Audiblox and Phonics:
Question and Answer

QUESTION:

I'm just curious about your opinion on teaching children phonics. I've noticed that the “sight word” approach is used in the reading part of the program. What about phonics? Is it necessary?

ANSWER:

Learning is like building a house. The first step is to lay a foundation. Unless there is a strong and solid foundation, cracks will soon appear in the walls, and with no foundations, the walls will collapse. In the same way one needs to lay a proper foundation before it becomes possible for a child to benefit from a course in reading, writing and arithmetic. If this foundation is shaky, learning “cracks” will soon appear. Audiblox lays this foundation. The Audiblox Reading exercise lays an important part of this foundation.

One intention of the Audiblox Reading exercise is to widen the eye-span in order to reduce eye fixations and regressions. When a person reads, his eyes engage in a series of quick movements across the page with intermittent fixation pauses. The more often the eyes have to pause for fixations, the slower the reading speed will be. A person with a reading problem will be inclined to pause more often, and the duration of each fixation will be longer than that of the typical reader. Regressions occur when the eyes move toward the left to look again at words that have already been covered. The person with a reading problem is inclined to have more regressions than the normal reader.

The Audiblox Reading exercise is based on the learning principle of building a “pyramid of repetition.” Click here for more information on this learning principle.

Closely related to the learning principle of “pyramid of repetition,” is the concept of overlearning. In a classical experiment on overlearning (see Psychology: Its Principles and Applications, T. L. Engle and L. Snellgrove, 1974) adults were asked to learn lists consisting of twelve nouns of one syllable each. Without overlearning recall was 20% after 1 day, 5% after 4 days and 2-3% after 28 days. With 100% overlearning recall was just below 50% after one day, more than 30% after 4 days and 25% after 28 days. When doing the Audiblox Reading exercise a child is overlearning these words far more than 100%, in fact he is overlearning them to such an extent that it eventually carries over to his general reading ability. That is why in the case of some children it happens that their reading is on par long before they have even finished the yellow word cards.

The general reason why children have learning problems is because the foundation of learning has not been laid properly. Phonics is not part of the foundation; it is part of the walls of the house. The only foundational skill which phonics strongly addresses is analysis. That is the main reason why one cannot really successfully overcome a learning problem through phonics instruction.

In the book Learning Disabilities: State of the Art and Practice, editor Kenneth Kavale uses meta-analysis to indicate the effectiveness of a number of interventions for LD children. Meta-analysis is based on the effect size statistic, which indicates the magnitude of effect; that is, what influence did a treatment produce? For example, the effect of one year’s instruction in reading, on average, produces an effect size of +1.00, which means a one standard deviation increase on an achievement measure, which, in turn, means a one year increase. An effect size of .50 therefore represents one-half year’s worth of schooling.

Below are the effect sizes of a number of interventions. Between 23 and 180 studies were involved in calculating the effect size of an intervention:

Systematic phonics instruction is no more effective than any of the above. According to the National Reading Panel the effect size of systematic phonics instruction is 0.32 for LD children and 0.15 for low-achievers from 2nd to 6th grade.

Compare this to something like mnemonics. Mnemonics training is basically memory training. Memory is one of the indispensable ingredients of a solid learning foundation. Scruggs and Mastropieri (Learning Disability Quarterly, 1990, vol. 13) synthesized the results of twenty-four experimental investigations of mnemonic instruction in special education settings. They found that the overall effect size of these combined investigations was 1.62 standard deviation units; 1.62 means that the child is catching up!

The problem with using mnemonics is that it is a technique, which should be taught only after the skill of memory has been taught. Also, because it is a memory crutch, generalization attempts have been less successful. It is rather like teaching a person to swim back-stoke before he can swim properly. If he has to save somebody from drowning in the sea he won’t be able to do so.

To answer your question: Phonics instruction is essential. However, it is not covered by Audiblox since it is not part of the learning foundation. We have limited Audiblox to the foundational skills such as eye-span, memory, and many others. Once the foundational skills have been put into place you will find that a child will learn phonics — and many other things which form part of the walls of the house — in no time!