What is Visual Memory?
Memory is the general process by which knowledge is encoded, stored, and later retrieved within the brain. More specifically, visual memory involves the ability to store and retrieve previously experienced imagery obtained by the optical nerve (sensations/ perceptions) when the original input or stimulus of the imagery is no longer available or present.
In other words, visual memory allows a person to recreate imagery within their mind as a recollection of the stimulus – such as a letter, word, picture, or landscape – once the stimulus is no longer able to be seen.
Types of Visual Memory
Scientists have classified visual memory into three distinct categories: iconic memory, visual short-term memory, and visual long-term memory.
Iconic memory, also known as visual sensory memory, is a unique, an incredibly short-lasting memory type that can best be described through an example. If you have ever been into a haunted house during the Halloween season that has strobe lights, you may remember that when the light flashes in a dark room it provides a moment of perception of the room, and your mind will be able to retain that perception for about half a second. Another example is taking a picture in a dark room with the flash on, which will create the same effects.
Visual short-term memory (STM) retains visual information for only a few seconds so that it can be utilized in the function of ongoing cognitive tasks. Visual STM is longer-lasting and more durable than that of iconic imagery. It plays a big role, for example, in the task of driving a car by remembering road signs that you have passed and retaining an understanding of the location of other vehicles around you.
Visual long-term memory (LTM) is the ability to recall images or places that have been viewed in the distant past. Whether it is retaining the memory of the directions to get to a restaurant you visited last week or a fond recollection of the view of a gorgeous hike you took years ago, your visual LTM is driving this ability.
How Does Visual Memory Work?
Put into a very simple way, visual memory and visualization skills are our ability to interact with symbols, images, and words. The process includes our retina receiving visual input or stimuli which flows into the brain, and from the brain the shapes and colors are retained or recalled.
Visual memory is incredibly important to learning and education as at least 80 percent of what we learn is visual. It is a critical factor in reading, spelling, and writing allowing an individual to readily reproduce a sequence of visual inputs.
Skills in visual memory in school can help with:
– Spelling and remembering sight words
– Reading and reading comprehension
– Recognition of letters and numbers
– Quickly copying notes from a board
– Forming a mental image of a word, like seeing a picture of a dog in their head when they see or read the word “dog”
Visual memory is also clearly important for situations outside of school including:
– Remembering location of important items (shoes, phone)
– Ability to give directions
– Remembering phone numbers
– Recalling memories
How to Detect Visual Memory Issues
Someone that may have problems with their visual memory may display the following signs:
– Individual may have difficulty copying words and images
– Difficulty copying and recognizing numbers, letters, or symbols
– Slow at writing and reading
– Bad reading comprehension or difficulty remembering details
– Poor spelling
– Sounding out every word when reading
– Poor math skills
– Mixing up common letters like ‘p,q’ and ‘d,b’
Just like all other learning disabilities, it is critical to have a professional test the individual experiencing difficulty. The sooner the issue is diagnosed, the sooner solutions can be implemented.
How Do You Improve Visual Memory?
If you or someone you know is having trouble with visual memory, there are a variety of exercises and games to help strengthen the skill.
Some ideas to get started include:
– Memory games that include words
– I-Spy game
– Attempt to visualize something unusual – start with a word like “alien” then describe what you see
– Recall what happened during the day
– Look at pictures/ paintings, take them away, then try to describe what you saw
– Rhyming games
– Matching game (multiple card pairs face down, player turns over two at a time and attempts to find its match)
Help and Resources
Developing the skill of visual memory is incredibly important for the successful progress in reading and writing for all new learners. If you feel that a loved one or family friend could use a guide to become more proficient in visual memory, send them over to the professionals at the Colorado Reading Center for testing and learning resources. Our clinicians help students of any age and welcome all inquiries – take a look at our website or give us a call for more information!
Early Detection and Signs of Dyslexia
/in General /by ColoradoReadingIdentifying Dyslexia from Preschool to High School: Key Signs and Early Intervention
Dyslexia is one of the most common learning differences, affecting as many as 1 in 5 children in the United States. Since early intervention is crucial for helping individuals overcome reading and writing challenges, recognizing the signs of dyslexia at different stages of childhood can make a lasting difference. While dyslexia doesn’t go away, understanding its early markers helps children receive appropriate interventions to succeed academically and personally.
Signs at Every Stage
Many children with dyslexia go undiagnosed, especially if they are bright and develop coping strategies early on. This makes it essential for parents, educators, and healthcare providers to understand the signs of dyslexia and seek intervention early.
Dyslexia can affect children at all stages of their education, from preschool through high school, with different challenges emerging at each level. While every child is different, there are common signs to look out for. Recognizing these signs early allows for timely intervention, which can make a world of difference in a child’s academic and personal life.
Preschool (Ages 3–5): Early Language and Pre-Reading Skills
Dyslexia can begin to show as early as preschool. Although children at this stage are not yet reading, there are language and early literacy indicators that may suggest a child is at risk for dyslexia.
Signs to Look For:
Preschoolers with dyslexia might struggle with phonemic awareness, which is the ability to recognize and manipulate sounds in words. This can result in difficulties with rhyming or segmenting words into syllables—skills that are fundamental for reading later on.
Elementary School (Ages 6–11): Learning to Read and Write
Elementary school is typically when dyslexia becomes more apparent because children are expected to begin reading, writing, and spelling with increasing proficiency. At this stage, children with dyslexia may begin to fall behind their peers in these areas.
Signs to Look For:
Children in this age group may also struggle with reading fluency, reading comprehension, and retaining information they’ve read. Dyslexia at this stage can cause significant frustration, leading children to avoid reading and writing tasks.
Middle School (Ages 11–14): Increased Academic Demands
As children move into middle school, the academic demands increase, and the emphasis shifts from learning to read to reading to learn. Students with dyslexia at this stage might struggle to keep up, especially in subjects that require extensive reading or written responses.
Signs to Look For:
Middle school students with dyslexia may find it harder to manage the volume of reading across subjects like history, science, and English. They may also have trouble keeping up with written assignments, even if they understand the material orally.
High School (Ages 14–18): Advanced Reading and Writing Challenges
By high school, the demands for independent learning, advanced reading comprehension, and essay writing increase. Students with dyslexia often face significant challenges, especially if they haven’t received adequate intervention earlier in their schooling.
Signs to Look For:
At this stage, many high school students with dyslexia may have developed coping mechanisms, but these often break down as the workload increases. Without appropriate accommodations, such as extra time on tests, assistive technology, or structured literacy intervention, students may continue to struggle academically.
The Importance of Early Identification and Intervention
Early identification and intervention for dyslexia are critical for improving a child’s reading and writing skills, as well as their overall academic success. Research shows that the earlier dyslexia is identified, the more effective interventions can be in helping children close the achievement gap with their peers.
Effective interventions for dyslexia include:
Schools, parents, and specialists can work together to ensure that students receive the support they need, whether through formal IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) or 504 Plans that provide necessary accommodations and interventions.
Conclusion
Dyslexia is a lifelong condition, but with proper support, children and adolescents with dyslexia can thrive academically and personally. Recognizing the signs early—whether in preschool, elementary, middle, or high school—empowers parents and educators to provide timely, targeted interventions that make a real difference in a child’s life.
Sources:
What is Multisensory Instruction?
/in The Science of Reading /by Robert WWhat is Structured Phonics versus Whole Language?
/in The Science of Reading /by ColoradoReadingWhat is Structured Phonics vs. Whole Language?
There has been a long-lasting debate among academics regarding the most effective method in teaching students how to read. The dispute between believers in structured phonics verses those in support of the whole language approach began as early as the 1820’s and culminated in the United States in 1987 when the state of California, as part of the new language-arts curriculum, passed bills favoring the whole-language approach over basic decoding skills.
What are these two radically different approaches? Why did the two approaches create the “Reading War”? Read on for a deep dive into the conflict that helped define modern reading instruction.
Structured Phonics Instruction
Phonics instruction lays its foundation in teaching letter-sound relationships. In essence, phonetic-based reading attempts to break written language down into small and manageable components. Learners correlate certain letter symbols with their respective sounds allowing them to piece them together to create words, or in the case of reading, deconstruct a word into the various parts then weave the sounds together to form a pronounceable word (also known as decoding).
For example, a student will be taught that individual letters have a specific sound such as the letter ‘B’ saying ‘buh’ /b/ not its name “bee”. This will happen for the rest of the letters in the alphabet, so when a student is presented with the word “bat” – they will be able to break it down into its parts and sound it out correctly: “buh..aaa..tt – bat”
Later in the phonetic instruction process, students will learn that small groups of letters can be linked together in patterns which will always say the same sound such as “tch, dge, ng”.
Phonetic instruction is a methodical approach to analyze sounds, letters, and ultimately words.
Whole Language Instruction
Whole language instruction differs drastically by attempting to teach words and sentences as whole pieces of language – words are not systematically analyzed or pulled apart as they are in phonics instruction. Those that believe in whole language instruction argue that language should not be broken down into letters and decoded, but instead language is a complete system of meaning with words functioning in relation to each other in context. In other words, the most important focus should not be on sounds at all but primarily on the meaning and context.
The whole language approach was defended on rational grounds in the 1800’s in the Worcester primer: “It is not very important, perhaps, that a child should know the letters before it begins to read. It may learn first to read words by seeing them, hearing them pronounced, and having their meanings illustrated; and afterward it may learn to analyze them or name the letters of which they are composed.”
The three arguments used to promote whole language instruction are:
1) Reading time does not depend on word length; therefore, word recognition must not rest on the systematic breakdown of words. This, however, has been proven incorrect as our brain processes all letters simultaneously, not one at a time.
2) We are slightly faster at reading words in lowercase than in uppercase; thus, it is the contour of letters and the resulting contour-specific signature of each word which is most important in reading. The contour is lost in upper case letters, which are all the same size, so our reading speed is reduced. But this is incorrect understanding because if we actually used contour to identify letters, we would be unable to read the upper-case letters at all, let alone at a slower pace.
3) Typographical errors that respect the overall contour of a word is harder to detect than those that violate it. An example is in the word “test”, where an error of “tesf” is harder to identify than an error of “tesq” where the ascending letter “t” has been replaced by another ascending letter “f” and a descending letter “q” respectively. But this is merely due to the similarity between the “f” and the “t”, not a whole-word resemblance.
The Solution
The two approaches to teach reading skills differ dramatically in how learners are instructed to approach unfamiliar printed words. Phonics instructs a learner to try to analyze the word into parts and to sound it out. Whole-language encourages the learner to guess the word from the context of the story or accompanying pictures. Regarding the clues to understanding a word, phonics instruction believes they are found within the word itself, while whole language looks externally or outside the word.
At the end of the day, results matter above everything else. The National Reading Panel found that children who are taught phonics systematically and explicitly make greater progress in reading than those taught with any other type of instruction. This result is corroborated when California students’ test scores plummeted after instituting whole language instruction in 1987 and the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that 3 out of every 4 students were below average for their age.
Phonics instruction is the better instruction method by a long shot. At the Colorado Reading Center, phonics is our focus to implement deep understanding of word decoding in our students. At the same time as phonics instruction, we apply some sight word reading with the most common words found in a particular reading level – this is important so that we get our students, who are generally behind their grade, quickly up to the level they should be to perform well in school.
Help and Resources
Developing the skill of reading is incredibly important for successful progress in school for all new learners. If you feel that a loved one or family friend could use a guide to become more proficient in understanding phonics, send them over to the professionals at the Colorado Reading Center for testing and learning resources. Our clinicians help students of any age and welcome all inquiries – take a look at our website or give us a call for more information!
What is Phonemic Awareness?
/in The Science of Reading /by ColoradoReadingWhat is Phonemic Awareness?
Beginning the learning process of reading can be quite a difficult undertaking. When we think of new readers and how they learn, we usually picture children’s stories and the alphabet, but whether the beginner is a child or an adult that never acquired the necessary skills, the first step towards success is phonemic awareness.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992).
Phonemic versus Phonological Awareness
Many people have the incorrect understanding that phonemic awareness and phonological awareness are the same thing, or synonyms of one another. It is important to be clear that although they are similar, they are indeed unique, and this differentiation is key to understanding the development process.
Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness. Phonemic awareness is more specific and deals with the ability to identify individual sounds within words, called phonemes (“cat…/c/ /a/ /t/”), as well as manipulate them within a given word (“Change the /c/ to a /b/… now the word is bat”). Phonetic awareness is a broader term referring to the more developed ability of being able to hear, identify, and manipulate larger units of sounds such as onsets and syllables and recognition of rhyming words.
For beginning learners, and for the purpose of this blog, we will be focusing on phonemic awareness (the more specific term), as it will be the first skill that needs to be developed.
Why is Phonemic Awareness Important?
Phonemic awareness is critical for identifying reading development in new learners, and it is the most important pre-reading skill that can be developed being central to the role in learning to read and to spell. According to the National Reading Panel, “Teaching phonemic awareness to children significantly improves their reading more than instruction that lacks any attention to phonemic awareness.”
It is well accepted that phonemic awareness is the best predictor of reading and writing success in young children. It helps learners to master sound-spelling relationships, thus improving this skill through structured education is critical for a higher chance of being able to read and write when literacy instruction begins.
Without phonemic awareness, learners will be unable to group words with similar and dissimilar sounds, blend and split syllables, blend sounds into words, break a word down into its sequence of sounds, nor detect and manipulate sounds within words. It is the foundation, so to speak, of a future reader and writer and without it fluency can never be achieved.
How Learners Develop Phonemic Awareness
The development of phonemic awareness is unique for every learner. Some are able to begin growing phonemic awareness naturally through rhyming stories (like Dr. Seuss), through singing and learning nursery rhymes, or even by listening and reading along with a parent or teacher. This can be a very fortunate start to the learning process for some students, but others may need systematic and specific phonemic awareness teaching to grow in their abilities in preparation for writing and reading. There are many online resources as well as professional institutions available for this type of instruction.
Levels of Phonemic Awareness
Marilyn Jager Adams, a specialist in cognition and education at Brown University, created a widely used definition of phonemic awareness in 1990, and developed a basic understanding of the skills leading to phonemic awareness in five distinct levels.
1) Ability to hear rhymes (“dog, fog”) and alliteration (repeated initial sounds in words, i.e “purple poster”).
2) Ability to identify similarities and differences in rhyme and alliteration across and between words.
3) Ability to blend and segment syllables (“rain-bow…rainbow”).
4) Ability to split a spoken word into phonemes (“bag…b-a-g”).
5) Ability to identify and manipulate the sounds in words (“Say ‘dog’. Now change the last sound to a /t/. What word do you have now?”)
Help Developing Phonemic Awareness
Developing the skill of phonemic awareness is incredibly important for the successful progress in reading and writing for all new learners. If you feel that a loved one or family friend could use a guide to become more proficient in phonemic awareness, send them over to the professionals at the Colorado Reading Center. Our clinicians help students of any age and welcome all inquiries – take a look at our website or give us a call for more information!
What is Visual Memory?
/in The Science of Reading /by ColoradoReadingWhat is Visual Memory?
Memory is the general process by which knowledge is encoded, stored, and later retrieved within the brain. More specifically, visual memory involves the ability to store and retrieve previously experienced imagery obtained by the optical nerve (sensations/ perceptions) when the original input or stimulus of the imagery is no longer available or present.
In other words, visual memory allows a person to recreate imagery within their mind as a recollection of the stimulus – such as a letter, word, picture, or landscape – once the stimulus is no longer able to be seen.
Types of Visual Memory
Scientists have classified visual memory into three distinct categories: iconic memory, visual short-term memory, and visual long-term memory.
Iconic memory, also known as visual sensory memory, is a unique, an incredibly short-lasting memory type that can best be described through an example. If you have ever been into a haunted house during the Halloween season that has strobe lights, you may remember that when the light flashes in a dark room it provides a moment of perception of the room, and your mind will be able to retain that perception for about half a second. Another example is taking a picture in a dark room with the flash on, which will create the same effects.
Visual short-term memory (STM) retains visual information for only a few seconds so that it can be utilized in the function of ongoing cognitive tasks. Visual STM is longer-lasting and more durable than that of iconic imagery. It plays a big role, for example, in the task of driving a car by remembering road signs that you have passed and retaining an understanding of the location of other vehicles around you.
Visual long-term memory (LTM) is the ability to recall images or places that have been viewed in the distant past. Whether it is retaining the memory of the directions to get to a restaurant you visited last week or a fond recollection of the view of a gorgeous hike you took years ago, your visual LTM is driving this ability.
How Does Visual Memory Work?
Put into a very simple way, visual memory and visualization skills are our ability to interact with symbols, images, and words. The process includes our retina receiving visual input or stimuli which flows into the brain, and from the brain the shapes and colors are retained or recalled.
Visual memory is incredibly important to learning and education as at least 80 percent of what we learn is visual. It is a critical factor in reading, spelling, and writing allowing an individual to readily reproduce a sequence of visual inputs.
Skills in visual memory in school can help with:
– Spelling and remembering sight words
– Reading and reading comprehension
– Recognition of letters and numbers
– Quickly copying notes from a board
– Forming a mental image of a word, like seeing a picture of a dog in their head when they see or read the word “dog”
Visual memory is also clearly important for situations outside of school including:
– Remembering location of important items (shoes, phone)
– Ability to give directions
– Remembering phone numbers
– Recalling memories
How to Detect Visual Memory Issues
Someone that may have problems with their visual memory may display the following signs:
– Individual may have difficulty copying words and images
– Difficulty copying and recognizing numbers, letters, or symbols
– Slow at writing and reading
– Bad reading comprehension or difficulty remembering details
– Poor spelling
– Sounding out every word when reading
– Poor math skills
– Mixing up common letters like ‘p,q’ and ‘d,b’
Just like all other learning disabilities, it is critical to have a professional test the individual experiencing difficulty. The sooner the issue is diagnosed, the sooner solutions can be implemented.
How Do You Improve Visual Memory?
If you or someone you know is having trouble with visual memory, there are a variety of exercises and games to help strengthen the skill.
Some ideas to get started include:
– Memory games that include words
– I-Spy game
– Attempt to visualize something unusual – start with a word like “alien” then describe what you see
– Recall what happened during the day
– Look at pictures/ paintings, take them away, then try to describe what you saw
– Rhyming games
– Matching game (multiple card pairs face down, player turns over two at a time and attempts to find its match)
Help and Resources
Developing the skill of visual memory is incredibly important for the successful progress in reading and writing for all new learners. If you feel that a loved one or family friend could use a guide to become more proficient in visual memory, send them over to the professionals at the Colorado Reading Center for testing and learning resources. Our clinicians help students of any age and welcome all inquiries – take a look at our website or give us a call for more information!
What is Encoding versus Decoding?
/in The Science of Reading /by ColoradoReadingThe Essentials of Encoding and Decoding
Communication is the essence of interaction for the majority of living things – animals, but especially humans, rely on the ability to communicate through various forms. The process of communication requires a sender and a receiver of a message or signal, and it cannot be better emulated than through the human invention of reading and writing.
Encoding and decoding, perhaps better represented as writing and reading respectively, are the fundamental abilities that together allow for the mastery of linguistic communication. Learning to spell, read, and write can be challenging for people, but is especially true for language learners with disabilities such as dyslexia and dysgraphia.
So, what are these skills that many people take for granted? How can we overcome difficulties in acquiring them? And what resources are available to start succeeding in linguistic communication?
What is Encoding?
Encoding is a process in which a message is created or formulated for communication purposes by a sender or an encoder. While encoding can be considered as verbal (through words, signs, photos) or non-verbal (body language, facial expressions), our focus is on encoding in reading/ writing. In the case of reading and writing, encoding is the translation of a spoken word or sound into a written symbol- essentially what we refer to as spelling.
When starting the learning process of encoding, students must first know the English alphabet and the corresponding sound that each of the distinct letters make. Students will then learn to write the alphabet which leads to spelling actual words. In order to spell (encode) a word that they can say, the student must be able to break down the word into the sounds they hear and ascribe a symbol to those respective sounds – this skill usually forms at the end of kindergarten or the beginning of first grade.
The message is created by the encoder, then passed on to the receiver, who then decodes it.
What is Decoding?
Keeping with the focus of reading and writing, the other side of the coin to the encoder is the receiver of the message or the decoder. Decoding is the translation of the symbolic representation of a written word or letter into an understood sound or sound pattern and thus the resulting interpretation of the message.
In order for someone to decode, they must have strong phonemic awareness, which is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992). Identifying and in turn gaining a sense of meaning from these unique sounds by looking at, or rather, reading a written word is the key to decoding.
What Skills are Needed to Encode and Decode?
A basic set of skills are required for English language learners to begin encoding and decoding. On the surface level, a learner will need knowledge of the sound-symbol relationship (phonics), knowledge of the 44 phonemes (basic units of sound), knowledge of the English alphabet, and phonemic awareness.
The process of encoding and decoding requires both auditory and visual skills to connect between the two, and the fundamentals of the English language begin to be grasped as students gain the knowledge of phonology, orthography, and morphology. For example, knowing why the ‘-ed’ ending makes each of its three sounds, /d/, /t/, and /id/, is uncovered when a student can identify the final sound in the root word. Overtime as they become proficient in these concepts to identify and spell words, it will ultimately lead to automatic word recognition and achieving fluency.
What is Word Attack?
Word-attack and word-attack strategies help students decode, pronounce, and understand unfamiliar words they may come across when reading. By empowering students with a flexible set of tools to break down a word into smaller pieces they will be less likely to feel lost and give up while giving them confidence and a better chance of success when facing the unknown.
A useful word-attack strategy is to break a word down into more manageable parts and sound out each portion independently of the others. For example, if you have a long, one syllable word such as ‘stouts’, it may be helpful to break it up as ‘st/ou/ts’ – each portion is only two letters which is much easier for a beginning reader than trying to tackle it all at once. The same tool applies when faced with an unknown, multisyllable word such as ‘disregarded’. Try breaking it down into ‘dis/re/gard/ed’, which will be less overwhelming, easier to pronounce, and more likely to land understanding for the reader.
Help When Needed
Learning to read, write, and spell can be a challenging undertaking for a developing language student. There are many resources available including books and videos to help during the process; and if you feel that a loved one or family friend could use a guide to become more proficient in encoding and decoding, send them over to the professionals at the Colorado Reading Center. Our clinicians help students of any age and welcome all inquiries – take a look at our website or give us a call for more information!
What is Dyslexia?
/in General /by ColoradoReadingWhat is Dyslexia?
Dyslexia is a learning disability that affects a person’s phonological processing, making reading and writing challenging for the individual. People with dyslexia experience difficulty in identifying speech sounds and/or learning how they relate to letters and words. While not every person with dyslexia experiences the same symptoms and difficulties with reading, dyslexia is a deficit in phonological processing.
For example, people who are dyslexic may also struggle with reading comprehension, writing, spelling, and even math. Young dyslexics also tend to struggle with other things unrelated to reading, like attention span, sequencing (remembering things in order), motor control, and left and right confusion leading to wider issues affecting social interaction, memory, and dealing with stress. Dyslexics can end up struggling with everyday activities that most people take for granted because of the far-reaching issues stemming from dyslexia.
In order to understand how dyslexia affects our students and young readers, we need to take a look at phonological processing. Phonological processing is using all of the sounds of a language in order to process both spoken and written language. Phonological processing is a broad category that includes phonological awareness, working memory, and information retrieval. People who are diagnosed with dyslexia may struggle with one or all of these pieces of phonological processing.
Recent Research
While science is constantly evolving and creating new insight into dyslexia and its effects, researchers have not yet determined what exactly causes dyslexia. What they do know, however, is that dyslexia is genetic; in other words, a child is more likely to develop dyslexia if one of their parents is dyslexic. Furthermore, if that child has any siblings, there is a 40% chance that the sibling could also have problems reading.
Researchers are getting closer to understanding exactly which parts of the brain are affected. When a person is reading, both hemispheres of the human brain are active, but the left hemisphere does most of the work. Pathways are created during the reading process, and each has a specific function. For instance, there is a pathway that facilitates ‘sight recognition’ (recognizing a word just by looking at it rather than breaking it down by individual sounds), which leads to another developed pathway that allows the reader to remember the meaning of that recognized word. This results in a series of connections leading to speech, articulation, and pronunciation. All of these processes happen simultaneously throughout the brain for a fluent reader.
For someone with dyslexia, these internal pathways and connections form differently. There is little understanding as to why these differences occur, but researchers have found that the left hemisphere of the brain in a dyslexic person lacks the necessary connection to facilitate the pathways which allow a reader to become fluent. Instead, the right hemisphere begins to overcompensate and work harder to create those connections that are needed to read and comprehend. Below is a graphic that shows the activity in a brain of a non-dyslexic reader versus that of a dyslexic reader.
Resources
If you struggle with dyslexia, know that you are not alone! Dyslexia is much more common than one might initially believe. Research has found that nearly 18% of the population is dyslexic. That is almost 1 out of every 5 people! Our resources at the Colorado Reading Center can help relieve some of the struggle and stress that may be caused by dyslexia. We provide resources to help readers, young and old, develop the essential skills for reading success.
People of all ages can suffer from dyslexia. However early interventions with young students, typically between Kindergarten and fifth grade, have been shown to be most effective. There are plenty of resources including books and videos to help understand the possibilities of overcoming Dyslexia, and there are numerous organizations such as the Colorado Reading Center that offer professional services for dyslexia remediation.
The Schwa – or the lightly pronounced unaccented vowel sound
/in Reading and Spelling Rules /by ColoradoReadingWhat is the Schwa?
Now that students have learned about multiple syllable words and syllable division with a variety of endings, they will be introduced to the ‘schwa’. The schwa is a lightly pronounced unaccented vowel sound that sounds like /u/ rather than the vowel saying its name or sound, and the ‘schwa’ is represented by an upside down ‘e’ (ə). The ‘schwa’ is a concept of our language that can be overlooked despite its prevalence in the English language.
Take for instance the word, ‘banana’; there are three of the same vowel in this word, but only one is actually pronounced with its sound – the other two are unaccented syllables, allowing the ‘schwa’ to occur (accented syllables will never be said with a schwa in English). Occasionally, the schwa can also be on a vowel digraph. An example of this would be in the word ‘captain’; if we said this word phonetically, the ‘ai’ in it would make a long /a/ sound, but we actually read it with an /ə/ sound.
History of the Schwa
Where does the ‘schwa’ come from? The actual concept wasn’t coined as a ‘schwa’ until the late 1800’s by German phonologists and was borrowed from the Hebrew words “shva”, but the unstressed vowel sound goes back even further to Old English as well as languages of different families such as Albanian, Caucasian and Uralic languages, Hindi, Korean, Romance languages, Slavic languages, and many more all throughout the world!
There is always one stressed vowel within a multi-syllable word, so the unstressed vowel (or syllable) began to take on a consistent, unaccented sound /u/. English is a stress-timed language (opposite of a syllable-timed language, like Spanish), which means the rhythmic impression is based on the regular timing of stress peaks, not syllables. This style of English goes all the way back to the 9th century and is the same style that we use today.
The schwa is incredibly important for world languages in general by helping to emphasize the accented syllable. It might be hard to believe, but this sound is actually the most used sound in the entire English language.
How We Learn the Schwa
To help students understand the schwa and how to identify it within words, we draw the student’s attention to it with an example word, like ‘banana’ as it is easy to identify the schwa in this word. A clinician will write out the word and have the student divide it into syllables. Then, they ask them to identify the accent, which will play fair (in other words, it will say its expected sound).
Next, the clinician will draw the student’s attention to the unaccented syllables and identify the sound they are making as the schwa sound. It can be fun to have the student try the word without a schwa on the first and last syllable (e.g. bānanā). Next, the student will decode several words with the schwa sound repeating this process.
Step 1: Syllable Division
ba | na | na
Step 2: Identify Accent
ba | nà | na
Step 3: Draw Attention to Unaccented Syllables with Schwa Sound
bə | nà | nə
It may also be helpful to look up a few words in the dictionary to demonstrate how the schwa is represented so they can sound out unknown words. For example: captain (ˈkap tən), banana (bəˈna nə), abandon (əˈban dən). It will not be hard to find as it is in the majority of English words!
‘-ER’ and ‘-EST’ Endings
/in Reading and Spelling Rules /by ColoradoReading‘-ER’ and ‘-EST’ Endings
An inflectional ending is a group of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning. They have spelling and pronunciation rules that are very helpful for a developing reader to learn. The fourth and final inflectional ending we teach is the ‘er/est’ ending. These endings are added to adjectives to show comparison.
Purpose of ‘-ER’ and ‘-EST’ Endings
‘-ER’ and ‘-EST’ suffixes fall into the the English categories of comparatives and superlatives respectively. We use ‘er’ to compare two things to each other (fast/faster). The ‘est’ ending is used when comparing three or more things (fast/fastest). There are some words that change completely when used in comparison (good/better/best), but for the purpose of gaining reading and spelling skills, these irregulars are not the focus.
History of ‘-ER’ and ‘-EST’ Endings
English speakers have been using ‘-er’ and ‘-est’ suffixes in order to make comparisons since the inception of English and holds tradition even as far back as Indo-European spoken in 4,500 BC. The Old English derivatives were spelled differently than they are today being ‘-ra’ and ‘-est/-ost’ as in the word for hard: hard (heard), harder (heardra), and hardest (heardost).
It wasn’t until the 1200’s when English speakers began to use the words ‘more’ and ‘most’ to slowly replace the ‘-ER’ and ‘-EST’ endings.
How We Teach the ‘-ER’ and ‘-EST’ Endings
The spelling rules for the ‘er/est’ ending are very similar to the other three inflectional ending rules we teach and the same spelling patterns are used for ‘er’ and ‘est.’
For base words that end with consonant+‘y,’ change ‘y’ to ‘i’ and add the ending (busy/busier/busiest). The base word does not change if it ends in vowel+’y’ (happy/happier/happiest).
We use the consonant doubling rule if the base word has a vowel saying its sound—or a short vowel—followed by one consonant (flat/flatter/flattest).
Finally, in a base word that ends in ‘e,’ do not double ‘e,’ just add the ending ‘r’ or ‘st’ (brave/braver/bravest). A summary of these rules can be found below.
Examples of the ‘-ER’ and ‘-EST’ Endings
In general, just add ‘er’ or ‘est’
tall to taller, tallest
If the base word ends in ‘e,’ remove the ‘e’ and add ‘er’ or ‘est’
nice to nicer, nicest
If the vowel says its sound and there is a single consonant after, double the consonant
thin to thinner, thinnest
If the word ends in vowel+’y,’ simply add ‘er’ or ‘est’
gray to grayer, grayest
If the word ends in consonant+’y,’ change ‘y’ to ‘i’ and add ‘er’ or ‘est’
silly to sillier, silliest
‘-S/ES’ Ending
/in Reading and Spelling Rules /by ColoradoReading‘-S/ES’ Endings
The English language has a number of inflectional endings, which are groups of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning. They have spelling and pronunciation rules that are helpful for a developing reader to know. The third ending we teach is the ‘s/es’ ending, which is used to make words plural. There are some words with irregular plurals such as “mouse/mice” or “sheep/sheep.” For the purposes of reading and spelling remediation, we do not spend time teaching these. It is more important for our students to know about common pluralization.
History of the ‘-S/ES’ Ending
English has lost many of its inflectional endings over its long history, but the common plural ending for nouns has survived since Old English. The ‘-S/ES’ ending derives from the masculine ending ‘-as’, as in cyningas “kings”.
We can be thankful for this adoption from Old English, otherwise we would have many more irregular plurals from the ancient Germanic language. If you think ‘mice’ is weird, imagine if more than one goat was a bunch of ‘gat’, or more than one oak tree was a field of ‘ack’. In order to properly discuss a plural form of any of these nouns, you would have needed to know the exact word for it rather than just adding on the handy ‘-S/ES’ ending.
Rules of the ‘-S/ES’ Ending
The ‘s’ ending is quite different from the other endings covered so far because it does not contain a vowel. This makes adding the ending less complicated. For the vast majority of words, simply add the letter ‘s’ to change from singular to plural. There are just two situations that require something different.
First, if the base word ends in consonant+‘y,’ change ‘y’ to ‘i’ and add ‘es’ (copy/copies). The other part of this spelling rule relates to the ‘s’ sound. If the base word ends in the letters ‘s,’ ‘z,’ ‘x,’ ‘sh,’ or ‘ch,’ the ending ‘es’ must be used (fuss/fusses, bench/benches). To make the plural sound distinct from the singular base word, this adds another syllable which sounds like /iz/.
Examples of ‘-S/ES’ Endings
In general, simply add ‘s’
walk to walks
If the base word ends in ‘e,’ add ‘s’
save to saves
If the vowel says its sound and there is a single consonant after, add ‘s’
hop to hops
If the base word ends in vowel+’y,’ add ‘s’
play to plays
If the base word ends in consonant+’y,’ change ‘y’ to ‘i’ and add ‘es’
cry to cries
If the base word ends in S, Z, X, SH, or CH, add ‘es.’ This adds a syllable and is pronounced /iz/.
misses, fizzes, foxes, brushes, lunches.