When a child skips letters or words when reading

When I hear a child read aloud and they skip over the final letter of each word, I know this is not carelessness, but a sign that their sound processing isn’t supporting their decoding. They are used to over-compensating for weak phonemic awareness and skim past words, as they try to gather the gist of a storyline, filling in the gaps with their own imagined ideas. They may even be encouraged to do so by a well-meaning parent, keen to encourage their child’s obvious creativity. The teaching of phonics at the child’s school is strong, so what has gone wrong?

Children do learn in different ways because they have had different exposure to language in early life. Since the explicit and systematic teaching of phonics was first introduced into the teaching of early reading, children have benefited from a universal level of access to the smallest sounds of language. This step was necessary as too many children lacked basic knowledge of letters and sounds, in other words the way that phonemes and graphemes correspond.

When I work with children now, I know that they have been taught phonics and that any gaps are more likely to be due to weakness at the perceptual level.

Phonics teaching is necessary, but it isn’t sufficient

Even though we can draw a distinction, between knowledge of phonemes and sensitivity to the smallest sounds of language, we also know that phonics teaching is necessary, but it is not sufficient, particularly for some children.

This is because children learn to read by bolting their decoding skills onto the language processing system that they developed in their pre-school years and we need to acknowledge the complexity that this brings. Researchers have uncovered differences in language development in infancy that impact reading attainment years later.

The perceptual gap that phonics can’t close

Children from language-impoverished backgrounds arrive at school with measurably different phonemic awareness. Hart and Risley’s landmark finding, that by age five, some children have heard 32 million fewer words than their more affluent classmates, is well known. Less discussed is what this means at the level of the brain’s ability to detect speech in a noisy environment.

Researchers have shown that children’s ability to detect the sounds of speech in background noise correlates directly with their auditory working memory and attention. Children who struggle to filter the speech signal from the noise around it are working harder to process every sentence in every lesson, every day. This is not so much a knowledge gap, as a perceptual one.

The encouraging finding is that this can change. Studies have shown that after two years of musical training, children from disadvantaged backgrounds performed significantly better on speech-in-noise perception. The auditory brainstem, it turns out, goes on adapting throughout childhood. The question for schools is whether we can achieve something similar: not necessarily through years of instrumental tuition, but through targeted, rhythm-based support.

What classroom rhyme and rhythm can & cannot tell us

The phonics classroom environment uses rhyme and rhythm. Many books have been written to support rhyme detection and the predictive element of rhythm and rhyme strengthens early reading development. Indeed, reciting rhythms and singing together are wonderful activities for children of all ages.

For teachers, these activities shine a vibrant light on children’s rhythmic awareness. Those interested in noticing learning differences see that some over-anticipate actions or words or both. And some are always behind the group. The way that children perform and participate in these exercises can help us to see those with language processing differences who are compensating, trying to cope or lagging behind.

This is particularly obvious in December, when many schools post clips of children ‘in performance’ and it’s clear that although the children are trying to stay together, many do not. This moment of observed ‘synchrony’ is where we notice how social, contextual and language cues intersect.

The work of remediating these learning differences is delicate but vital for children who learn differently. Using rhythm as an intervention to support these children requires precision in a small group context, where synchrony, belonging and mattering can be emphasised.

Rhythm as intervention: precise, targeted, and different from music

Rhythm-based training strengthens the brain’s sound processing systems, supporting children who don’t respond to traditional phonics teaching. Using a rhythm-based approach to tune into what matters and tune out the ‘noise’ we can help children build inhibitory control and discernment of salience. They already process context more than other children, but it’s possible that rhythmic precision builds the necessary inhibitory control to support perception of sensory signals at the level of phonemic detail.

A rhythm-based approach differs from ‘music training’ in the sense that there are no instruments or singing, no complicated mnemonics, and no practising at home. In this way, a rhythm-based approach removes economic and social disadvantage and minimizes differences in home background.

The 'active ingredients' are reading simple musical notation with fluency from the first session, rhythm-based actions and ‘team working’ in small groups. This distilled version of musical training places emphasis on fluency, ease, synchrony, belonging and mattering.

Many of the children taking part have learned while at school to see themselves as ‘different’ and benefit from the experience of absolute synchrony in a small group. The experience of belonging and the emphasis on being 'the same', whilst working as a team is an aspect that the children enjoy.

‘Jane’ in Year 3 and ‘Michelle’ in Year 7

When Jane first joined my group, she was in year three and wanted to talk about her birthday rather than read to me. Smiling, she held my gaze as she told me about the plans for her party. And as I gently moved her attention to the passage I hoped she’d read, her face became pale and her voice quietened. She guessed most words, conflated groups of connective words such as ‘of’, ‘for’ and ‘from’, as well as confusable words: ‘through’, ‘though’ and ‘thought’ and omitted suffixes such as ’s’, ‘ed’ and ‘ing’. It was clear that she knew how to attack words, and which graphemes and phonemes corresponded, but her reading development needed a boost.

After ten weeks of rhythm-based exercises, I heard her read once again. She sat and began to read to me straight away. I noticed that the suffixes were no longer missing and connectives were no longer muddled. There was a strong feeling of forward direction in her reading and each word flowed naturally into the next. Her voice rose and fell, mirroring the shape of each phrase, clause and sentence. Best of all, instead of guessing a word that was unfamiliar she inferred it from contextual cues. Her reading was faster on easier passages of text, but slower on the more challenging levels that she was now able to read. Jane was delighted that she could now read words like ‘suspicious’ and ‘evidently’ and she said she now ‘knew what was going on in class’.

Her teacher had noticed that she was able to take part in discussions in the classroom about texts and characters and had noticed an unexpectedly strong gain in fluency, positive attitude to reading and her ability to tackle tricky words.

Michelle was in year seven when she first read to me. She was able to read words such as ‘circus’ but struggled with less familiar words such as, ‘wounded’. She would read each passage slowly, quietly and steadily, mispronouncing words with silent letters such as ‘knight’ and conflating ’know’, ‘knew’, ‘new’ and ‘now’. As she read, I could tell that she had practiced reading. After the ten week rhythm-based programme, she read to me with energy and expressive interest in her voice and said this,

I’m reading in lessons. It’s completely changed.

She had made 30 months of progress in reading comprehension, and was able to read passages fluently and with natural expression. Before the programme, she had always dreaded reading aloud in front of others in the class.

The headteacher of her school said,

The students have really engaged with the activities; it makes learning fun as well as having a profoundly positive effect on their reading skills.

Jane and Michelle are not unusual. In every school, there are children whose auditory processing has shaped the way they read and the way they see themselves as readers. They do not lack effort. They do not lack good teaching. They are waiting for the right kind of support to reach them.

If you recognise these children in your school…

I’ve written a short guide that explains the connection between rhythm and phonemic awareness and what it means in practice.

Read more here

Further reading

Hart, Betty. and Tom Risley (2003) The Early Catastrophe, American Educator 27 (4), pp.6-9

Hart, Betty. and Tom Risley (1995) Meaningful differences in the everyday experiences of young American children, Baltimore MD.: Brookes.

Skoe, Erika, and Nina Kraus. "Musical training heightens auditory brainstem function during sensitive periods in development." Frontiers in psychology 4 (2013): 622.

Slater, Jessica, et al. "Music training improves speech-in-noise perception: Longitudinal evidence from a community-based music program." Behavioural brain research 291 (2015): 244-252.

Slater, Jessica, et al. "Longitudinal effects of group music instruction on literacy skills in low-income children." PLoS One 9.11 (2014): e113383.