The Solomon Method: Teaching English Literacy

TEACHING ENGLISH LITERACY - Avoiding the failure cycle

Most successful readers of English have learned to read by the vocabulary method. This technique involves selecting high frequency words that are used in everyday speech. Derived from familiar oral or textual passages, these words are usually found on lists for practice and each word may be repeatedly flashed on cards until they are recognised by sight. Words are recognised as a "whole" in much the same way as pictures or logos are recognised. Since the mid twentieth century the vocabulary method has been termed "whole word", or "whole language" approach. It has been universally adopted in teacher education institutions for the teaching of English reading.

Those who learn to read familiar words in this way, gradually build up a reading vocabulary. These readers are able to work out unfamiliar words in the early reading books, initially by guessing the word from looking at a picture. With more advanced, unillustrated text, the context of the passage is used as the cue to guessing the word. Their strategies are assisted by the phonetic sounds of the alphabet letters. Gradually, some readers discover rules that might apply to the pronunciation of ambiguous spelling. In a percentage of readers this method results in orthographic reading in which the reader encodes both familiar and unfamiliar words without consciously analysing the components of the word. For this population, reading appears to be an automatic process requiring no more formal instruction than early language requires.

In the last decades of the twentieth century the drawbacks of this approach began to be reflected in the declining literacy rates in English speaking countries. In many pockets of the population, after six years of exposure to the English language in formal school education, between thirty and fifty percent leave primary school without adequate English reading, writing and spelling skill. The theory underlying the vocabulary method has been found to lead to a cycle of failure for up to fifty percent of students.

Scientific research shows clearly that the reading process should emerge automatically but is governed by brain growth in the first eight years of life. In this developmental period only a proportion of readers are able to learn reading by memorising words at sight. Others whose neurological organisation is still in the process of formation become confused and disorganised when they are expected to learn by memory, by guessing, or by rules. Those strategies exercise one part of the brain while other brain regions, vital for the development of orthographic, or automatic, reading, remain under-used.

When the brain is not fully utilised in the service of learning to read, symptoms of dyslexia and attention deficit disorder can become evident in children from the age of six or earlier. Pupils who are unable to work out words from memory or context, or from the letters in the word or from finding a pronunciation rule, tend to react in a number of ways. The more dyslexic reader will overlook the actual word in print and invent a word in its place such as saying 'street' for the word 'road'. Others are likely to look at part of the word or one or two letters in the word and then utter any word that has those letters in it; such as 'red' for /road'. The child with attention deficit is more likely to avoid looking at the print and to engage in distracting or disorganised behaviour because they cannot make sense of print. These reactions occur, not necessarily because of a biological deficit but because the pupil's brain, which was intended to encode printed text at approximately the age of six, is delayed in this function. The neurological delay and its behavioural effects should be corrected by a method of instruction which does not require the pupil to rely on memorising, nor on guessing nor on the use of rules.

The Solomon Method demonstrates the effectiveness of actively discouraging the use of memory or sight recognition of whole words and of make guessing from pictures and context unnecessary. The question may then arise: how can English be learned in any other way? This instructional model and techniques of the Solomon Method show that it is possible to introduce and to continue reading by the phonetic sounds of the alphabet. Words are broken down into speech sound components which are represented by combinations of printed letters. This phonemic awareness approach is a more effective strategy for those whose reading delay is caused by immaturity in the literacy-specific neurological pathways. When these pathways are exercised, it results in a balance in the brain hemispheres. The reader gradually becomes less reliant on the sound components and begins to read automatically by recognising whole words.

The problem with the phonemic approach is that English is much a more phonemically complex task than most languages because the twenty six letters of the English alphabet represent forty four speech sounds. Combinations of letters can be pronounced in many different ways. There are few rules which can be applied consistently. Historically this is a major reason why educators in English adopted the whole word 'vocabulary' method.

The Solomon Method introduces phonological awareness through its initial resource "Teaching Literacy from the Beginning". The teaching materials of this introductory package assist the student to progress from the stage where meaning is seen in pictures to the next stage of finding meaning in the printed word. The goal is to stimulate the development of phonemic awareness to enable a pupil to achieved a neurological maturity equivalent to the age of six years. At this point the pupil is expected to process the consonant - vowel - consonant words in the first phonics reader "Fat Cat Sam" without reference to any illustrations.

In most languages, this level of alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness and sound blending skill would be sufficient for the pupil to become a competent reader by generalising the process of sound blending to longer words. Because of the lack of correspondence in English spelling and pronunciation, the sound blending process for English words with more than three letters is too complex for those students who cannot use memory, or context or rules to encode a new word. "The Solomon Method - A Comprehensive Literacy Model" provides a second phase in the instruction. This includes a device for overcoming the obstacles of English spelling and pronunciation.

Drawing again on scientific research studies, the Solomon Method found that the use of a simple pronunciation code comprised of 24 diacritical marks which are placed above or below the line of printed text produced instant success in the reading of English. This device, together with unique teaching techniques remain the basis for the sustained effectiveness of the method.

Dr Julia Solomon
World Literacy International
http://www.worldliteracy.com.au

EARLY SUCCESS WITH READING

Twentieth century instruction of children in the art of reading has taken two forms. The one best known since the 1960’s is the sight vocabulary or language method, based on the theory that if a child has spoken or heard a word, that word will be recognised in print and automatically read with meaning.

The other is the alphabet method which involves identifying each letter of the alphabet by its phonetic sound. The sounds are then blended in the correct sequence to pronounce the word. As words become familiar through repeated pronouncing, phonetic sound blending becomes more fluent.

The reality is that many children use both of these strategies to become successful readers, irrespective of any method used in classroom instruction. This fact can be understood in the light of the knowledge that reading is a function of neurological maturation. The ideal child’s brain is so organised that, in the first six years of life, the right brain hemisphere does the work of seeing words as a whole while the left brain hemisphere breaks up words into sequenced sounds. Between the ages of six and eight, ideally, the hemispheres begin to work in coordination. The separate letters and the whole word are processed simultaneously, leading to automatic reading.

The fact that many but not all children read independently of instruction, indicates that all children do not enjoy the benefits of ideal neurological organisation. It raises the question of which approach in reading should be used for these children.

This question is all the more important since the whole language method has fallen into disfavour consequent to the publication of findings which suggest that the decline in literacy skills in schoolchildren in the last few decades is associated with the exclusive use of whole language methods for reading instruction. With figures showing that possibly forty to fifty percent of school children have difficulty reading English, a new interest in the alphabetic approach to reading has been generated

Unfortunately, the rediscovered alphabet approach to reading has been subsumed under the rubric of ‘phonics’ and as such has covered a multitude of instructional mistakes. These include:-

• not being told early or long enough that each written character of the alphabet (grapheme) has a spelling name and a phonetic sound (phoneme);
• that the spelling names of letters are used only when we spell, the graphemes when we read and write and the phonemes when we speak;
• that the spelling names of the letters a-e-i-o-u are the names of five letters of the alphabet and that they constitute only a small proportion the vowels of English used in speech.

These mistakes are evident in the lack of recognition, in most readers, of the phonetic sound of each letter as distinct from the name of the letter used when spelling and in the inability to divide a word into phonetic letter or syllable sequences and re-assemble them into a whole word in speech.

This confusion can be corrected with a pronunciation model for reading instruction and lead to successful reading for those who have failed to learn with whole language methods or with previous phonic approaches. Theoretically, the explicit sequencing of each letter sound will stimulate the left hemisphere and, at the same time, complement the right side which is responsible for whole word recognition.

Educators who support the phonics approach would not necessarily foresee problems with either the theory or the practice of sequencing or blending phonetic sounds to make words. Indeed the proponents of whole language as a reading method would also be likely to argue that no problems exist in phonics insofar as grapho phonic cues are included in strategies for assisting whole word recognition.

Both whole language and phonics advocates appear to deal with problems in phonetic irregularities and sound patterns of English spelling by traditional techniques. For instance they show the regularity and ease of pronunciation in ‘consonant-short vowel-consonant’ combinations; or display lists of words as ‘word families’ which have the same spelling pattern with a consistent pronunciation ( words for example containing “ay” “ar” “oor”). The pitfalls in this form of instruction relate to the fact that the English language is not phonetic: the sound patterns of English spelling are notoriously irregular and ambiguous. The sound pattern in “oor” can for instance be spelt in fifteen different ways: the spelling pattern “ea” can be sounded in fifteen ways . This renders ineffective those programmes which ask pupils to make words by placing consonants at the beginning and end of vowel combinations.

Another strategy for dealing with irregularities of sound and spelling patterns in English is to use the forty five generalisation rules that presumably cover all possible contingencies in English spelling. The mistake in this approach is again that the first instructional goal in literacy is accurate reading, not spelling. Moreover, the application of rules is a higher order thinking function of the brain. It requires a level of neurological maturity that is not usually enjoyed by ‘at risk’ readers. Observers of children will note how difficult it is for pupils who, while they can recite a simple punctuation rule, cannot see when to apply it in practice.

This common inability to apply rules to minimise ambiguity is just as apparent and more serious in English pronunciation. When children cannot pronounce words, they either stop reading or continue to guess words. Answering comprehension questions in writing becomes impossible if the reader does not actually register the word in print, which is a result of guessing and just ‘getting the gist’ of the text. Ambiguity constitutes an insurmountable obstacle for many pupils who are unable to ‘discover ‘ the pronunciation for themselves and are by nature not able to tolerate guessing because they have a need to be sure before they ‘have a go’.

English pronouncing dictionaries have recognised the need to reduce ambiguity in written English by using pronunciation marks (diacritics) to denote the specific sound of any letter combination. Some reading models have adopted diacritics from the international pronunciation code to indicate long and short vowels. However, having too few indicating marks yields too many unknowns for the pupil. Neither does it address the fact that in English speech there are six short vowels, six long vowels and six diphthongs which need to be reproduced in oral reading if all words are to be intelligible.

It seems extraordinary to persist in using methods on which a significant percentage of children fail. We know that, from the age of six, normal children have the neurological maturity to use phonetics in the form of sound blending (the more correct definition of ‘phonics’). The English language itself is the major obstacle. We now know also that a simple but effective solution to the problem is a pronunciation code suitable for the reader of English in any age range beginning at six years.

On this basis, the programme “Reading for Sure” has been trialed and shown to produce success for both teacher and pupil in the mastery of English reading. By using a pronunciation mark for each of the eighteen speech vowels in English, rules become redundant until the pupil is ready for rules. In the meantime, when the motivation of the child is at its highest for succeeding in reading, the pronunciation code makes that success possible. The research studies on Reading for Sure have concluded that not only are word attack skills enhanced; the comprehension levels of the pupils are significantly increased. There are measurable improvements in the child’s self esteem.

Julia Solomon
World Literacy International

Breaking the Cycle of Failure for Students with Reading Problems

The whole language approach, or the vocabulary method of teaching English, leads to a failure cycle or at least to inadequate results in a significant percentage of cases when expenditure in time and funds is considered.

The solution must lie in a method which utilises the convincing research findings that awareness of the speech sounds of the alphabet is the fundamental process to be acquired before reading can begin. At the same time any new method of instruction must take into account, what is for some students, the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of spelling and pronunciation irregularities of English. The trialing of the Reading for Sure method over the last ten years has shown how this can be accomplished.


Drawing on scientific research studies, Reading for Sure was established in 1990, on the premise that the use of a simple pronunciation code comprised of 24 diacritical marks, placed above or below the line of printed text, produced instant success in the reading of English. The unique diacritical marks, which denote each of the vowel sounds in English speech, eliminate the ambiguity inherent in the written language. The consistency of the code overcomes the confusion and anxiety that many students experience when confronted with English text. This innovation can re-motivate the failing and despondent student . It remains the basis for the sustained effectiveness of the Reading for Sure method.


Language is stimulated by the method, which uses only oral reading. The discovery of new words in text, precisely pronounced, becomes the vehicle for discovering meaning and for extending comprehension of the language as a whole. The active discovery process translates to writing skills in which the student accesses the pronunciation code for acquiring correct spelling.


The method has been trialled in private clinics and schools in Australia and overseas with consistently positive results for 98% of students.

Please feel free to ask for more information.

Julia Solomon
World Literacy International