Strategies that are not worth pursuing when a school-aged child struggles with reading
Caroline Erdos, Literacy Expert
Dr. Erdos is a consultant for the Sir Wilfrid Laurier School Board in Quebec and a speech-language pathology advisor for Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology Canada. Prior to this, she was ALDI Coordinator (Advancing Learning in Differentiation & Inclusion) for the 10 English school boards in Quebec, Canada, where she supported resource teachers through various professional development initiatives. Caroline has over 20 years’ experience as a pediatric speech-language pathologist in a tertiary care centre and has worked as a language and literacy consultant and a legal expert in speech-language pathology. Her areas of expertise include bilingualism and multilingualism, reading impairment, oral language impairment, foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and craniofacial disorders. She has guest lectured at Université de Montréal, McGill University, and the McGill University Health Centre. She has also given workshops at numerous conferences across North America and has written and collaborated on several publications.
So far, this blog has addressed several ways of supporting children in their enjoyment of reading and development of reading skills. This post is about popular interventions that you may come across that are not backed up by science. These include:
Vision therapy* – Orthoptic or eye exercises taught at the optometrist’s office and practiced at home. These exercises are meant to fix visual problems observed in some individuals like eye jerks or tracking issues when reading. Such exercises are not supported by research evidence as an effective way to help children who struggle with reading.
Tinted lenses and/or overlays* – Tinted glasses or transparent overlays that are meant to reduce glare. While individuals might differ in their sensitivity to glare or font-to-background colour contrasts, dampening such effects has not been shown to result in reading gains.
Dyslexia font – Specific fonts are said to enhance the reading abilities of individuals with dyslexia. Again, individuals may have their own preferences, however, research evidence does not support the use of a specific font to improve reading ability. You can read more about this here.
Three-cueing method – Involves cueing a struggling reader to 1) use meaning derived from a text or picture, 2) use visual information like letters or parts of words, or 3) use syntax to figure out an unknown word. These strategies run counter to evidence-based ways of supporting a struggling reader, namely strategies that encourage the child to focus on print and sounding out and blending all the parts of the word.
Sight word memorization – Involves rote practice and memorization of words as whole chunks. Studies have demonstrated that sight word memorization is actually a highly inefficient strategy as compared to using a combination of phonemic awareness, letter-sound knowledge and meaning of words to store new words. The latter evidence-based strategy is referred to as orthographic mapping.
Tracing the outline of a word – This involves directing the child’s focus to the contour of a word and having them trace it with their finger or a pencil. Contour tracing is often used as a strategy to strengthen spelling. Like sight word memorization, this strategy is highly inefficient as compared to orthographic mapping.
You may be thinking that these strategies are still worth a try because they do not harm a child. However, time, money and energy spent on an ineffective strategy detract from expending those resources on evidence-based strategies that are more likely to make a significant difference in a child’s life.
*You can access the joint statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus and the American Association of Certified Orthoptists here. Both vision therapy and tinted lenses are addressed in this statement.
