Teaching Objectives for ReadingDoctor® online
The broad objective of ReadingDoctor® Online is to improve reading skills by teaching students to become better at decoding unfamiliar words when reading.
Research shows that improving decoding ability enables students to be better at teaching themselves new words, leading to improvements in overall reading ability. Reading researchers have discovered that a teaching method called synthetic phonics is the most effective way to teach kids to read and spell.
ReadingDoctor® Online uses a synthetic phonics approach in its teaching methodology. Students progress through an automated systematic synthetic phonics sequence. Additionally, educators can individualise activities and set homework activities to target specific areas.
Click the video below to hear Dr. Bartek Rajkowski, Speech & Language Pathologist and creator of ReadingDoctor® provide a brief overview of the purpose and teaching objectives of ReadingDoctor® Online.
Synthetic phonics is a highly structured, sequential and explicit method of teaching reading that has received the most scientific support of any teaching approach. It teaches beginning and remedial readers how to construct words from the smallest language ‘building blocks’ of letters and letter combinations, and their corresponding speech sounds.
ReadingDoctor® Online uses a synthetic phonics teaching method to help students to understand the relationships between speech sounds and letter patterns, helping them to ‘crack the code’ in written language. To view a video of Dr. Bartek Rajkowski’s recent presentation on the relationship between the sounds of speech and the English spelling system, please CLICK HERE).
In summary, ReadingDoctor® Online focuses on improving the crucial skill areas that have been found through research to be essential in developing reading ability. It has a particular focus on the following important reading sub-skills:
Grapheme/phoneme (letter/sound) correspondences
Letter-sound knowledge is knowledge of the letters or groups of letters which represent the individual speech sounds in language.
Letters and letter patterns that represent speech sounds are called 'graphemes', while the speech sounds of a language are called 'phonemes'. ReadingDoctor® Online teaches students grapheme-phoneme (letter-sound) relationships in a clearly defined, incremental sequence. You can read an in-depth guide to graphemes in Australian English HERE. You can also purchase flashcards with the embedded mnemonics used in ReadingDoctor® Online HERE.
2. Blending
Blending, or the ability to join speech sounds together to make words, is a crucial phonemic awareness skill that helps students to read unfamiliar words.
ReadingDoctor® Online teaches students to apply the highly important skill of blending (joining) phonemes in order, all through a word to read it.
3. Segmentation
Segmentation, or the ability to split words up into their separate speech sounds, is another crucial phonemic awareness skill. Segmentation helps students to develop spelling ability.
ReadingDoctor® Online teaches students to apply the skills of segmenting (splitting) words into their constituent phonemes to spell words.
4. Sight Word Knowledge
Research also suggests that students benefit from being taught to recognise the most common words in English instantly, especially those with irregular spellings such as 'who' and 'said'.
ReadingDoctor® Online explicitly teaches students to recognise highly frequent, and especially phonically irregular sight words.
Other important skills
In addition to the above skills, the program is designed to strengthen vocabulary skills by teaching students to comprehend and read thousands of words with accompanying sentences and illustrations.
Activities provide students with an extremely high level of repetition, which is important for developing the skill automaticity required for reading fluency. Research shows that this repetition is especially important for struggling readers. Automaticity is also encouraged through the inbuilt reward system which reinforces speedy responses in addition to accurate ones.