Suggestions for Instruction for Profile 5 Learners

Reading components work together. Increasing skill on any component increases skill on the others.

Word Recognition and Spelling:

• Have your learners mastered these prerequisite skills to accurate decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling):
  
  
  1. Do they know the names and sounds of the consonants with automaticity?
  2. Do they know the names and the long and short sounds of the vowels with automaticity?
  3. Do they know the principles of open and closed syllables?
  4. Do they understand segmentation/chunking practices?
  
  Profile 5 learners have not mastered the above skills to the point of being able to apply them automatically when they begin to read or spell a word. Developing automaticity in attaching sounds to symbols (phonological awareness) is a skill to aim for. However, Profile 5 learners have a dyslexic's reading component profile of low print skills (alphabetics) and high meaning skills, and therefore, for some in this group, phonological awareness may never become fully automatic. But, practice will strengthen these skills.
  
  
  • Phonemic Awareness (PA):
    Any kind of practice that involves only the sounds of letters--not the letters themselves--will help focus learners' attention to "sounding out" a word before spelling it. Give them a PA assessment such as the Test of Auditory Analysis Skills (TAAS) (5 minutes per learner) to see where their mastery of consonant deletion gets shaky. Five minutes of a PA game (see the Spelling page in the Mini-Course) before you start a spelling lesson will prompt the learners to listen to and manipulate sounds before they put symbols to the sounds in the lesson itself.
  
  
  • Phonological Awareness:
    To know just which letter combinations and syllable forms a learner needs further practice on, you can administer a word attack assessment. It will save instructional time in that you will be able to zero in on just those phonic elements that have not been mastered, that are holding up a learner's progress.
    
    
  • Visual Memory:
    Enlarge their bank of sight words. Similar techniques to those you would use to teach decoding phonetically irregular words (sight word practice) apply to teaching to encode (spell) them.

Word Meaning (Vocabulary):

• Some vocabulary words that are appropriate to middle and high school social studies and science curricula can be used also for both word recognition and spelling instruction. In that way, learners will not only be able to read and understand new words but also to use them in written work. There will be reciprocal reinforcement among all three of these reading components (word meaning, word recognition, and spelling).

For more information, please read the sections in the Mini-Course on Word Recognition and Spelling.