Waldorf News

Why do Some Students Struggle to Learn to Read?

By Jennifer Militzer-Kopperl, Renewal of Literacy

Rudolf Steiner said, “If you look without prejudice, every child is a riddle to be solved, particularly for educators” (2001, 123). Steiner is right—each child is a riddle, and none more challenging than the one who struggles to learn to read! There are many factors that can contribute to reading problems. They include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Weak phonemic awareness
• Movement challenges
• Perceptual problems
• Learning challenges (e.g., dyslexia)
• Etc.

Many require a specialist to diagnose and treat, but the first item is the class teacher’s responsibility to educate.

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to discern the sounds (or phonemes) in words and manipulate them. For example, the word cat has three phonemes: /k/ /a/ /t/. If you take away the first phoneme (i.e., /k/), the word becomes at.

The full development of phonemic awareness is not a natural part of child development—it requires education.

Phonemic awareness starts to develop spontaneously in preschool and kindergarten children who are not dyslexic. These children start to recognize rhyming words and then start to create rhymes. However, the ability to recognize individual sounds in words and manipulate them requires education.  That is where teachers come in.

How Can Teachers Teach Phonemic Awareness?

Waldorf kindergarten teachers and class teachers in grades 1 and 2 should help students develop phonemic awareness but in different ways.

Kindergarten teachers can play games with rhyming words and sounds. They can bring poems and songs that feature rhyming words, such as “Down by the Bay.” They can make sure each student learns to recognize rhyming words and create rhymes. Students who struggle are at risk of dyslexia. Kindergarten teachers can alert the class teacher and the parents so they can give these students extra practice in this critical area (and follow up if it proves inadequate).

Class teachers then provide the formal education necessary for students to develop full phonemic awareness. Teaching the letters of the alphabet helps students focus on the individual sounds in words. For example, T’s sound is /t/ like in the word tiger. From there, teachers can help student realize that they can hear that sound /t/ in other positions in the word. For example, in the word cat, it is the last sound. In the word mitten, it is in the middle. Teachers can then provide students lots of practice to identify where the sound is in a word.

Then class teachers can help students break a word down into all its phonemes. A useful strategy is for students to say each sound in a word and simultaneously raise a finger. That way, they can count the sounds as they say them—and then write down a letter or letters for each sound they hear, as in Kid Writing (see “Steiner’s Three Objectives for Writing in First Grade” www.waldorftoday.com/2020/12/steiners-three-objectives-for-writing-in-first-grade/).

Class teachers can also have students manipulate phonemes by having them add, substitute, or delete a sound in a word. For example, students could spell the word cat in the air with their fingers (air writing). The teacher could ask the students to erase the letter C and write the letter B. What does the word say now? (Bat)

These are only a few things teachers can do to help students develop phonemic awareness. These exercises and more should be included daily in main lesson blocks in grades 1–2. They will help the students become aware of the sounds in words—and thus make sense of the alphabetic code. Until students can separate out all the sounds in words and blend them back together, encoding and decoding are difficult skills to master. The class teacher provides the instruction and practice necessary for students to develop full phonemic awareness. It is a prerequisite for good reading and spelling skills.

What about Students Who Struggle?

Some students learn phonemic awareness easily. Most will master it if given instruction and plenty of follow-up practice. A few will continue to struggle. These students may be dyslexic.

Students who are diagnosed with dyslexia frequently struggle with phonemic awareness. Difficulty with rhyming is one of the red flags. These students benefit from special instruction in programs that explicitly teach phonemic awareness—and then follow up with explicit instruction in phonics. A good example is the Lindamood-Bell program LiPS: Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing for Reading, Spelling, and Speech followed up with a program in Orton Gillingham.

Conclusion

Weak phonemic awareness is not the only factor that leads to difficulty learning to read. However, it is frequently the answer to the riddle of the student who struggles to learn to read—or one part of the answer. It is also something that teachers can—and should—teach. Including phonemic awareness instruction in grades 1–2 pays off in spades. A few minutes each day can give students the foundation they need for reading and spelling.

For more information about teaching phonemic awareness in Waldorf schools, consult the book The Roadmap to Literacy: A Guide to Teaching Language Arts in Waldorf Schools Grades 1 through 3 (Langley and Militzer-Kopperl 2018), chapter 3.3: “Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: They Key to Encoding and Decoding.”

Jennifer Militzer-Kopperl is the co-author of The Roadmap to Literacy: A Guide to Teaching Language Arts in Waldorf Schools Grades 1 through 3 (Langley and Militzer-Kopperl 2018) and the author of the sequel Continuing the Journey to Literacy: A Guide to Teaching Language Arts in Waldorf Schools Grades 4 through 8 (2020). These books comprise a complete language arts program for Waldorf schools grades 1-8 called Renewal of Literacy:
www.renewalofliteracy.com.

Bibliography
Steiner, Rudolf. 2001: The Renewal of Education: Lectures Delivered in Basel, Switzerland April 20–May 16, 1920. Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press.