100 EZ Lessons: Part 2 Content

In the last post I talked about one aspect of the content of 100 EZ Lessons, namely, that  out of 300 or so useful sound-spelling correspondences, 100 EZ taught 80.  Another aspect of content is the skills taught.  The primary skill in reading is tracking from left to right, all through the word. While this seems obvious to those of us who read with ease, it is remarkable how many reading programs neglect, mis-teach or under-teach this skill.  Teaching larger components than the sound-spelling correspondence level--such as whole word, word parts, and word families--can interrupt the the smooth tracking from left to right, as it asks the beginning reader to pay attention to parts in the middle or at the end of the word before processing the beginning.  Left to right tracking is a skill, not a birthright.  Students learning Hebrew can have similar problems, only tracking from right to left.   Anything that causes the training of smooth (and by smooth I mean comfortable and accurate, not that the eye movements are continuous, because they're not) tracking from left to right to be inefficient should be avoided.  This is not to say that all children will have problems, I only mean that some children could have problems if they are given interfering instruction.   

My daughter developed what I call an eye stutter.  I had taught her those 300 correspondences and she could work through most words accurately.  However, she would read a sound and go back to the beginning of the word, then add a sound and go back to the beginning.  Often she would pick out the correspondences she recognized first, then fill in the rest.  It would take her an excruciatingly long time to get through a word like "excruciatingly," with its 13 correspondences (e x c r u-/OO/ c-/sh/ i-/ee/ a-/ae/ t i ng l y).  In effect, her eyes would travel back and forth across the word dozens of times before she could say what the word was.  It was tiring and frustrating and she hated reading.   So I went mucking about the internet to find a solution--well, a cheap solution.  And I found it at Debbie Hepplewhite's website, www.syntheticphonics.com.  READ EACH SOUND ONCE ALL THROUGH THE WORD (okay, I added "each sound once" because my daughter would say the sounds over and over and in the process forget everything else she had read).   It took about a week of painful sound by sound reading, but it worked and her fluency and comfort improved dramatically.

So, back to 100 EZ.  The developers created an explicit method for helping the eye track through a word and an easy script for the parent to follow during reading.  When new correspondences and words are introduced they are shown with an arrow below them.  There is a dot on the left and an arrowhead on the right.  Below each unit (I say unit because it doesn't always correspond to a correspondence, for example, when the word 'see' is introduced in Lesson 10, there is a dot under each letter 'e', whereas the correspondence would be 'ee' for the sound /ee/) is a dot or open arrow shape.  As the child reads the parent slides their finger along the line, pausing at each shape then moving on to the next unit.   As correspondences and words are reviewed the shapes underneath are removed and the child is suppose to read the word the "fast way", that is, without pausing after each sound but still left to right.  This is great pedagogy.  The instruction is clear and concise, and leads the child from skill to skill:  Correspondence knowledge to slow left to right tracking to fast left to right tracking.  The arrow lines are used continuously throughout the whole program, only being modified slightly for passage reading.  

What about the words introduced as wholes?  Generally, the program stays on task.  Occasionally, it emphasizes the end of a word such as when the word "has" is introduced the instructor is told to point to the end of the word and say, "This part says az."

In conclusion, left to right tracking is an important area of instruction and 100EZ gets it right.