Frequently Asked Questions
1. How does ABeCeDarian differ from other programs?
2. Will this program work for all students?
3. Do I need special training to teach a child to read using the
ABeCeDarian Reading Program?
4. How early can I start?
5. How do I know where to start?
6. How fast will children make progress?
7. If I use ABeCeDarian, do I have to buy other materials?
8. How will I know what progress the student is making?
9. The school my child is in uses a different reading
program. If my child receives tutoring in ABeCeDarian, will this confuse
him and delay his progress?
10. Is ABCD multisensory?
1. How does ABeCeDarian differ from other programs?
To answer this question, it is helpful to first
identify the key features of ABeCeDarian.
Key Features of
ABeCeDarian
The logic of
the code is taught explicitly
The underlying
organizational principle of our writing system is that letters
represent individual speech sounds, known technically as
"phonemes." For example, the word "cat" is spelled the way it is
because it has three sounds /k/, /a/, and /t/ and the /k/ sound is
spelled with a "c," the /a/ sound by "a", and the /t/ sound by
"t."
Unfortunately, there is not a simple one-to-one
correspondence of letters and sounds in English. While there is a
relatively large amount of complexity in these letter/sound
relationships, mastering them is made considerably easier when the
learner understands three important features governing how letters
represent sounds in English:
1. Two or more letters are used to
represent a single speech sound or phoneme, as is the case with the
underlined letters in: shop, rich,
and boot.
2. Many sounds (especially those for
vowel sounds) are represented by multiple spellings. The words
boat, no, low, hope, and though all have the same vowel
sound, but the
sound is spelled a different way in each word.
3. Many spellings (especially those for
vowel sounds) represent more than one sound, as can be seen and heard
in the words know and how.
All these features of our writing system are
explicitly presented in ABeCeDarian through engaging activities such as
word
puzzles and sorting tasks.
Once students can read at a second grade level,
however, they need to start learning about another level of information
in our writing system. This level of information is exemplified
by the italicized parts of the following words:
unlikely,
unhappy, con
struction, de
struction, use
ful, care
ful. These word
parts convey not only sound information, but meaning information.
The technical name for these parts is "morphemes," and they consist of
prefixes, suffixes, and root words that make up a considerable number
of the longer words students will learn as they read more complicated
text.
Students investigate and learn about prefixes, suffixes,
and roots, explicitly in the levels of ABeCeDarian for students who
read at the third through sixth grade levels.
Letter/sound
correspondences are taught explicitly and systematically
Students learn
the
major letter/sound correspondences. They practice saying these in
isolation as well as finding target graphemes within words and reading
these. When students reach the upper levels of the program, they
explicitly learn and practice reading and spelling common morphemes.
Explicit
practice in segmenting and blending is provided
In every lesson
students spend time breaking words into individual phonemes and then
blending individual phonemes together to form words. These skills
of segmenting and blending, in conjunction with knowledge of the
letter/sound correspondences, are the key to developing the ability to
recognize common words rapidly and to being able to read unfamiliar
words.
Practice is
conducted to fluency
Students practice
learning letter/sounds, reading small lists of words, and reading
sentences each lesson until they can do so not only accurately, but
also without hesitation as well. Giving students sufficient
practice
to develop fluent performance increases retention and accelerates
future learning. Teachers of ABeCeDarian learn optimal practice
routines and have at their disposal a variety of activities to make
practice engaging to students.
Teachers
correct errors productively
No matter how clear and precise instruction is, all
students make some errors. Indeed, errors are a necessary part of
learning just about anything. Good instruction, therefore, should
take account of errors and treat them not as failures but as
opportunities for learning. To take advantage of these
opportunities, it is important that teachers know how to respond to
them productively. And the way to respond to errors productively
is to show the student why his answer
isn't correct. ABeCeDarian provides teachers with a template to
help them provide this information simply but accurately and in terms
that the student can easily grasp.
Students read
lots of text
Good growth in
reading ability requires lots of practice reading text.
ABeCeDarian simplifies phonics instruction so that a significant
portion of each reading lesson can be devoted to reading books.
This emphasis helps ABCD teachers keep phonics and decoding
instruction in the proper perspective, and allows them the flexibility
to use ABCD with a variety of trade books or reading anthologies.
While most reading programs help most
students make progress, there are a number of inefficiencies that can
retard student growth. Here are some important inefficiencies to
avoid that can be found in some reading programs.
Handwriting
instruction that isn't integrated into the program
Beginning students need explicit handwriting
instruction. If a school uses a separate handwriting program,
valuable instructional time can be lost because the letters practiced
in the handwriting program do not match up directly with the sequence
of letters being introduced with decoding instruction. In ABeCeDarian,
beginning students receive explicit handwriting instruction as they
practice reading and writing the words they are learning to read.
Phonemic
awareness instruction that isn't integrated with code instruction
Most beginning reading programs acknowledge
the
importance of helping students develop the ability to identify and
manipulate individual
speech sounds, or "phonemes." Unfortunately, however, many
programs have teachers conduct these activities exclusively as oral
activities, separate from reading lessons in which students learn to
associate the correct sounds with letters and how to use this
information to sound out words. There is a good deal of research
to indicate that reading growth is accelerated when instruction
combines phonemic awareness work with letter/sound work, or
phonics. Moreover, when teaching itchy 5 and 6 year
olds with limited attention spans, such a separation wastes critical
instruction time. In ABeCeDarian all of the phonemic awareness
activities are integrated into each reading lesson.
Phonemic
awareness tasks that are only indirectly related to reading are
practiced
Many beginning reading programs have students
practice phonemic awareness skills such as identifying words that have
the same first sound, or recognizing rhyming words. These skills
are only indirectly related to decoding. The phonemic awareness
skills that are directly related to reading are segmenting (breaking a
word into individual speech sounds or phonemes) and blending (taking a
string of phonemes and recognizing what word they make). ABeCeDarian
focuses only on segmenting and blending.
Letter
names taught before or at the same time as letter-sounds
One of the most reliable and stable correlations
in
educational research is that between letter-name knowledge of young
children and their eventual reading ability. A very large number
of children who know all or most of the names of the letters of the
alphabet at the beginning of kindergarten turn out to be good readers,
whereas a very large number of children who don't know any letter names
or only a few at the beginning of kindergarten turn out to struggle
with learning how to read. As a result of this research, those in
charge of the curriculums of kindergartens across the country have
decided to teach their students the letter-names on the assumption that
knowledge of letter names is a cause of good reading
acquisition.
Unfortunately, this is not precisely the
case. The relationship between letter-sound knowledge and reading
indicates only that the two things are likely to go together--it does
not specify, however, what actually causes good reading. As soon
as a person tries to teach a kindergartner or first grader how to read,
it becomes obvious that letter names are not very useful at
all. For example, knowing the names of the letters in the
word
cat (cee, ay, tee), does not help the student read the word
accurately. In contrast, knowing the sounds that the letters
represent, /k/ /a/ /t/, and knowing how to blend them is extremely
useful, because it gives the student tools he needs to read the word.
A number of phonics programs ask beginning
students
not only to learn letter-names, but also a key word and a sound.
These programs are good so far as they teach the letter/sound
correspondences explicitly, but this presentation of letter-name,
keyword, letter sound (and often a picture) adds unnecessarily to the
demands made on the memory of the learner. The increased memory
demands can be a problem for many students, yet it does not add to the
accuracy or speed with which they learn to read. On the contrary,
such memory-heavy instruction often slows the progress students can
make.
Letter-names should be learned at some point, but there is
little need for very beginning readers to do so initially. For
almost all children, moreover, learning the letter-sounds first and
learning how to read well makes learning the letter-names later on
extremely easy.
Activities that require students
to draw lines between items or circle them
It is in part because of the predominance of
worksheets in which students do this sort of work that all phonics
instruction has been dubbed "drill and kill" by opponents of explicit
phonics programs. Reading work for students should almost always
involve reading and writing words. Drawing lines and circling
things in the absence of pronouncing a word or spelling it is only busy work.
Phonics
instruction that isn't organized by sound
Most phonics programs teach letter/sound
correspondences explicitly. Almost all, however, organize this
instruction around the letters or graphemes That is, they select
some letters and then tell the students what sounds the letters
represent.
The phonics instruction in ABeCeDarian, in
contrast, is organized by sound. Each lesson
starts with sounds and then shows students what letters are used to
represent those sounds. For nonreaders and very beginning
readers, the first task is a word puzzle, which is essentially a
spelling task. Students are given a word orally and then with the
teacher's help, they spell that word with movable letters. This
presentation reinforces the lesson that letters represent sounds and
shows students just where the sounds come from. More advanced
students ready for first-grade level material in ABeCeDarian start
learning the various vowel digraphs such as
ow, ea, ay, oi, ou, au,
etc. But they are introduced to them by means of a sorting
activity in which all of the words on a sorting page will have the same
vowel sound, but the sound is spelled in a variety of ways. The student's task
on this introductory activity in each unit is to sort these according
to how the vowel sound is spelled. The format of this activity
not only teaches students letter/sound correspondences explicitly, but
also reinforces that one sound can be spelled multiple ways.
Slow exposure to high frequency words
In some phonics programs vowel digraphs such as
ow,
ea, ay, oi, ou, and
au are not taught for some time. Students in
such programs may learn the code accurately, and become good at
decoding words they have been taught, but they don't quickly get the
opportunity to read enough of the high-frequency words necessary to be
fluent even at the first grade level. It is very important that the
sequence of instruction for beginning readers emphasizes fluent reading
of high frequency words.
Memorizing high frequency words as sight words without analyzing how the letters represent sounds
Some students, in contrast, receive reading
instruction in which they are asked to focus on learning a set of high
frequency words from the very early phases of their instruction, but
they are asked to learn these words as wholes, without analyzing or
understanding how the letters represent sounds. This situation is
true in many kindergarten classes around the country, in which students
have to memorize between 20-50 high frequency words without learning
much about how to sound these words out. This frustrates a large
number of students who have no way of verifying whether they have read
a word correctly or not, and it miseducates students with regard to how
one learns to decode. ABeCeDarian students, in contrast, focus on learning
high-frequency words not by memorizing them as
wholes but by learning explicitly how the letters in the words
represent sounds.
Having students
learn phonics rules
Some phonics programs ask students to memorize a
variety of rules on the assumption that these rules make it easier to learn letter/sound
correspondences. One of the most well-known of these rules is,
"When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking."
This rule is supposed to explain the sounds for vowel digraphs such as
ai, ea, and
oa. Students learn that the second letter of the pair
is "silent," and the first one "says its name." There are several
problems with such rules. One is that many of the rules are of
little utility. For instance, the "two vowels go walking" rule
just mentioned does not help students read any of the following common
words:
house, oil, book, they, chief, and
cow. Another problem
with rules is that young children don't think in terms of rules, so it
takes quite a bit of effort and practice to get them to apply rules.
It is useful to teach students in third grade
and
above some rules for spelling, especially, rules regarding spelling
changes that occur when suffixes are added to root words. These
rules are taught in the ABeCeDarian Spelling Patterns workbook.
But teaching spelling rules is different from teaching rules for the
purpose of trying to make it easier for the student to learn
letter/sound correspondences.
Teaching students to guess when reading an unfamiliar word
The very worst practice among reading programs,
however, is the recommendation that student's guess when they come to
word that they don't recognize immediately.
First of all, students don't need any special instruction
to guess when they come upon a difficult word in their own
reading. They will do so almost naturally, just as surely as they
will laugh when they hear something funny without being instructed to
do so.
Second, we have a tremendous amount of research evidence
to suggest that poor readers guess words frequently, but good readers
pay attention to each letter in the word and use their knowledge of
letter/sound correspondences and blending skill to figure it out.
Indeed, those teachers experienced with working with older remedial readers
know that one of the biggest hurdles to overcome with these students is
their reliance on guessing.
2. Will this program work for all students?
Yes. Students with learning difficulties such
as dyslexia, attention problems, and general cognitive impairments or
delays need comprehensive and explicit instruction. They also
need carefully sequenced lessons and instructional language that is
simple but precise. All this is provided by ABeCeDarian.
For students who are fortunate enough to have no
particular learning difficulties, teachers will find that ABeCeDarian's
precision and efficiency accelerate learning and allow these students
to quickly read at grade level or above.
Furthermore, because so many of the activities are in puzzle-like form,
children of all ability levels remain very engaged.
What will vary among students is how much repetition
and practice they will need to master the material in each
lesson. Explicit pacing guides allow teachers to understand very
accurately how much practice a particular student needs with material
in a lesson before progressing.
3. Do I need special training to teach a child to read using the
ABeCeDarian Reading Program?
No. The teacher manuals clearly
detail the skills and knowledge students need in order to be able to
read well. Lessons are carefully sequenced and scripted so that
the interaction among the teacher, the student, and the material is
both engaging and productive. Information about proper placement,
pacing, and error correction is clearly provided. Suggestions for
variations and refinements that will help students who are making slow
progress are also presented.
No matter how well-organized the curriculum
is, however, all teachers will have questions as they see how
particular students respond to the lesson. To help address these
questions, there is a discussion group on Yahoo in which the program
developer as well as many teachers and tutors who have experience using
the program provide clarifications, suggestions, and support.
We are also working to make available a
variety of free short videos of students working on different lessons
so it will be easier for teachers new to the program to visualize what
the lessons look like. Currently, there are two short videos
covering the topic of good error correction.
Training workshops with the program author,
Michael Bend, however, are available for those who wish a greater level
of support. Attending a training workshop will certainly
accelerate how quickly most parents or teachers grasp the scope of the
program and the principles underlying its techniques. Moreover,
because most workshops have a small number of participants, there is
opportunity to help users figure out how best to integrate ABeCeDarian
with the other components of their language arts curriculum.
Additional follow-up to workshops, including
classroom observations and model teaching are also available.
4. How early can I start?
Most children who are ready for kindergarten
are able to begin formal reading instruction. Formal reading
instruction refers to specific lessons to teach decoding that involve
learning letter/sounds, undertaking exercises to acquire the skills to
blend isolated sounds together to form words, and providing sufficient
repetitions of words so that the child will be able to read these very
rapidly and without sounding them out.
When working with 5-year olds, it is important to
keep lessons to 15-30 minutes in length. When working with a
group, 15 minute lessons are advisable. When working individually
with a teacher, many kindergarten age students are able to work for
20-30 minutes at a time. A very large number of 5
year olds will be able to make excellent progress with just 15 minutes
a day of formal ABeCeDarian instruction as part of a set of rich
experiences in which the child is read many books and has the
opportunity to talk about a variety of topics with knowledgeable and
interesting adults and older children.
Some 4-year-olds and even 3-year-olds
show interest in learning how to read. It will do no harm to do
the ABeCeDarian lessons with such interested children provided that the
lessons are extremely brief, roughly from 1 to 5 minutes in
length. When working with such young children, it is very
important that the teacher take the cue from the child and let her move
on to another activity as soon as she is ready. In other words,
it is not a good idea for the parent to have a set-amount of time for
each lesson and make the very young child stick to that. Forcing
such a young child to do reading lessons is likely to be
counterproductive: The child does not have the attentional skills
or cognitive skills to benefit from the lessons, and, moreover, the
inappropriate work is likely to lead the child to dislike
reading. In
addition, lessons for 4- and 3-year olds should not involve any
handwriting because children this age to not yet have the fine motor
skills to write well. Plenty of time should be spent developing
these fine motor skills with scissors work, beading, making marks on
paper with crayons, and the like.
The most important literacy
activities to do with students of this age are to spend daily time
reading and re-reading books to them, and to converse with them
frequently. In addition, children this age need plenty of play, both outdoors involving
running around and building things in sand boxes and making mudpies,
and indoors involving big blocks, little blocks, and make-believe. These are also
important activities for 5- and 6-year-olds as well.
5. How do I know where to start?
There is a
placement assessment available to
download on the Free Support Materials
page of this website. The assessment takes under 10
minutes to administer and comes with complete instructions.
6. How fast will children make progress?
How quickly a student learns to decode depends
on several factors. Fluent decoding of first and second grade
level material requires that a student has virtually instant
recognition of a large number of frequently occurring words and word
analysis skills to help him rapidly figure out unfamiliar words he
comes across. Having these skills involves a good visual memory
for words, which is aided by good knowledge of letter/sound
associations, and the ability to hear a string of isolated
sounds and know what word is made up of those sounds in that particular
order. The stronger a student's visualizing skills and blending
skills when he starts, the faster he will make progress.
Kindergarten
students: Many kindergarten
students will be able to complete ABeCeDarian Levels A1 and A2 in 9
months if they receive 15-30 minutes of instruction a day. This
translates into roughly 45 hours of instruction. A large number of children
can make it through the material in considerably less time. A
small number of students will need 45-60 minutes of instruction a day
to make this progress in 9 months. After completing this
level, students will know the 1-letter consonants and vowels, the
digraphs
sh, ch, th, and
ck, read about 40 high frequency
words easily, and have the skills to sound out 3 and 4 sound words with the
letter/sounds that they know.
First grade
students: Almost all first grade
students will be able to complete ABeCeDarian Levels A Short Version
and B1 by the end of first grade, assuming about 25-30 minutes of
instruction daily. This translates into a total of about 72 hours
of instruction time. Most students will be able to complete these
materials in considerably less time. If a student begins first
grade after having already completed the A1/A2 sequence, he will very
likely be able to complete B1 by the middle of the year. After
completing Level B1, students will have learned 26 vowel digraphs, will
recognize 100 high frequency words easily, and will be able to read
first grade material at least 50 words correct per minute.
General
comments about remediation:
Remediation of older students is almost always more difficult than
teaching students making normal progress. For one thing, remedial
students are more likely to have severe difficulties with the skills
involved in developing automatic word recognition, and need much more
intensive practice to develop these skills. In addition, older
students who are behind are more likely to have behavior problems
in response to the frustration they have experienced with their earlier
learning. The goal of remedial instruction is to help students
make more than one year's academic growth in a calendar year.
Remedial
students (second grade reading level or
lower):
Remedial students who are non-readers or read at about a
first grade through second grade level can usually progress through
Levels A (Short Version), B1, and B2 at a rate of about 1.5 to 2 hours
per unit. To go through all three levels usually takes about
60-80
hours of instruction time. Students should be able to read second
grade level well after completing Level B2. A number of teenagers
and adults with very low reading ability have an extremely difficult
time learning how to blend. Depending upon their level whenn they
start ABeCeDarian, these students may take a couple of years to
progress to second grade level reading ability.
Remedial
students (3rd grade reading level or
higher): Remedial students who read at a third grade
level or
higher can usually complete Level B (Short Version), Level C, and Level
D in 45-60 hours of instruction time. By the end of this work,
most students will be able to decode at a sixth grade level. For
the fastest progress, remedial students should read about an hour
outside of their lessons each day.
7. If I use ABeCeDarian, do I have to buy other materials?
Yes. ABeCeDarian provides a set of 10
storybooks that accompany levels A1 and A2 (for non-readers and very
beginning readers, roughly kindergarten and beginning first grade), and
so teachers do not need additional student reading materials when
working with students at these beginning levels. However,
teachers will need to provide additional reading materials when
students are in the more advanced levels. The QuickReads series
(http://quickreads.org) is an excellent resource and works well with
the ABeCeDarian materials for students reading at the second through
fifth grade levels. Teachers will also want to have students read
appropriate trade books as well. The Random House Step Into
Reading series (http://www.randomhouse.com/kids/books/step/) is one
excellent source for good material, both fiction and non-fiction, for
elementary school reading material.
For the most part, ABeCeDarian focuses on only
one small but important part of English Language Arts, namely
decoding. The exceptions to this focus on decoding are:
1. Explicit handwriting instruction in
the kindergarten/beginning 1st grade levels of the program.
2. Vocabulary development in the
3rd-6th grade level materials (Levels C and D).
Teachers will need to provide separate lessons and
materials for
instruction in spelling, grammar, composition, vocabulary, and
comprehension.
8. How will I know what progress the student is making?
The best measure of a student's success at
decoding is his oral reading fluency. To assess a student's oral reading fluency is quite
simple. The teacher has the student read a short, leveled passage
out loud. The teacher times the student for a minute and counts
how many words she reads correctly. It's helpful to count errors as
well. For a very reliable reading, it is a good to do 3 separate
one-minute timings on different passages and select the middle
score. The QuickReads materials listed above are excellent for
these timed readings. Teachers may also use the DIBELS progress
monitoring passages or comparable passages. Norms are available
to compare the child's performance with a national sample of students
in the same grade. The table below shows the median score for
students at the end of first through third grades.
Grade
|
Words
Correct Per Minute
|
1
|
50
|
2
|
90
|
3
|
105
|
9. The school my child is in uses a different reading
program. If my child receives tutoring in ABCD, will this confuse
him and delay his progress?
No. Although routines and activities may
differ between a child's lessons at school and with a tutor or parent using
ABeCeDarian, the general content and the ultimate goals are exactly the
same. Students read English words in both lessons and they are
evaluated in terms of how many words they can read accurately and
fluently. ABeCeDarian explains the logic of our spelling system
explicitly, comprehensively, and precisely without using
extraneous vocabulary or having students memorize rules to explain
spelling patterns. Because the instruction is so precise and
efficient in ABeCeDarian, students avoid frustration, learn quickly,
and see their own progress, so they are motivated by their lessons and
enjoy reading more, and are better able to make sense of the activities
they have to perform in their reading lessons at school.
It is important to note that children
generally exercise highly developed skills at figuring out the
different rules and routines that apply in different
environments. In one teacher's class, for instance, there might
be a strict rule
about classroom noise, while in another's, there is not. There
are certain rules for playing a playground game when just the fourth
graders are playing it by themselves, and a slightly different set of
rules when 1st through 4th graders are playing it together. Most
children readily learn to discern the different rules that apply in
different environments and can keep them compartmentalized without
confusion.
The greatest discord between school
instruction and ABeCeDarian will occur in the unfortunate event that the school instruction actively
encourages students to guess when they come across an unfamiliar word.
What is potentially confusing in this situation, however, isn't the
discord between school and ABeCeDarian lessons, but confusion sown by
the inefficient strategy of guessing. Although there are many
poor readers who are resigned to guessing because they do not have the
letter/sound knowledge and blending skills to sound out unfamiliar
words very well, there are virtually none who are happy having to
guess. Guessing is not really a tool but a mark of limitation and
a sign of failure. What will happen to the student in his
ABeCeDarian lessons is that he will acquire the knowledge and skill
necessary to read unfamiliar words well--he won't be obliged to try to
read words without really having much to go on. In short, he will
become less confused!
10. Is ABCD multisensory?
Yes. In every lesson, ABeCeDarian
students look at words, say out loud the sounds in the words, and write
the way each sound is spelled. In most activities, all of these
tasks are done simultaneously.
