Sounds Don't Make Words for Me

Description of Learner:
Susan is a 44-year old woman, born in the U.S. The first day she came to our learning center, she told me she had diagnosed learning disabilities. Susan is on general relief, and has repeatedly been unsuccessful at obtaining Supplemental Security Income (SSI), despite official diagnoses of learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression (at one time), and physical problems. During the past 26 years, the longest she has held a job is five years; she has been fired from each one because, in her words, "My disabilities get in the way." The basic reading and writing skills she wants to work on are those needed to get and keep a job. She is highly motivated, expresses herself well orally, and is friendly and out-going. She has a great sense of humor and speaks up to voice her opinions.

Challenge Faced:
Susan reads at a 5.8 grade level as measured by the TABE (Tests of Adult Basic Education: CTB/McGraw-Hill). She gets easily frustrated when she reads lists of words, because she usually is unable to decode them correctly. Her only strategy for deciphering unknown words is to sound them out, which is rarely successful. Susan appears to have greater success when tackling new words within a context. She uses phonics to help her spell words - and it hardly ever works; for example she spells "deficit" "desft". She also reverses letters; mistakes which she is sometimes able to correct without prompting. Interestingly, she points out most of her mistakes to me. At one of her first classes, I asked her for a writing sample. She wrote about her pregnant daughter, spelling it, "dotr". She writes much like a second or third grader, and, according to her, this is the reason she has repeatedly been fired from her job.

What We Did:
Susan is working on a career assessment survey to determine where her occupational interests lie. Her motivation is to get and keep a job. I tried a few strategies to help her write the word "daughter" (because it is an important word to her) - and to remember how to write it. I told her these were all "experiments" - that I did not know what was going to work. It was important that she tell me what worked best for her. The word 'daughter' is phonically irregular; one will have limited success when attempting to sound it out, so it was an interesting place to start for our first "experiment." I first asked her to take pictures of the parts of the word, relying on her good visual memory --she is adept at crafts, and was a hair stylist. I asked her to split the word into chunks of any kind, and "take pictures" of the chunks. I explained that she can do this with important words, if it works for her. After that, I asked her to read the word aloud over and over as she looked at it. Then, she asked, "Can I write it a few times, too?" After three months, I asked her which strategy worked best; she decided that they ALL worked together, and she could actually spell daughter correctly.

Analysis:
The career assessment survey works well for Susan, because she likes finding new and self-affirming information. Even though most of the survey is composed of word lists, the words tend to speak to her interests and talents making them highly relevant. She especially likes reading and writing words related to jobs she wants and believes she can manage. Susan and I are still exploring strategies that will be highly effective for her, and I continue to introduce phonics patterns as they relate to words of interest to her. I then find other words with those patterns to help cement the pattern in her memory (i.e., taught, caught). I believe she is making solid progress in both reading and spelling even though she is uncertain about a specific career path and is reticent about returning to the world of work.

What I Learned:
Splitting the word into chunks (not syllables, but chunks manageable by the learner's memory) moves her away from using phonics - which she is not very successful implementing - as the only way to remember how to spell a word. She has good visual memory, so she remembers what the word "looks like" as she takes mental snapshots of different parts of the word. This gives me new meaning for the term "sight word."

Susan, Group Discussion

Did Susan mind being part of this "experiment?"
No - quite to the contrary. The first day Susan came to our learning center, she said "I am LD and I need help." I explained to her that I knew a little about learning disabilities but was by no means an expert. I asked her if she would mind if we tried some things out until we found something that worked for her. I told her that I would be learning along with her. She was excited about the idea of "experimenting" and of giving me feedback. We laughed about both of us being students in this process. I think what she was totally against was to be fit into some kind of mold which, according to her, had hurt her in school. Susan is very good at self-advocating, and has very solid ideas about what does and does not work for her.

What do you mean by "taking mental pictures" of chunks of the word, and what is Susan doing when you ask her to do this?
In words such as "daughter," the written form does not correspond well to the spoken form. Unfortunately, English has a lot of words like this, which are challenging for Susan. She seems to know basic sound-letter correspondences, but when she tries to spell words using her knowledge of basic phonics, she runs into problems like "dotr" for "daughter." With a diagnosed reading disability Susan needs to find some accommodations that help her function with her reading. If she can make symbols called letters into some kind of picture that is unrelated to the sounds, she can turn a word that is hard for her to spell or recognize into one that she recognizes on sight, without trying to sound it out. What she is doing when she takes these pictures of words or of parts of them is memorizing how the word looks, not what each letter is. She can split the word into smaller chunks to take those pictures, so the task is not overwhelming.

What is the relationship between learning to spell and writing the words?
Susan's skill with crafts suggests to me that she is both a visual learner and a hands-on learner. Being a visual learner, she probably has a very good visual memory, so "taking pictures" of words works as a way to remember not only how to spell those words, but also to recognize them when she comes across them in print. Being a hands-on learner makes her adept at manipulating things (learning by doing), and it may be a stretch to say this, but when she can split those words up any way she wants, she is manipulating them to suit how she can best process them.

Summary:

Director's Comments:

The fact that Susan attempted to use phonics on a consistent basis and that she was well-grounded in some of the basics, suggests that she could use phonics successfully. Her correct application of simple phonics patterns (do for dau and tr for ter) supports the assumption that she is capable of using phonics, but that she has limited knowledge of alternative patterns beyond the simple one-to-one letter correspondence. Because 'daughter' contains two silent letters (gh) and two phonics patterns (au; ter) and is dependent upon linguistic visual memory as well as memory of phonics patterns, approaching this word visually is wise, while at the same time beginning to conduct ongoing assessment of her phonics skills. After Susan splits the word into chunks in ways pleasing to her and takes a mental picture of it, (for example: dau ght er), she could read the word aloud and write it while saying the letters followed by saying the sound patterns (d-a-u, dau; silent g-h; t-e-r, ter).

Probably the most important concept shared in this story is your willingness to "experiment" with Susan rather than shying away from her needs, because of her learning disability. Even if adults have a history of learning disabilities, you can explore ways of working together that will be successful. By relaxing, applying a combination of strategies, and analyzing the ongoing results Susan can achieve success. For Susan, combining her knowledge of phonics patterns with her strong visual memory may be the most successful approach.