We live in a world that requires reading to participate at the highest level. Restaurant
menus, Internal Revenue Service EZ forms, and the instructions on an ATM are all
written at a tenth-grade reading level. Technical school manuals scale at a tenth to
twelfth-grade level. Where does that leave the 10% of adults who are self-identified as
having limited reading ability? Is it too late for them to improve their literacy skills?
Angela Wilkins, past president and a founding fellow of Orton-Gillingham Academy was
fond of the phrase, “It’s never too late to remediate.” By that, she meant that
improvement in language abilities could be realized at any age, even into adulthood.
Putting her own words into action, Ms. Wilkins began teaching incarcerated men at a
local prison in 2015.
Sally Shaywitz, in her seminal work, Overcoming Dyslexia writes, “There is no deadline
or age limit for when a person can learn to read.” Dr. Shaywitz goes on to give the
assurance that research attests to the human brain’s ability to reshape itself in mature
adults just as it does in children. She reports that with a structured, research-based,
systematic approach delivered with appropriate intensity, older disabled readers can
and do significantly improve their skills.
What, exactly, does it look like to teach an adult to read? Cindy recently accepted an
adult as a tutoring student, whom we will refer to as Alan. Retired from his first career,
Alan wished to attend technical school for skilled trade training. But the reading load
seemed too heavy, and with no strategies for decoding unknown words, he delayed
enrolling. Alan’s encouraging wife supported his desire for improved reading skills and
searched until she found Cindy, a tutor willing to take on an adult student.
Lessons began with the basics of consonants vs. vowels, basic vowel sounds, the role
of digraphs and blends, and a rapid presentation of common ways to divide words into
syllables and the six syllable types. This foundational information was quickly
assimilated by Alan, who has excellent cognitive abilities. For him, this is not all new
information, but it was previously disconnected information instead of parts of a
system that can be used to unlock words one bit at a time. After some lessons on
vowel teams, suffixes, and prefixes, Greek and Latin roots will round out Alan’s
program.
Although it is early days, significant improvement has already been noticed by Alan.
He is living proof of Ms. Wilkins mantra, “It is never too late to remediate!”
Resources:
Shaywitz, Sally, 2005. Overcoming Dyslexia, pages 288 - 293. New York: Vintage
Books
Wilkins, Angela. 2021. “Structured Literacy Heals: A Story of Hope and Comfort in a
State Prison Classroom.” The Examiner, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 2021 | International
Dyslexia Association
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