The definitions and assumptions of the two complementary approaches to reading which were mentioned earlier in this chapter, guided me in the creation of the research combined reading intervention programme of English as a foreign language to 'dyslexic students' in Israel whose L1 is Hebrew.
Some reading theories mentioned above support the view of teaching reading through a bottom-up approach, that is, teaching grapheme- phoneme correspondence (Gough, 1972, 1985; Carmine, 1977; Broughton
et al
, 1978; Stanovich, 1988; Hohn and Ehri, 1983; Tunmer and Bowey, 1984; Frith, 1985; Goswami, 1991; Ehri, 1992; Ganschowet al
, 1998; Robertson, 2000). The bottom-up approach to reading is utilised in traditional phonics programmes, where the child is taught to make connections between symbols and sounds (grapheme-phoneme correspondences). The child is encouraged to blend these into a word (e.g. the child is taught the sound of the letters c-a-t which together form the word 'cat'). With experience, children learn to decode more complex grapheme-phoneme correspondences on their own.An example of a traditional bottom-up programme for teaching reading to 'dyslexic students' is the Orton-Gillingham approach. Mercer and Mercer (1987) explain that this approach is an alphabetic synthetic multisensory phonetic approach developed for students who have dyslexia. It concentrates on fusing smaller units (letters, sounds, and syllables) into more complex wholes (words). Similar to the Orton-Gillingham approach, is Walton's (1998) phonics method. The phonics method of teaching is also based on the sounds of the letters (which are different from their
75
names), the teaching of which enables a child to build words by putting together the sounds of the individual letters or letter combinations.
Other scholars claim that phonological awareness can be improved with the help of the top-down approach – whole-word instruction (Kolers, 1966; Broughton
et al
, 1978; Frith, 1985; Manis and Morrison, 1985; Tunmer and Rohl, 1991; Ehri, 1992; Smith, 1994;). In methods which utilise the top-down approach, children are introduced to a word, learn to recognise it by sight, and slowly expand their reading vocabulary. Children using this approach are expected to pick up the rules of decoding grapheme-phoneme correspondences on their own, and be able to apply them to new unfamiliar words (e.g. the words 'car', 'tar', and 'far' are taught, and the child is expected to read 'bar' independently). P.A.T. (Phonological Awareness Training) Syllables designed by Jo Wilson (1996) is one example of a programme designed according to the top-down approach to reading. Wilson bases the method on research performed by Goswami (1990) and Treiman (1991) that suggests that children's development of phonological awareness follows 'a rather different pattern to that outlined in traditional phonics programs' (Wilson, 1996: 1).The effectiveness of the two different approaches to reading, the top- down and the bottom-up, is not questioned in this research. However, when teaching the reading of English as an FL to dyslexic Hebrew speakers in Israel, there are many students who do not achieve fluency and accuracy through the use of one of these approaches only. This claim is with accordance to Lovett
et al'
s (1990) finding after training children with severe reading disabilities in word recognition skills by using two different methods. One group was taught by whole-word methods (top- down), another was taught letter-sound correspondences (bottom-up). They found that neither group of children generalised what they had learned to uninstructed reading vocabulary. Thus, even the children who76
received letter-sound training appeared to have acquired specific lexical knowledge rather than sub-lexical, letter-sound knowledge, which could then be used to decode unfamiliar words. This finding was reinforced by a subsequent study conducted by Lovett
et al
(1994).Lovett
et al'
s (1990, 1994) findings and the fact that many of my private students, in the course of my years of practice, have been exposed to both the top-down and the bottom-up approaches to reading English as an FL, in different contexts and at different times, but still were unable to reach fluency and accuracy in their reading in English, led to my believe that a combined method of the two approaches might be more effective in enhancing phonological awareness and improving reading skills rather than either approach on its own. This is supported by a number of scholars who have found that the combination of the top-down and bottom-up approaches to teaching reading to students at risk due to a learning disability is effective (Stanovich, 1980; Frith, 1985; Eskey, 1988; Goswami, 1991).2.11.1 Effectiveness of a Combined Approach to Reading
in English-FL for Dyslexic Hebrew Speakers in
Israel
Rumelhart (1997) claims that for reading to be effective not only in the first language, but also in the foreign language, both top-down and bottom-up reading strategies are required and must operate interactively.
Both Rumelhart (1997) and Ganschow
et al
(1998) believe that the same methods used for improving reading disabilities in the first language, can be applied in the foreign language as well. While Ganschowet al
(1998) believe that a bottom-up approach to reading should be used, Rumelhart (1997) recommends the use of a combination of the bottom-up and the top-down approaches to reading.77
Although some studies have reported significant gains after bottom-up approaches and phoneme-based training (Bradley and Bryant, 1985; Alexander
et al
, 1991), others have found that a sizeable number of students with reading disabilities benefit only minimally from such training (Torgesen and Davis, 1996). It may be that some learning disabled students respond better to alternative strategies that use larger phonological units (words), that reduce the memory demands involved when readers must sequentially blend together sounds to pronounce unfamiliar words (Goswami and Bryant, 1990; Snowling, 1996).In addition, a number of scholars have concluded that children at risk for reading failure because of learning disabilities have difficulty understanding and applying the 'alphabet principle'; i.e. grapheme- phoneme correspondence (Adams, 1990; Stanovich and Siegel, 1994; Wagner, Torgesen and Rashotte, 1994), which in turn, enables a child to develop word recognition, reading fluency and reading comprehension skills.
Based on these assumptions and Rumelhart's (1997) recommendation that both top-down and bottom-up approaches to the teaching of reading in L2 and FL be used, the purpose of my research is to estimate the effects of an intervention reading programme in English as a foreign language for native dyslexic Hebrew speakers in Israel, which is based on the combination of the top-down and the bottom-up approaches to reading, has on these 'dyslexic students'.
The bottom-up approach (grapheme-phoneme correspondences) in the research intervention aims to increase the phonological awareness of the student through reading activities directed at the level of phonemes. The top-down approach aims to increase the phonological awareness of the student through reading activities on the level of whole words. In whole-
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word instruction, the student is taught to identify words as whole units rather than as a sequence of phonemes.
The goal of a combined reading intervention is to help the 'dyslexic students' acquire a deeper awareness of the sounds of speech and an improved understanding of the connection between the sounds of speech and the letters of the alphabet (the bottom-up approach) or the sounds of whole words and frequent spelling patterns (the top-down approach).