|
If you're here looking for information, you probably know someone who has problems with reading. Maybe you've heard this person read and make mistakes like these:
Perhaps you've tried various methods of reading instruction with little or no effect. You're baffled; your student is bright and may have average or above average oral language skills, yet is still unable to make sense of the reading process. This information is for you. Dyslexia, a catch-all term for reading problems, has received a great deal of attention lately. It has been discovered that dyslexia is not the visual problem that it was assumed to be. Instead, it's caused by an inability to perceive sounds correctly. You may have heard terms such as "phonemic awareness," "auditory conceptual perceptual judgement," and "auditory conceptual dysfunction" to name a few. All of these labels refer to the ability or inability to monitor the individual sounds in words. Can you imagine how important it is to have this ability? If I can't monitor the sounds in a word, how will I know if I'm leaving sounds out or adding some in? How will I know when I've switched sounds, like when I see "best" and say "bets"? I can't know. The problem is originating at the subconcious level where the language is first being perceived. I have no control over the way I perceive those sounds. (Sally Shaywitz at Yale University has written an excellent, in-depth article in Scientific American about the problem.) Is it possible for me to go back and learn how to perceive those sounds correctly? Happily, the answer is "yes." Pat and Charles Lindamood, with their extensive backgrounds in linguistics, psychology, and speech pathology, identified this problem in the '70s and developed the "Auditory Discrimination in Depth" (A.D.D.) program to deal with it. The foundation of the program relies on the idea that since their students' auditory perception was unreliable, a new way of perceiving the sounds had to be used. The Lindamoods chose the most basic of the senses, that of feeling, and began to assist their students to identify sounds by the way the sounds felt rather than how they sounded. Using this basic modality of feeling, the students began to develop a more reliable system for identifying sounds. Through various tracking exercises (having the student use colored blocks to show a chain of nonsense words), decoding (reading individual words) and encoding (spelling words), the students learned how to check their mouths to make sure that each sound they felt matched what they were hearing and matched what they saw on the paper in front of them. Since 1983, we've been applying the A.D.D. program (now referred to as the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing®(LiPS®) Program for Reading, Spelling, and Speech (©Lindamood, Lindamood, 1998) at ETC to achieve the same phenomenal results for our students as the Lindamoods have for theirs. Using the Lindamood® Auditory Conceptualization test (LAC test), we can identify auditory conceptual dysfunction in a student and recommend treatment with the LiPS® program to eliminate that learning disability. When applied correctly, the LiPS®
program can be of tremendous benefit to children and adults, poor
readers and non readers. What does "applied correctly" mean? The best
results are achieved when the program is given one to four hours a
day, five days a week. This intensive treatment allows the student to
develop kinesthetic perception more quickly and thoroughly. At ETC,
we offer this kind of schedule. Also, we work one-to-one so that
students receive the full attention of a well trained, expert
clinician. If you'd like to schedule a diagnostic testing with us or
have more specific questions about the LiPS® program
e-mail
us. We'd love to hear from you.
|
home | reading | math | comprehension | case studies | possible signs
related links | contact us