most important because it is the same sequence that the sounds are uttered. Consider some more interesting reasons that sight-words cause confusion for young readers:

• Sight words are hieroglyphics - large hieroglyphics.
• Sight-readers need to memorize 4,000 - 5,000 words by shape just to read the newspaper. Even the Chinese have this problem with their hieroglyphics. Whereas, phonics only requires learning about 46 sounds to decode almost any word, increasing vocabulary by 100-fold. Translating Chinese and Japanese by their sounds into alphabetic words makes them so much easier to learn. Everyone can understand!
• As grown-ups, sight-readers easily confuse Perdition, Pandemonium, Purgatory, and Paradise (see Cathy Froggatt’s article*). They each begin with the same letter and are long words, plus somewhat related in meaning. Yet a 6-year-old phonics reader can sound them out easier and accurately.
• "Context" would not necessarily help sight-readers decipher the words in cases like the above, yet the word choice changes the whole meaning of the sentence (see *Whole Language at the Fork in the Road, by Cathy Froggatt – the funniest, most true, and best satire on Whole Language)!
• To a child, sight words and their letters are 3-dimensional, like a dog, the same backwards and forwards and upside-down. Like, cab, bac(k); bad, dab, dad; there, their; your, you’re.
• Sight words = reversed letters, reversed order. This is not genetic; it's because sight-words as hieroglyphics don't have any chronological order in a child's mind. A dog is a dog, no matter which way it's turned. Not knowing the individual letter sounds, sight readers don't understand the sound sequence in the word. Palindromes might be the only safe words for sight-readers to learn! Like level, kayak, radar, noon, madam, civic, etc.
• Sight words = limited reading ability, not able to deconstruct sounds. As adults, sight-readers come across unfamiliar words and have to guess in front of others. It's embarrassing!
• Sight words = increase in speech problems, too. Children who already struggle with processing sounds in their brain are given a bigger handicap with sight words. Only phonics can cure this. Yes, speech problems and dyslexia can be cured with phonics!
• Phonics wires neurons on the left [hearing] brain-hemisphere; whereas sight-words wire them on the right [seeing] brain-hemisphere defectively.
• Originally, the invention of phonics advanced independent thought like never before. It's true! The creation of symbols for each sound, instead of symbols for whole words, made reading available to the whole population, not just the educated scholars, scribes, and priests. This opened up the exchange of ideas like no other in history. (The printing press would have been impossible later without individual phonics letters, too.)
• Any lab monkey can learn a few sight words: food, water, cage, let, me, out! Don't we want our children to be smarter than lab monkeys? Then they have to read better than monkeys, too.
• A parrot can learn to talk, but he does not understand his own sentences. Word-shape-induced dyslexia does the same for reading.
• Homonyms and changing short vowels to long vowels are difficult. It is hard for sight-readers to distinguish homonyms like fail, fell, and feel; Brian from Brain, cut from cute, etc. Phonics readers understand the sequential chronology of the sounds as well as the affects of silent letters and blends. Homonyms become much easier, too.
• What about "ough" words? To a non-sequential reader, “ought” and “tough” are basically the same word. So are “though” and “through”. There are a whole lot more of these types of confusions with sight-reading.
• Father vs. Daddy in context. Sometimes the choice of the word makes all the difference to the flavor of the sentence. Context might have a child say daddy for father, but this doesn't usually work well. What about when there is no context? Like signs? Single words?
• Is love evol (evil)? Is a star pupil the same as lip-up rats? Not only do sight-readers read words backwards, but whole sentences backwards or scrambled as well. What about when earshot becomes shot ears? Word order in a sentence changes its meaning, too. “So much depends...” vs. “…depends much; so?” or “Buy a fat pig” vs. “Pig fat a buy!” And palindrome sentences, “Eros, eyesore?” (from The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver). See how the meaning changes just by word order? And more by letter order? Now put those two confusions together. The sight-reader may be reading a very different book than the author wrote!
• My sister-in-law has a tole-painted sign on wooden blocks. Together the two blocks say, “The best things in life, are not things.” My middle son put the bottom block on top so that it said, “Are not things, the best things in life?” He thought he was so clever! See how word order changes meaning? How about celebrated Bible misprints, like when John 5:14 was printed as “Sin on more” instead of “Sin no more”? Talk about a change of meaning!
• Numbers and letters mix-up. Phonics readers usually do not mix up letters with numbers. But many sight-readers do. The math sum, 800+5, may look like "Boots" to a child who has learned the confusing word-shape way. I've seen it happen. Sight-reading, for some reason, makes it harder to distinguish 1 and I; 2 and Z; 3 and E; 4 and A or h; 5 and S; 6 and G; 7 and T or L; 8 and B; 9 and g; 0 and O, etc.
• Clairebella = sister. My friend, Danielle, began teaching her son, Jaksen, some sight-words because his preschool used them. Suddenly he started mixing up things like never before. When she would show him the name Clairebella, he would say, “sister”. He related the look of that word correctly to his sister, but didn't understand the sounds in the word or why that was wrong. Contextually, he was correct. He also started mixing his letters and numbers, which he didn’t do before the sight-word lessons. Luckily, his mom started over with The Godfrey Method phonics to re-wire his brain on the proper hemi for reading!

                Why do we want to dumb-down our children with sight-reading and induced dyslexia? Yes, I said induced. Going back to hieroglyphics is going backwards. Do we want backwards children in a backwards society? Who does this benefit? I came across some teaching aids called, “Word Shape Worksheets,” (below) and I almost choked. Their purpose is to help children memorize the outlined shape of words. If teachers only understood how much damage they are doing with these kinds of hieroglyphic exercises!

                Without the accuracy of individual letter sounds, boots, beets, & beats, all have the same shape. So do beast and boost. How about boosts and beasts? Worse yet is confusing letters with numbers. To a young child, 5+337 could be STEEL. It’s obvious why induced-dyslexia causes major spelling problems.

                Another symptom of sight-reading is behavioral problems. Studies of children with reading disabilities show the effects of induced-dyslexia on the personality and behavior of the child. Many children exhibit conduct disorders, undesirable reactions, and confused frustration. Dr. Orton found that, “Faulty teaching methods may not only prevent the acquisition of academic education by children of average capacity, but may also give rise to far reaching damage to their emotional life.” (Average capacity means NOT dumb.)

                *Did you know that there is a world-wide gender gap in reading, especially with whole language or sight-reading methods? Science has shown that boys are very different from girls in fetal development, emotional response, brain differentiation, and such. The multi-focus teaching methods above favor girls in academic achievement. However, when the single-focus approach of systematic phonics is used, the sex differences are eliminated, with the boys even outperforming the girls, sometimes.

                A few years ago I read a Reader’s Digest® article which reported that, in general, we are losing our boys in education. They keep falling further behind. The article didn’t make the connection between teaching methods and learning difficulties, but we do. So, knowing that more boys fall behind with whole language and other sight-reading methods, a wise parent will make sure that her son has systematic, synthetic phonics taught as his method of reading! Since reading is the foundation of everything else, he will have a much better chance to be his best self, even bright or gifted. Daughters, too!

                Thus sight-reading is not only a serious handicap to school performance, but also to wholesome personality development, which is significant. What child feels good about going to resource (remedial) class? What child is proud to tell his friends? Quite the opposite. Kids can be cruel with teasing. Children often feel stupid when they’re not, deeply harming their self-esteem, perhaps for life. Experiments have proven that such children can be trained to read properly with adequate phonics methods, which eradicate the confusion and related behavioral problems.

                “The road to literacy is not an easy one, even with the best phonics program [pre-TGM]. How much harder it must be with sight words!” Samuel L. Blumenfeld in, Children Taught With Look-Say Method Lack All Sense of Precision of Letters.

                Why teach a child to read defectively on purpose? Sight-reading takes normal children and teaches them to read like handicapped children. It's not genetic. It gets harder each year in school as s/he falls further and further behind. Your Baby Can Read is the epitome of the causes of dyslexia and may prove to be worse for our children than the Whole Language fiasco.

                Now that you know the “emperor has no clothes” (see Vol. 5 of It's Not Rocket Surgery! by Shannah B Godfrey), that whole-language sight-words are not what they seem, why continue down that path? Teach your child to read before kindergarten with The Godfrey Method in A Merry Child Was Alpha Bette (or A Sunny Kid Was Prince River). Save him or her from the educational decline. Early reading the right way!

                Turning off the TV and teaching phonics to your child early, the right way, may prevent or reduce dyslexia (even ADHD & autism). Professor Maggie Snowling of York University (UK) says the fashionable cures for dyslexia do not really offer a cure for difficulties with literacy. She said, “As far as I can see, the only effective treatment for dyslexia in children is a structured phonic program in a one-on-one situation, backed by confidence-building.” See the dyslexia portions of articles by:

• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 2004
• University of Washington, Seattle, Dr. Virginia Berninger and Dr. Todd Richards
• University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Professor Carsten Elbro

under http://www.dyslexia-parent.com/news.html

                Note: Speaking vocabulary is the only place that you don’t want to just “keep it simple.” Studies show that, in general, dads tend to use bigger words with children than moms, and it helps to raise their vocabulary. Hearing words often helps children sound them out easier when reading, and comprehend what they read easier.

http://thegodfreymethod.com/blog/saving-jack-and-jill-11-ways-cure-speech-problems-and-dyslexia