The same issues would surface if someone read them a text. In every case of this I can recall, the student had a diagnosed learning disability and had received significant intervention on the decoding side their comprehension difficulties resulted from the fact that they had weak vocabularies, understanding of syntax, and general knowledge. When I was tutoring, I had several students who didn’t exactly fall into the “word caller” category, but whose decoding skills significantly outstripped their general language ability. This corresponds to basic observable reality: most skilled adults readers could decode an advanced engineering textbook with relative ease, but few would have the vocabulary or mathematical knowledge to understand what the text actually meant. For all intents and purposes, they would simply be reciting words. To back up for just a second, the Simple View (Gough and Tunmer, 1986) states that Reading Ability = Decoding Ability x Aural Comprehension. This is the generally accepted model of how people are (un)able to make sense out of written texts, and when you think about it, it’s quite logical.Įssentially, a person can be able to decode a text perfectly, but if the language involves vocabulary, syntax, and background knowledge above the level of their aural comprehension, they will not be able to understand it. I’ve heard Richard tell this story a number of times, but it was only very recently that I connected it to the so-called “word caller” phenomenon, in which children decode with apparent ease but are unable to make sense out of what they are reading. Richard put the girl on an intensive diet of vowel sounds, and sure enough, her comprehension began to improve. As a result, she was unable to tell many words apart and thus could not comprehend what she read. Richard tested the girl and discovered that Jean’s diagnosis was in fact correct: the girl could not distinguish between vowel sounds. She turned to Richard and promptly announced, “That little girl can’t hear vowel sounds.” Luckily, though his friend Jean Tucker-a speech-language pathologist, reading specialist, and creator of the Spell of Language program-happened to be visiting that day and overheard the child reading. When he told this to her mother, however, the woman’s response was that her daughter sounded fine but in fact understood almost nothing of what she read. Richard assumed that she’d ace the test with little trouble. She was clearly very bright, and when she was asked to read aloud, she did so quite fluently. One of Richard McManus’s favorite stories about a student involves a young girl who was brought to the Fluency Factory to prepare for a private-school admissions exam.
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