I am thrilled to introduce our guest writer for this article, experienced specialist teacher, Malcolm Litten as he shares with you an awesome app that can help a young dyslexic learner to learn their phonemes.

Reading is currently taught in primary schools with the focus on phonics.  At the end of Year 1, all children are tested with the Phonics Check.  If they do not achieve the required 32 items out of 40 correct, a letter is sent by the school to the parents informing them of this and explaining that their child will have to be retested at the end of Year 2.

I cannot be the only one who worries about the impact of telling a child that they have failed at the age of 6.  I know no-one uses the word ‘failed,’ but, considering the process,  that is merely playing with words.

Most schools will introduce extra support for any Year 1 child who is not progressing as they would hope.  This will ensure some achieve the required standard, but not all children will succeed.

I want to introduce you to a free app designed to provide regular further support to any child struggling to learn phonics called Phoneme Reader.  It has been developed as a result of work I have done in an Indian school with learning readers in their first three years in primary school.  In contrast to the teaching of reading in the UK, these children are taught to read through learning sight words.  Phonics is never mentioned.

The school’s learning target is that every child will learn 100 sight words a month in Year 1 and 200 a month in Year 2.  Not all children were achieving this target.  It was decided to introduce computer support as soon as the teacher detected any difficulty for the child.  Support was provided by offering short lists of the sight words on computer.  Text-to-speech software read each word as it was highlighted.  Key to this support was that the children worked independently, at their own pace, able to repeat words as often as they chose and able to vocalise the word in response if they chose.  Each child had 20 minutes twice a week on the computer.

The results over time have been remarkable.  It was common for as many as 18 out of 25 in a class to start using the computer support.  The number normally dropped rapidly to around 12 and then more slowly down to a core of 5 to 7 children.  By the end of their third year every child except one out of a total of 200 had become a sufficiently successful independent reader to not require further computer support.

This form of support clearly doesn’t fit the UK context.  The challenge was to find a way of replicating the approach but changing the focus to phonics. 

Phoneme Reader has a dictionary of 10,000 words.  If any word from the dictionary is typed in, the word appears firstly as a whole word then split into the phonemes.  So “you” would appear as “y – ou” and “sight” as “s-igh-t.”  When the play button is clicked, the user will hear the phonemes in sequence and see each phoneme simultaneously highlighted.  Then the whole word is spoken.

The idea for its use is that the teacher provides a short list of words that illustrate whatever phoneme is being introduced in class teaching.  Each child can reinforce their learning by working on this list on a tablet or computer.  They can repeat each word as often as they wish and can vocalise the sounds and word, following the computer, trying to join in with it, or anticipating the computer.  They can control the pace at which each phoneme is spoken and highlighted.

Experience in India suggests that this independent, self-paced reinforcement can strengthen a child’s learning.  If the intervention starts before a child has begun to regard themselves as a poor learner or a failure, it can prevent the loss of self-confidence that damages self-esteem.  Comments from the teachers in the Indian school focused as much on the improvements in self-confidence as they did on improvements in reading.

Perhaps that is because the two things are so powerfully entwined?

Phoneme Reader is free.  It can be found on the Claro software website among their apps.  It is available on all platforms and once downloaded does not require the user to be online.

https://www.clarospeakweb.com/phoneme/

About Malcolm Litten.

With a 40 year career as an English teacher, Malcolm now tutors individuals, tutors teachers at Bath Spa University, lectures and trains.  In the last five years, he has been involved with work to encourage the use of text-to-speech software in schools in India to support the development of literacy.  He has achieved very encouraging results in a pilot school in Goa.  He also currently works in Mumbai and Pune.

Malcolm has recently produced Phoneme Reader with Claro software, a free app designed to support the learning of phonics.

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