RESEARCH EVIDENCE REPORT

Alignment with the Science of Reading

 The elements of the El camino program are aligned with the science of reading, following the recommendations for instruction of foundational skills of the Institute of Education Sciences (2019).

These recommendations include:

• Develop awareness of sounds and teach how they map onto letters.·
• Teach students how to decode words, analyze word parts, and recognize and write words.
• Allow students to read connected text to begin to develop accuracy and fluency.

Support for Dyslexia

El camino provides a structured literacy approach that is essential for students with dyslexia as well as students struggling with other reading difficulties. The explicit routines and immediate feedback, multiple opportunities for practice, and multisensory instruction allow students withreading difficulties to develop the foundational skills necessary for reading independence.

A discussion follows of some of the current research regarding dyslexia, with anemphasis on dyslexia in Spanish.

Dyslexia is the most common learning disability affecting students(Fletcher et al., 2019).

It occurs across all languages, regardless of IQ or sociocultural conditions.

Dyslexia is defined as a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. (British Dyslexia Association (BDA), 2009;International Dyslexia Association, 2002).

Current research suggests that thereare no absolute criteria for diagnosing if an individual has dyslexia. The BDA(2009) states that the severity of the disability can only be evaluated byexamining how well an individual responds to a good intervention.

Dyslexia Models

 Some of the early research assessing the causes of dyslexia proposed a single-deficit model in which a deficit of phonologic awareness (PA) was the primary cause (Ramus et al., 2003).

However, it was soon noticed that many students with strong PA and decoding skills still labor to read with fluency.

Research by Wolf and Bowers (1999) developed a double–deficit hypothesis (DDH) as the best predictor of dyslexia in which a deficit in either PA or the naming speed of a series of familiar items (Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN)) is present in students with dyslexia.

A deficit of PA appears to affect reading accuracy, where as a deficit of RAN affects fluency.

Wolf and Bowers(1999) noted that these deficits can occur together,resulting in the most severely impaired students with dyslexia.

Much of the early research into dyslexia, since the 1970s, has been conducted with English-speaking students learning to read in English.

During the last 20 years more research has been conducted in other languages as well.

One such study was conducted by López-Escribano (2007) with dyslexic students learning to read in Spanish, in Spain, confirming the existence of a double deficit of PA and RAN in the most severely impacted readers.

Phonological Development Before Beginning to Read

 The emergence of phonological awareness, which is defined as the “ability to recognize, identify or manipulate anyphonological unit within a word, be it phoneme, rime or syllable” (Ziegler& Goswami, 2005, p. 4) begins with a sensitivity to large phonological units such as syllables, and develops into an awareness of smaller phonological units, such as individual phonemes.

Syllable awareness is generally noted in Spanish between ages 3 and 4, when a child can count the number of syllables in a word.

This is followed by the ability to detect individual phonemes in a word or syllable, beginning with onset-rime.

“In languages like Spanish, onset–rime segmentation is equivalent to phonemic segmentation for many words (e.g., for a word like “loro,” the onset–rimes are/l/ /O/ /r/ /O/ and so are the phonemes)” (Jiménez, 2012, p. 42).

Awareness of onset-rime is usually present between ages 4 and 5. Phonemeawareness only develops once children are taught to read and write, regardless of the age at which reading and writing is taught (Ziegler& Goswami, 2005).

During this time, PA becomesa good predictor of successful reading.

Cross–linguistic studies show this to be true in Spanish as well as across all alphabetic orthographies (Jiménez, 2012; Serrano & Defior, 2008; Vaessen et al., 2010).

Reading Acquisition in Spanish

 Languages vary in the grain size of lexical representations used to mapphonology onto orthography.

In more transparent languages such as Spanish, children first learn the sounds of individual letters, and then learn to blend phonemes together to read a two-letter syllable such as “me.”

Once students can read two-letter syllables with automaticity, they can begin to combine two syllables to read a word like“me–sa.”

Once students are reading age-appropriate words with 70 to 80 percent accuracy, their fluency begins to increase. (Altani et al., 2020; Juul et al.,2014).

Children in transparent orthographies such as Spanish, Finnish, Greek,or Italian master decoding much earlier and begin to read with 90% accuracy, by the end of Grade 1 (Altani et al., 2020; Seymour et al., 2003).

In contrast, English-speaking children do not generally reach 90% accuracy until age 9 or 10 (Altani et al., 2020; Ziegler &Goswami, 2005).

Components That are Helpful for Dyslexia

El camino is designed to progressively move students through the skills necessary to learn to read.

The early lessons focus on being able to segment a word into syllables, followed by hearing the initial sound of a word, and progressing into segmenting a syllable into its phonemes and blending the phonemes to read a syllable.

When students can read syllables with accuracyand fluency, they begin to combine syllables to form words and to read the same words.

The program culminates in reading connected text in sentences.

Multisensory instruction that is beneficial for students with dyslexia is included through:

• tracing letters with fingers
• using fingers to segmentand blend phonemesin syllables
• combining letter tiles to form syllables
• combining syllable cards to form words.