Academic Associates

The Problem

Trouble in America

When the average six-year-old child enters first grade, he or she already knows the meaning of about 26,000 words. They may not use all of those words themselves, but they understand what the words mean when they hear them.

The goal of many first grade reading programs is to teach the students to read between 200 and 600 common words by the end of the school year. Sadly, over half of them can’t even read 100 words by the time they finish first grade.

In fact, many of them never learn to read well at all. In the United States, over half of the adults can’t read material written at the sixth grade level.

How did this come to pass? The answer lies in the fact that John Dewey, the “Father of Progressive Education” and Arthur Gates, an influential educator, changed the way reading was taught in this country. Before these changes were made everyone who attended school learned to read in a very short time. In our large cities, over 90 percent of the adult population could read anything written in our language. Dewey and Gates proposed that our schools abandon the method that had been used to teach reading ever since reading was first invented. As a result, we now have an epidemic of poor reading in this country.

Millions of children and adults are paying a terrible price because of what these men and other educators of their time did. It is imperative in a country as large and diverse as ours that everyone learn to read well. Yet many of our citizens are severely handicapped because they have not been taught to read by the only method that works every time.

Our only hope of putting America back on the right track is to return to teaching reading by the method that has worked for thousands of years. It is called phonics, and if it were properly used in the schools of America today, those six-year-old students would be able to read 35,000 to 40,000 words by the time first grade was over.

Identifying the Problem

In the United States, approximately 40 to 45 percent of school aged children are below grade level in reading.¹ Of the 40 percent who have difficulty with reading, approximately 80 percent are boys.² Male and female brains, while similar in many respects, often function differently when processing the same or similar tasks. This is a result of physiological differences in the neural architecture of the brain over which neither the male nor female has any conscious control. These differences are graphically illustrated by magnetic resonance images taken during various activities.

Brain activation patterns show that males process reading in a relatively small area in the left hemisphere of the brain, while females typically process reading in significantly larger areas of both sides of the brain.³

We also know that females are typically better able to infer, that is, to draw conclusions from intuitive, inferential stimuli or incomplete data, than are males. Males, especially those who have difficulty with reading, do not generally have the ability to draw conclusions from inference or extrapolation. Those in this group require a directed, factual approach in order to arrive at conclusions.

The male in the 40 percent group is generally unable to draw abstract conclusions, and is thus unable to infer that letters are symbols that stand for sounds. He must be taught every possible sound represented by each letter and combination of letters, plus dependable rules that govern the sounds those letters make. Until he learns this, he will have difficulty reading. ⁴

The females in this group process very similarly to the males. They too have difficulty making the necessary inferences. That is why they benefit greatly from a phonological approach that covers the 44 sounds of American English.

For a complete understanding of how our alphabetic system works, the child must have a thorough grasp of this information:

The ability to analyze words into phonemes.
The knowledge that these phonemes occur in all words.
The knowledge of which letter symbol represents which phoneme.
The understanding that there is a consistent relationship between each phoneme and a letter across all positions in a word and across all words (transitivity). The letter b stands for the phoneme /b/ in the word ‘big,’ and also for /b/ in the word ‘bat,’ and also for /b/ in the word ‘tub'.

The Academic Associates Reading Program is designed to address the problem in a simple straightforward manner. Students are given the phonetic skills to master over 90 percent of the million words in the English language.

In Marcia D’Arcangelo’s very recent interview with Sally Shaywitz, professor of pediatrics at the Yale Child Study Center , she posed this predicament:

“Educators are vitally interested in information that can help them teach reading. Many middle school and high school teachers haven’t been taught how to teach reading.”

Dr. Shaywitz’s reply contained, “…This [scientific] evidence supports the fact that reading is part of language. To read, we have to break up spoken words into smaller units, understand that letters represent sounds, have a knowledge base, have a vocabulary, and have the motivation and enjoyment." ⁶

When trained in teaching the Academic Associates™ Reading Program teachers have the skills necessary to teach anyone to learn to read. Elementary teachers know a lot about reading but have never been taught a program that works every time. The Academic Associates^TM Reading Program does for its teachers what no university or teacher’s college can do. In our reading program we build on the first three stages of reading development. ⁷ Our students begin with initial decoding. An understanding of the phonetic structure of the English language is a must if a poor reader is to become a good reader.

We then move into fluency where the decoding becomes both accurate and rapid. This frees up attention for higher-level reading comprehension skills.

Reading for meaning becomes one of understanding the content. It is during this stage that students expand their knowledge base. Students who are reading below grade-level lack significantly in their knowledge base.

After students learn to sound out and pronounce words, they are taught simple, effective techniques for understanding what they read. Reading becomes a logical, uncomplicated process.

By lesson 13, most fourth-graders through adults read and spell college level words, and comprehend material at their own grade level or higher.

This is usually accomplished in 45 to 60 hours. Out of the thousands of students and adults who have been through the Academic Associates Reading Program, every one has learned to read and, typically, progressed 2 to 5 grade levels in their reading ability.

¹This is based on the 1994 NAEP’s reading exam of 4th graders, and Education Week 9/16/98.

²Scientific American, "Dyslexia", by Frank R. Vellutino March 1987 page 39.

³Scientific American, "Dyslexia", by Sally E. Shaywitz A new model of this reading disorder emphasizes defects in the language processing rather than the visual system. It explains how language is processed November 1996.

⁴Ibib.

⁵"Why Our Children Can’t Read", by Diane McGuiness, The Free Press 1997 page 174

⁶Educational Leadership, "Learning About Learning to Read", by Marcia D’Arcangelo, October 1999 pages 26-31.

⁷Journal of Learning Disabilities, "The Effect of Early Reading Failure on Acquisition of Knowledge Among Students with Learning Disabilities", by Vicki Snider & Sara Tarver June/July 1987.