Teenagers with poor phonetical awareness

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kevvy
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Nov 12, 2011 12:50 am

Teenagers with poor phonetical awareness

Post by kevvy »

Hi, I am trying to get some advice about my 17 year old son's learning difficulities. He has undergone a series of tests which indicate that he tracks as average or above average in a number of areas but that his phonological awareness is at year 4 level along with some differences between his working memory and processing speeds. It has been suggested we see a speech pathologist but have been informed that this may not be much help as most childrens phonological processing changes at the year 4 level. We are aware that our son has some learning difficluties but no one seems to know what to do. My question is, are there any programs that can assist people of my son's age to improve in the area of phonological awareness and whether anyone has a similar story? Thank. Kevin.

By the way we live in Australia.
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debbie
Posts: 2596
Joined: Mon Oct 08, 2007 2:28 pm
Location: UK

Post by debbie »

Hi Kevin - welcome to the PI message forum.

Has your son ever been taught systematic phonics?

This means, has he been explicitly taught the letter/s-sound correspondences of the alphabetic code and the three core skills of blending all-through-the-word for reading, and orally segmenting (splitting up) whole words for spelling - and does he know about the concept of 'spellling alternatives'? Has he been taught handwriting as part of phonics teaching?

If not, it could well be that your son is one of those people who has not been able to deduce the alphabetic code well enough for himself - along with many, many other students who have not been taught the English alphabetic code explicitly.

Then, commonly, any difficulties that young people have are explained away by 'in child' difficulties and rarely 'teaching failures' or flaws in the approach to teaching reading and spelling.

Of course there are people with particular processing difficulties - but once again - are they 'within child' or as a consequence of the kind of teaching which has dominated the childhood education?

Have you tried to find out if your son knows the 'alphabetic code' well enough?

There are some free assessments on the 'free resources' page which you might like to investigate.

Or you could simply use an alphabetic code chart to see how many of the letter/s-sound correspondences your son seems familiar with.

How well does he 'blend' for reading and 'segment' for spelling?

Sometimes, students get by with their reading through painstakingly remembering as many words as they can - but they cannot decode new and challenging words - especially when these words are in more challenging literature.

Perhaps you can describe more of your son's reading profile, and you are welcome to email me privately if you prefer at:

debbie@phonicsinternational.com

Kindest regards,

Debbie
Debbie Hepplewhite
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