On today’s podcast we review David A. Kilpatrick’s book Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. If you’ve been looking for a clear but thorough explanation of the science of reading, and how to treat reading problems, look no further!

Show Notes:

Kilpatrick’s website: https://equippedforreadingsuccess.com/shop/

This website links to several helpful videos by Dr. Kilpatrick and others. Scroll down to “Useful Literacy Related Videos.”  https://www.smartspeechtherapy.com/free-literacy-resources-for-parents-and-professionals/

PAST Test https://www.thepasttest.com/ 

Visit the The Speech Umbrella Store to download the Phonological Awareness Tracking Form

Related Podcast Links

Dyslexia Perspectives with Michael, Robin, and Sarah Sullivan 

Tracking Phonological Awareness 

Under the Umbrella of Phonological Awareness

The Book Whisperer part 1

The Book Whisperer part 2

The Developmental Sequence of Phonemic Awareness

Book Links

Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David A. Kilpatrick

The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller 

Impossible R Made Possible online course

Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

Dan: Welcome to The Mindful SLP, the podcast for SLPs looking for a simple tools and optimal outcomes. Your host is Denise, experienced speech therapist specializing in all things pediatric and Dan, business manager for her private clinic.

Welcome. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Here it is the end of November in 2020, and it looks like we have survived another political season. We’re not going to get political today, but we do want to talk about something that often comes up in political races and that is reading based on U S government statistics, nearly one-third of all fourth grade readers read below a basic level. And that number has been static, stable for decades. So clearly we’ve had lots of programs try to attack this, but nothing seems to be moving the marker. Denise, what do we do? Is this a something that we just can’t fix?

Denise: We can so fix it, and what really kills me is the knowledge to fix it has been around for quite a while.

So David A. Kilpatrick wrote a book called Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. And we’re going to review that today and he presents the answers, the history, and maybe some reasons why it hasn’t, um, migrated out to where it needs to be into our public.

Dan: I’m not an SLP nor nor am I in education, but I even know, and I think that the general public knows that there’s been a lot of reading programs, so they’ve come and gone over the years and a lot of books have been written and I’m sure there’s a lot of programs and a lot of lectures a lot, I mean, it’s just a huge industry because we have this problem. What makes this one different from all the rest?

Denise: I had the very same thought when I ordered the book. And a fellow SLP called it life-changing and those are pretty powerful words. So I thought, okay, I’m going to give it a go. After reading it. I really believe he has outlined the answers. He’s very clear in the way he explains his research, very impartial. So I believe it’s solidly based research and here’s a quote from him.

“It has been shown in multiple empirical studies that a large proportion of students at risk for reading difficulties, as well as students with severe reading disabilities, can develop and maintain normalized reading skills when provided with the right kind of intervention.”

Dan: That’s a pretty bold statement.

Denise: It is a really bold statement, but these answers that he talks about, they’re like the best kept secret

Dan: Best-kept secret, that sounds like the Grinch when he said “solve world hunger, tell no one.”

Denise: So that’s exactly what it feels like. I want to read a section to you from Kilpatrick’s book. And I quote, “in the summer of 1999, I presented a two day workshop on reading for 85 teachers. I told those 85 teachers that I could envision that in 20 years we educators would be saying something like, do you remember a few years ago? How we used to have all those reading problems? Now we have so very few.” He wrote this book because the answer has only dribbled out in bits and pieces. Methods are partially implemented and we still have a lot of preventable reading problems. The answers got lost somewhere along the way.

Dan: Give us an outline of how we’re going to approach this book today.

Denise: You have no idea what went into my outlines. This book…

Dan: I knew you’d locked yourself in a room for three days.

Denise: Okay. This book is so good. My first outline was an attempt to explain the whole book because I really geeked out on all the science and all, that didn’t go well. And I finally realized Denise, this is a book review. I want listeners to be so excited about this book that you go out and buy it and read it for yourself and have that great experience of discovery like I did. I pared it down to just the top 10 points and I realized, oh, that’s way too much, so now I’ve heard down to four sections.

Dan: Ooh, this is a good reduction sauce.

Denise: Yeah. So first we’ll go over the history of Response to Intervention, which we commonly called RTI. Second, the science of reading, third, how to intervene, and forth, what an SLP can do.

Dan: Tell me about response to intervention or RTI. I think I’ve heard this term before. Uh, in your Impossible R course, you talk about a client who was in RTI for several months before getting actual speech therapy. What does Kilpatrick say about RTI in reading?

Denise: This was a huge eye-opener for me. Until I read Kilpatrick’s book, I never completely understood the thinking behind RTI, what it was created for and how it was meant to be used. Now, I thought I understood it based on how I saw it implemented when I worked in the schools.

I sense a things got lost in translation moment.

Oh boy, did they ever. The whole idea for response to intervention stems from several federally funded studies that used an orthographic mapping explanation for how we learn to read.

Okay, so don’t get thrown by the term orthographic mapping. We’ll come back to it. But the gist of it is when struggling readers were taught to read using the methods employed in these federal grant initiatives, they showed average improvements of 12 to 25 standard score points that was maintained over several years.

Dan: 12 to 25, that’s a lot.

Denise: I know, that’s huge. There’s almost unheard. Now contrast that with the average improvement of 2 to 5 standard score points, using common intervention practices.

Dan: You think somebody would notice that a 10 X differences, huge. I mean, I’d love 10 X more money.

Denise: Yeah. So as I understand it, the federal government said we’re onto a good thing here. Let’s change the whole reading problem in America by using these methods we know work and let’s call it response to intervention.

Dan: Because every good government program deserves a longer name.

Denise: Yes, for sure. And in the speech therapy world, we deserve our long names too, but RTI was meant to prevent reading problems and also intervene very early at the first sign of a reading problem. And here’s where something got lost: using methods proven to be highly effective, using those very same methods that were used in the studies.

Dan: How was RTI used the schools that you worked in?

Denise: The very first time I heard of it was when our school psychologist said we’re qualifying some children for special education who don’t need it. We need to try different levels of intervention before determining they need special education. That was my introduction to RTI. That’s pretty much how it played out in the schools I worked in. We got better at formalizing and tracking the process. And I was part of team meetings where teachers would say, I’ve tried this and I’ve tried this on they aren’t making progress.

And then we give the teacher some more suggestions of interventions to try. And if that still didn’t seem to move the child along then we’d test them for special education. I never once heard anyone suggest using the actual scientific methods that RTI was created for. I didn’t even know the research.

Dan: Or you just thought it was an idea of hey, let’s try doing this to keep people out of special ed. It wasn’t even really a reading program.

It wasn’t necessarily to keep them out, it was to make sure that they didn’t come in if it wasn’t needed. Right. But you’re right. The focus on reading kind of got lost. Although I must say that almost every child in special education would have a reading problem naturally, but the focus wasn’t on this, uh, using these methods to repair reading.

And here’s another funny thing RTI was created for reading instruction and intervention, backed with very specific and sequence proven methods in the schools I was at RTI was used for everything. So if the child had a behavior problem or difficulty in math, the teacher had to come up with ways to intervene before referring to special education, but can teachers easily access proven intervention methods in these areas?

RTI was designed for reading, but reading and math are different.

Denise: Well, and I’m not saying the intervention before turning to special education is wrong necessarily. I’m saying it was only this very specific reading intervention recipe that was proven to work in RTI.

Dan: You’re saying that none of the teachers knew about the proven research to intervene for reading, let alone the other learning problems.

Denise: That’s exactly it. I felt we were all kind of paddling around in the sea of RTI, which we were told we had to do. And then I sensed it could be a good thing. But there just didn’t seem to be much guidance. And as SLPs, we were doing RTI for children referred for speech sound disorders, even when we knew they were going to end up on our case loads because we believed we needed to jump through the hoops.

So as you mentioned earlier, one of the clients shown in the Impossible R course was an RTI for a long time, just stagnating. Before he got put into actual speech therapy. That’s part of the reason his parents sought private therapy. And now I will say some common sense prevailed when it came to significant speech and language disorders, and we were able to bypass RTI in those cases.

You know, people weren’t deliberately distorting RTI, but somehow the vital information got lost. If it had been implemented as Kilpatrick describes it, we would already be in that future envisioned. We wouldn’t have nearly one third of fourth graders reading below grade level. Because you see schools are doing RTI, compliance is not the problem. It’s lack of knowledge. Yeah. Enough about RTI. now I’ll get off my soap box.

Dan: Okay. Tell us about the science of reading. How does he leave that out?

Denise: This is the heart of the book. It’s hard to do it justice in summary form, but here’s my take. Okay. There are three levels of reading development, learning letter names and sounds, okay. Combining letter sound knowledge with phonological awareness so that you can sound out words. And we’ve talked a lot about phonological awareness.

Dan: Yeah, I knew you were gonna tie that in.

Denise: Oh, this is all about phonological awareness, orthographic mapping. So this is efficiently storing written words for immediate and effortless retrieval.

When was the last time you needed to sound out a word?

Dan: Just yesterday.

Denise: Well, you can do it if you need to.

Dan: Actually, it was the last time I had to do that with when I was preparing for this nisaught(?) orthographic mapping.

Denise: Okay. That’s true. You can do it when you need to, but you probably rarely need to given the percentage of words that you read.

Dan: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s now it’s much less, but when I was a kid, that’s how I learned to do it.

Denise: And so now the words are just there for your brain to retrieve, okay. Keep those three levels in mind, letter sound knowledge, using phonological awareness to sound out words, and storage. Now typically developing readers, build large sight vocabularies with enough reading experience and by large sight vocabularies I mean, they have that instantaneous retrieval, but why don’t poor readers? This is the question we need to understand in order to solve the reading problems. And we know the answer, it has more to do with listening than sight actually. It’s because they lack one or more of the following, letter sound knowledge, proficient phonological awareness, basic and advanced.

Let’s take little time to talk about proficient phonological awareness. You’ve got synthesis, which is putting together words, blending words, and you’ve got analysis, taking words apart. So I could say buh right, makes bright. But if I take the R out, when I have bite. So that’s more analysis kind of breaking the word apart, taking out sounds. Okay. So you need both of those and you need to be really proficient at that.

Dan: And we talked a lot about that in the phonological, uh, episodes before.

Denise: Yes we did. And vocabulary and phonological long-term memory. Now that’s a big long phrase there. So let me break it down a little bit. You can remember familiar words and word endings, and that memory will help activate a familiar sounding pronunciation when you see the unfamiliar printed word.

So if I know the word Frankenstein, because I’ve heard it, we all, you know, Frankenstein’s around a lot, but I don’t know what it looks like cause I haven’t read it on paper than the memory of how it sounds will help me read it because of other experiences I’ve had with like the person named Frank, that I can start seeing how those pieces fit together and become Frankenstein.

Dan: Yes. Yes. He says phonological long-term memory as a speech therapist, I kind of automatically substitute auditory memory. Really, really important to remember words, you remember how they sound, remember how words go together. So you’re building that bank, and so very quickly that word Frankenstein will become a part of your sight vocabulary and reading it will become automatic, just like I bet orthographic is automatic for you now. Right? So it’s like when you begin to type a website in your browser that you go to all the time.

Type ahead.

Denise: Yeah, let’s explain that.

Dan: Type FA and it comes up with Facebook, you type far, and it comes up with Far Side. Cause it just, it starts looking at my patterns and says, I think you’re going here, and so it suggests that, you know, your brain is doing the same thing as it’s reading a word.

Denise: And with this kind of learning happening, many children just take off and teach themselves to read.

Dan: I did that.

Denise: Yeah. You and I both experienced that. And that’s for a typically developing reader, that’s very common. They get enough of this. They already have these pre-existing skills and they just take off and you’re not really teaching them to read anymore.

Dan: But if I’m not good at manipulating the sounds and words, remembering how words are supposed to sound, I’ll have trouble billing those instantaneous sight word banks. And that’s the thing that makes reading easy.

Denise: That’s exactly it, and this made so much sense to me as we were talking to Sullivan now, our very last podcast, if you didn’t catch, it was with Michael and Robin and Sarah Sullivan. Tell us a little bit about Sullivan, Dan.

Dan: Michael J. Sullivan is a best-selling author, but he started writing for fun, because he was trying to help his daughter who is dyslexic and she just wasn’t enjoying reading and so she wouldn’t read. And so he was trying to write something that she would actually enjoy reading because they felt that reading would help her with her dyslexia.

Denise: Yes, so we got to talk to Michael and his wife, Robin and his daughter, Sarah, who Michael and Robin saw our list of questions and how many questions we had about dyslexia, they said, Sarah, come join us in this podcast. So Sarah was very gracious and she was very open about her dyslexia. I really appreciate it. She said some things that just went bing in my mind, because I just read Kilpatrick’s book. This is so much what he’s talking about. One of the things Sarah said is I can’t spell the word rinse. That is just a nothing word to me. I think there’s an R in it, and maybe there’s an N, that’s what she said. Yeah. That’s an issue with phonological awareness. She’s not hearing those separate sounds. And Robin also said, okay, Sarah makes up her own words for some things. And that’s just her word for it forever.

Dan: Yeah. She had made up a word for a bird and now she calls that bird, that word, but nobody else understands that word and they have to keep reminding her because they’re all birdwatchers that no one else knows what she’s talking about. And she’s got scientists off looking for this bird that doesn’t exist.

Denise: Yeah, that’s what we were joking about. But she does that because she doesn’t have this phonological awareness and that doesn’t refer with creating that instantaneous vocabulary. Now I do have to say that because of Sarah’s parents’ efforts because of her own efforts and because of so much authentic reading that she did, she has become what she called an avid reader.

Dan: Right. And that makes a big difference because now she’s picking these things up. And she said that once she started reading her dyslexia was not nearly as much of a problem for her.

Denise: Yeah. It was a huge problem in the earlier years and not so much now, but she still has a few of these issues lingering because of this recipe that we’re going to talk about for intervention. She got a bunch and a bunch of authentic reading. I have a feeling she may have got some of the phonics, but maybe not the phonological awareness.

Dan: Let’s talk about the recipe then. What is the recipe for intervention?

Denise: Well, first you assess. So in order to intervene, well, you always need to assess. I’m not going to go into, into great detail here because he does it so fantastically in the book, I do want to mention a couple of things though. So in his book he describes which tests are good for assessing which areas, how reliable they are, how to interpret subtests. You can pull out different subtests.

See, he uses these tests in a way to just plan intervention. And we often use tests to qualify someone for special education, and he’s like, ah, qualify them if they need to. I’m using this sub test to see what it’s going to tell me about how I need to help them. So I love that cause he goes through those different subtests and he has created his own assessment called the PAST that you can download for free.

It’s really good for teasing out phonological awareness problems in older students. I’ve already used it and I’m discovering some subtle deficits in some of my clients who seem to be stuck. They just weren’t progressing well.

Dan: How’s the PAST different from the phonological tracking form that you talked about a couple episodes back?

Denise: That is a great question. There is some overlap, but mine starts at a much younger skill level with prereading listening skills. Uh, most people probably wouldn’t even group that with phonological awareness, but it’s a precursor and almost no one includes tracking that, which is why I put on my form. It roughly goes through what you would expect a typically developing first grader to know. And so also my form is not an assessment per se, but it rather suggest activities for advancing through different levels of phonological awareness.

Dan: Really just keeping track and making sure that they’re getting all the necessary pieces, not necessarily assessing whether or not…

Denise: Yeah. And it’s just, um, making sure that you take them to mastery, that’s why it’s on there. The PAST begins with syllable manipulation and goes through to the most advanced phonological awareness skills, which continue to develop through third and fourth grade. And he also has a timing element, which is so valuable for knowing if a client has that skill automatically.

So a lot of tests do not have the timing element and to be really, really good, to become skilled at least have that instantaneous piece. As far as where the PAST begins with syllable manipulation, see, a lot of my clients cannot do that yet. I couldn’t start with the PAST I have to start with my own form. I have a fourth grader who I could not give the PAST to yet because he’s just, well, he’s apraxic and he has autism, and it took him a long time even to learn how to speak. So he’s just now starting to put that all together and we’re on my tracking form for a while yet.

Dan: Well, you can hear more about that tracking form in the previous episode. That was episode number 11. Yes. Yeah. So that was an episode number 11. And you can find that on our website, SLP proadvisor.com, or you can find that on your favorite podcast site. That, uh, assessment is available for free on our website. If you go to SLP pro-advisor dot com slash free, you can download that tracking form for free.

Denise: I want to say one more thing about the phonological awareness here, which is very important. And David Kilpatrick talks about it. Analysis is more beneficial than synthesis. So the being able to break words apart is much more beneficial. Synthesis is the easier skill and a lot of tests and assessments miss the kids who have these subtle deficits, because they only look at the synthesis. And by the way, my tracking form leans heavily towards the analysis tasks. Got a lot of those.

Okay. And also it’s very important that these kids learn to manipulate sounds without visual support. Now you may start with visual support, but you’ve got to get them independent of it. It’s a crutch and they won’t get where they need to be if they have to have that visual support, got to be able to have those sounds in their mind.

Dan: So let’s get back to the recipe. What’s our next ingredient.

Denise: It’s teaching phonics.

Dan: How is phonics different from phonological awareness?

Denise: You can do phonological awareness with your eyes closed, but not phonics. Because phonological awareness is all about the sound, right? Uh, phonics begins with learning letter sounds and names, so you’ve got to see the letters right, and progresses through learning spelling patterns, such as E D I N G endings. How we have a ph for F and so forth. Now phonics does need to be taught. Absolutely, but never at the expense of phonological awareness. And that’s what happens in some common reading programs.

Dan: And our third ingredient?

Denise: Lots of authentic reading.

Dan: Lots of reading. We’ve talked about that before, as well, back in the two-part podcast on The Book Whisperer.

Denise: Yes. And in case you haven’t heard that Donalyn Miller, who wrote The Book Whisperer, has impressive results from implementing authentic reading in her classroom. And that has been replicated by other teachers, including Ramona Dawn, who we interviewed for our podcast. So imagine how the landscape of reading could change. If we consistently implemented all three strategies across classrooms in America.

Dan: Well that’s what Sarah Sullivan told us, once she became that avid reader by just reading.

Denise: Yeah, she just immersed herself in reading and it had a huge effect, right?

Dan: She found a book that she enjoyed then as she went to the next one and the next one, the next one, eventually she became an avid reader, even reading the books that normally she would never have started with because they were just way too difficult for her. It’s almost like these last few episodes of our podcasts, they’re all this one big universal truth because it’s all tied together.

Denise: They just all tied together. It’s phonological awareness and reading.

Dan: Well does Kilpatrick recommend any programs that have all three components?

Denise: He does more than that. He reviews several programs and sorts them into three categories, minimally effective, moderately effective, and highly effective. And he bases that judgment, how he sorts the programs on standard scores, so I think it’s impartial judgment. Now, you know, I’m generally a you get what you pay for kind of gal, which is I often opt for more expensive options because it’s higher quality. I mean, just think of our furniture, right. But that doesn’t hold true necessarily for reading programs.

Dan: Oh really? So maybe we can get some cheaper furniture.

Denise: We all know we’re not going there, but for instance, there are two big name programs that are sort of revered in the special ed world. One of them is called Orton-Gillingham and the other is called Wilson. They’re expensive in both time and money and require specialized training. And I know Wilson requires different levels of certification at considerable cost, but they don’t have all the ingredients. While they are strong in phonics, they lack phonological awareness. And so I just looked up the price for an Orton-Gillingham training last night and it was over $1,200.

Wow. So contrast that with under $500 for a complete LPSPs, that’s short for Lindamood phoneme sequencing program, which has all the elements, which that was under the category of highly effective.

Dan: Interesting. So you’re saying that we could cut our cost by over half.

Denise: Yeah. And I don’t need to go to specialized training, I can read the manual. See it isn’t rocket science after all, you just need the right ingredients and the right sequence. And another drawback to Orton-Gillingham and Wilson is that they fail the KISS test. Yeah, the Keep It Simple, Sweetie. Or you can say, Keep It Simple, Stupid, if you want to.

Dan: I like to keep it simple, sweetie.

Denise: Yeah. So these two programs involve teaching elaborate phonics rules. So students learn the six syllable types of written English. Can you name the six syllable types by the way? No? But you’re a proficient reader.

Dan: Oh, so am I supposed to be able to?

Denise: Then they teach the exceptions to each of the syllable types. Cause you know, English is all full of exceptions. That gets really complex for someone with a learning disability and most skilled readers can’t do that.

They can’t list all the syllable types plus the exceptions. So we have to ask ourselves, it’s just what they really need to focus on?

Dan: Well, I will say no, because I lived in Japan for a few years and I was trying to teach English to Japanese people. They kept saying, why is this an exception or how is this not just, we get lost and start rolling my eyes and say never mind us, just speak Japanese.

Denise: Yeah. So our company motto is simple tools, optimal outcomes. And I’m wary of overly complex approaches. By the way, I found it interesting that the programs that were most familiar to me, just from a name recognition standpoint, fell into the least effective group. So when you read the book, you’ll see all of those programs that he listed as being very effective.

And some of the researchers created their own programs, just using the elements that they knew were effective. In fact, Dr. Kilpatrick created his own program. It’s called Equipped for Reading Success. He describes it as a complete phonemic awareness training program, and that is about $50 and he doesn’t talk about it in the book, I think that’s perhaps because he hadn’t written it yet when he wrote the book, but that is another option for you to consider. So you don’t have to spend tons of money.

Dan: Just read a book. All right, let’s wrap it up. What can our SLP friends do?

Denise: Well, first of all, we do phonological awareness all day long, even with articulation therapy, even if we’re not doing language, but also most of us are involved with our clients reading to a greater or lesser degree, we’re right in there with the classroom and the special education teachers.

So we can educate, we can counter misconceptions. We can give the book to our principal. Um, some of the misconceptions we can counter is that phonological awareness isn’t for older students. In fact, it is essential for older students. I mean, Kilpatrick has even worked with adults who, when he gave him his PAST assessment, they showed deficits in phonological awareness and they were able to improve after he got there through this phonological awareness, which by the way, it can be learned in a short amount of time.

Dan: Interesting.

Denise: And another misconception is there will always be a bell curve. What good is it to fight the bell curve? Why do we say that everyone can be a reader? So Kilpatrick’s answer to that is there will always be a bottom third statistically, right? Being on the bottom third of reading doesn’t mean you’re functional. In contrast, the bottom third of NBA players are still excellent players.

Dan: They’re just raising the curve.

Denise: So we can shift the bottom third to competence. I mean, there will always be the bell curve, but with the right strategies…

Dan: There’s nothing wrong with shifting the curve all the way to the right.

Denise: Yeah. Why leave so many readers behind in the below functional level when it’s not necessary? Oh, and also here’s another thing, another misconception you can help correct. Some important changes can happen quickly. I’m going to share a quick story with you. So I’m working with a preschooler. He’s not doing the kind of phonological awareness that is reading yet, but he’s doing the pre, the early listening skills I’m talking about.

And he used to be apraxic, he’s largely overcome the effects of apraxia. He has a few motor things to work on. But he’s running his words together. And when he tells you a story, sounds just drop out, it’s just, it’s a mess. But in, if you were to tell me one sentence, I would totally understand what he’s saying. So you see this, not a speech sound disorder anymore. It’s how he’s perceiving the sounds. It’s a phonological awareness problem. And so when his mother told another speech therapist that he had been going to, that she was switching, that speech therapist said, well, it’s just going to take him years to overcome the effects of apraxia.. You know, it’s like, why are you switching? And she asked me, you know, is it possible for him to progress quickly? I mean, oh yes, so possible. I mean, he’s a unique case. Usually you don’t see this kind of quick recovery from apraxia that he has, but he is almost totally recovered from the motor aspects of it and he’s just got little phonological awareness things he needs to work on. It’s totally possible, so there’s a misconception that it’s going to take years to overcome some of these things and that’s just not true. Now, imagine if you were able to prescribe a dose that would cure something, just like your doctor says, take this prescription for two weeks and you’ll be better, right? Isn’t that great? Well, we can’t usually do that in our world, but studies have found that after 12 hours of instruction in phonological awareness, students tended to reach the ceiling on phonological awareness. So they were as good as they were going to get, and they started being able to do the orthographic mapping.

Dan: Wow. twelve hours.

Denise: So it’s like a, almost like a prescription.

Dan: And we can’t find time to do this in schools?

Denise: It’s just, just, they don’t know. Um, and now just a caveat, it may take longer if there was a language disorder, but the change still can happen. But for most students. Yeah. Study after study showed 12 hours, bingo.

Dan: Once they catch it, they take off? Wow. Interesting.

Denise: I know the R T I team I was on would have been receptive to this information if I’d had it. I know my principals would have been receptive. They would’ve let me present it to them. They would have, let me present it to the faculty. I mean, they want to help.

Dan: Well, that’s the whole reason we’re all educators.

Denise: Yeah. Um, I, I don’t think most people are shooting down, oh, I don’t believe that will work. I just think they don’t know. Here’s why I want to read another quote from Kilpatrick’s book. “One of the most significant discoveries about reading is absent from nearly every presentation of reading research to those outside the research community. This is the discovery and empirical validation of orthographic mapping, which is the process students use to turn familiar written words into instantly accessible sight words.”

Dan: I can see why there’s that disconnect. You get those big, long words in there and long sentences and people will get lost in translation.

Denise: I can barely read that, but anyway, um, that is that there’s the gap. There’s the gap between what the researchers know about how to correct it and what the educators don’t know.

Dan: Well, that’s really the problem. And that’s why you called this Something’s Getting Lost in Translation. The researchers have all these discrete information, but somehow we’re not getting it to the people who were actually applying it in a way that they get it and can actually use it.

Denise: Yes, that’s exactly why I’m doing this podcast. Let’s get the word out. We can change the reading landscape.

Dan: Wo what’s the takeaway?

Denise: Early explicit and systematic instruction and phonics along with direct instruction in phonological awareness prevents and remediates reading difficulties. If we teach reading correctly from the beginning and intervene correctly, most students won’t have a reading problem. Then we can focus all our energy on the few that need more intensive help and SLPs that usually land in our camp because of the language disorder in the speech sound disorders, it would really help change the reading lands.

Dan: Tell us one more time. What’s the book?

Denise: The book is Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David A. Kilpatrick. He has some other books out there now, he’s got a website I’ll link to I’ll link you to the PAST assessment that he has. And also I found a couple of videos of him teaching a conference that you can just access for free. So there’s a lot of good stuff out there that he has provided.

Dan: Links to the books and to his other materials, especially his videos will be in the show notes, which you can get at SLP proadvisor.com/blog/14.

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Talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to The Mindful SLP. We hope you found some simple tools that will have optimal outcomes in your practice. This podcast is sponsored by SLP ProAdvisor. Visit SLP pro-advisor dot com for more tools, including Impossible R Made Possible, Denise’s highly effective course for treating those troublesome Rs. A link is in the show notes. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a five-star rating and tell your fellow SLPs. And please let us know what you think. Join the conversation at SLP pro-advisor dot com.