Every child tries to learn to read in the first year in school. Indeed, it is no surprise that a few do not, or cannot, leam from instruction in reading. We are surprised that almost all children learn to read in the first year. There are many conditions that help children to read—instruction and some kind of blueprint in the child’s brain are the two most important conditions that help the child. But when children fail to leam how to read, remediation becomes necessary. As said before, remediation begins when instruction fails.
Many attempts at remediation have been made using phonetics training and methods of teaching phonological coding. One of the well-known training studies was carried out by Lundberg, Frost, and Petersen (1988). While reading a brief summary of this study, be aware that they were training normal children to read, and did not select dyslexics or particularly poor readers. We suggest that the PREP program is very different from a phonological coding training program; it goes beyond phonological coding.
Rather, it combines a general training of PASS processing with curriculum-related remedial training that is derived from the PASS theory. The PASS approach to reading disability is different; those who wouldnot normally improve with phonetics instruction are to be trained both in basic cognitive processes as well as in curriculum-related tasks that replicate these processes.
In their classic article on effects of phonological training on 235 preschool children, the authors report a longitudinal study. The children had daily training session over a period of eight months and were compared with 155 children who did not receive this training. Effects of the training on children’s progress in reading and spelling were tested in first and second grades. The program was like a game. First, a period of rhyming games using nursery rhymes, then later, segmentation of sentences into word units and exercises that made the children aware of the length of words and improve their knowledge of syllables.
In the third month of the program, phonemes were introduced. But to make the task easy for the children, the word Tom, for example, was uttered by the examiner as t-t-t-t-om, Tom. As discussed earlier, phonemic awareness tasks such as initial phoneme identification, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme synthesis were used. The authors discussed the results and concluded that the development of rhyming ability does not seem to be strongly dependent on formal training.
What is rhyming? It is sensitivity to sound similarity, and it seems to develop naturally through the experience of the child. We have also discussed in a previous chapter that training in rhyming alone does not improve word reading among those who are developing a reading disability; it has to be combined with spelling that hastens growth in reading ability in children entering the alphabetic stage. Awareness of syllables is more natural and accessible as compared to phonemes.
Lundberg, Frost, and Petersen suggest that this is so because in order to attend to syllables the child does not. have to ignore the natural unity of the articulatory act. Phoneme segmentation, like initial phoneme recognition, is not naturally acquired. Therefore, extra training given to the children in the training group made them gain superior skills in phoneme segmentation.
In this widely quoted paper, the sample was different from the sample chosen in our own studies. This was an unselected group of children who had no obvious measures of reading difficulties.
Also, the type of training that was given, that is, phonemic segmen-tation, initial phoneme identification, and so on, obviously focused on phonemic awareness but not on the cognitive processes that might underlie phonemic awareness.
This is different in our research on PREP, which is presented in the next section, where the underlying processes were emphasized.
Shape Designs is one of the PREP tasks that may improve comprehension. In the meanwhile, let us take a look at the research that shows the effectiveness of PREP.