Second Chances

Abstract

The case of a 29-year-old university student is used to discuss impairments in decoding skills in older students. Factors are reviewed that contribute to decoding unfamiliar words, such as phonological awareness skills, quality of visual orthographic images, type of decoding strategy used, and morphological awareness skills. The assessment and intervention procedures used with this student highlight the application of current literature when developing assessment and intervention programs for students from middle school and high school to the university level. Additionally, the need is emphasized to recognize and work with the special emotional needs of older students with reading impairments.

A linguistic awareness intervention targeting spelling and written expression in a 10-year-old dyslexic child

“…The intervention overall aimed to support the following skills: Phonological ability (PA) was targeted by using Hatcher's (1999) Sound Linkage programme. We included segmentation ('talking like a robot' activities), blending (The turtle talk, by Tse and Nicholson (2014)-or continuous voicing by Apel and Swank (1999), e.g., /ccaaattt/ instead of /c/, /a/, /t/, he used these activities during both reading and spelling), deletion (search for the little words in big words 'mat->at', which can help in observing the constituent parts of the word (Apel & Masterson, 2001), substitution, transposition and spoonerism activities. For the last three sessions, we used the phonics programme from the computerised Nessy.com programme (Carbol, 2015).…”

The Development of the Decoding Skills Scale in Information and Communication Technologies and an Investigation of Preservice Teachers in This Framework

“…• decoding in reading a written text (e.g., Algozzine, Mcquiston, O'shea, & McCollin, 2008;Apel & Swank, 1999;Kirby, 2018;Parrila et al, 2023;Pritchard, Coltheart, Marinus, & Castles, 2016;Swank & Catts, 1994), • decoding in communication (verbal and non-verbal) and human relations (Burgoon & Bacue, 2003;Carton et al, 1999;Lee et al, 1980;Shannon, 1948;Swank & Catts, 1994), • neural decoding in neural activities (e.g., Shi, 2010) • decoding in humor orientation (e.g., Merolla, 2006) • decoding in music perception (e.g., Corcoran, Stupacher & Vuust, 2022) However, it is also seen that the expression of decoding differs in each study and is included in more than one discipline. Since this situation will prevent the understanding and generalizability of the concept of decoding, decoding processes in different disciplines need to be specificized.…”

Syllabic Versus Morphemic Analyses: Teaching Multisyllabic Word Reading to Older Struggling Readers

“…As readers transition from lower to higher grades, they are exposed to more complex words, which require an ability to break such words into their base words and their inflected or derived forms (i.e., prefixes, suffixes) and elicit meanings of the base words to read the target words, which otherwise cannot be read through pronunciation (Apel & Swank, 1999;Carlisle & Stone, 2005;Goodwin et al, 2013;Tighe & Binder, 2015). Although morphemic analysis, as exemplified in Table 2, can facilitate automatic and rapid reading of complex words (Dawson, Rastle, & Ricketts, 2018) because of development of links among spellings, pronunciations, and meanings (Carlisle, 1988;Goodwin et al, 2013), older struggling readers, compared with proficient readers, often do not have the necessary morphological awareness (Siegel, 2008) and often cannot identify base words and affixes in unfamiliar words to read them accurately and fluently (Apel & Swank, 1999).…”

“…COMMENTARY connections (i.e., graphemes, phonemes; Apel & Swank, 1999;Fracasso, Bangs, & Binder, 2016).…”

“…Compared with monosyllabic, bisyllabic, and trisyllabic words, older struggling readers often have a hard time reading multisyllabic words because many of them are formed due to attachment of prefixes or suffixes to a base morpheme (Henry, 2017;Nagy & Townsend, 2012;Tighe & Binder, 2015) and because of older struggling readers' weak morphological awareness (Apel & Swank, 1999;Siegel, 2008), which is their "ability to reflect on, analyze and manipulate the morphemic elements in words" (Carlisle, 2010, p. 466). Therefore, explicit instruction in syllabic and morphemic analyses should be considered to advance older struggling readers' accurate and automatic reading of multisyllabic words, which include syllables and morphemes (Bhattacharya & Ehri, 2004;Bowers et al, 2010).…”