Please note the following before reading the answer below:
Based on the answer below, students should "listen and read" or just listen to any textbooks or reading material required for other subjects, such as science, history, literature, etc.
Students should also be expected to read material for required assessments, such as, the Scantron Performance Series, CSAP, and DIBELS even if they aren't at the end of Level 4 of the Barton Program.
Can you explain more about why students are asked to not read while in the beginning stages of Barton? We are seeing a trend of some students regressing in progress/DIBELS etc....
Answer: Below is Susan Barton’s response…
If the students were young enough, and you were doing the Kindergarten or First Grade DIBELS monitoring, their scores would be going up because those early tests examine initial sound fluency, phoneme segmentation, and nonsense word fluency -- all of which require phonemic awareness and decoding skills, which are taught in great depth in the first few levels of the Barton Reading & Spelling System.
But starting in second grade (and from that point on), the only skill DIBELS measures is reading fluency.
Many Barton students will have a dip in their reading fluency scores, at first, because Barton tutors are teaching students to look carefully at the letters to "decode" the word accurately, instead of using context clues to guess at the word.
Guessing based on context clues may be faster, but guessing based on context clues is what caused students to "hit the wall" in reading development in the first place.
Independent, scientific, replicated research on children with dyslexia has shown that as they stop guessing and improve their "decoding" skills, (their ability to read by sounding out -- without guessing), their reading fluency will improve.
The only way to keep them from reverting to guessing is to have them read controlled text -- such as the stories provided in the Barton System and in our stand-alone chapter books. They may not have seen some of those words before, but they have mastered the decoding skills needed to sound them out.
There are many fluency building activities included in each Barton Lesson Plan, and many of the games described in the back of the Level 2 and 3 manuals were designed to improve fluency. In addition, there are optional and free fluency building drills that parents can download from our tutor support website.
All of those fluency building activities contain only words that students can decode -- which outside reading does not.
Also, your teachers should know that improving decoding skills (which leads to accuracy) is faster and easier than improving fluency. But if a parent is doing the activities in the Barton Lesson Plan, both skills will improve over time.
But accuracy will suffer, and a student's progress in the Barton System will slow down significantly, if the student is required to do uncontrolled outside reading during the first few levels.
That is why I (Susan) firmly state:
That no outside reading (except of controlled text, such as our stand-alone chapter books) should be allowed until a student is near the end of Level 4 -- and at that point, it should only be pleasure reading, and only if the student wants to or initiates it
You should delay reading of textbooks (where they have to learn facts from their reading) until they are at the end of Level 6.
