"Guided Reading" and Students With Language-Based Learning Disabilities

Charles Fox of the Special Education Law Blog has asked Lisa Hannum to evaluate a popular early-reading technique, "guided reading".  The first of two parts:

The following post is from a colleague who is special education advocate, a trained mediator, and past President of the Illinois Chapter of the International Dsylexia Association. She has a great deal of expertise and experience in the area of reading methodologies and knowledge of needed remediations for reading-based disabilities. She has written this post on the subject of guided reading, at my request, since many schools [mis]represent that Guided Reading is appropriate to teach student struggling with a reading disability. I will post a second part tomorrow relating to research-based methods that are appropriate to address the issues that students with reading disabilities face in the classroom.

Comments

[Liz]

Part Two is up:

A Structured Language Program.

A Structured Language Program to Address Reading Disabilities By Lisa Hannum

This is the second post from my colleague Lisa Hannum addressing the essential elements of Structured Language as the primary means of reading remediation, in contrast with Guided Reading which was discussed in the post from the previous day.

A structured language program teaches more than the sounds of the 26 letters of the alphabet. It teaches the concept of phonemes and graphemes. Phonemes are sounds in language. Graphemes are the letter or letter combinations that represent the sounds in words. For example, in the word cup there are three sounds, represented by three graphemes: /c/ /u/ /p/ (letters within / / refers to the sounds). In some words, there is a one-to-one relationship between sounds and letters. In other words, that relationship is not as simple. In the word chirp there are three sounds (/ch/ /ir/ /p/) These three sounds are represented by three graphemes, but five letters. Both letter and letter combinations can represent individual sounds. (Think of the complexity of a word like eight. There are only two sounds, /eigh/ /t/. The grapheme “eigh” is pronounced like the “a” in ape.)

It might be worthwhile for interested readers to print out these two posts and share them with their schools/teachers.

[Barbara Rosemond]

When you compare the Guided Reading with the Structured elements of Language to address reading disabilities. What criteria is used to decide on which method to use individually for each student?