The Reading Clinic

The Reading Clinic

Systematic, Practice, Structured Literacy Approach

Our approach involves direct, systematic, scaffolded instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, spelling, fluency and more complex components of written language using extended practice and multi-sensory teaching strategies delivered by highly trained instructors.

Reading Program

The Reading Clinic uses an Orton-Gillingham Approach. The Reading Clinic Instructors are trained in the principles of Orton-Gillingham, The Association Method, Discover Reading and utilize The Clinic’s own Yes! Reading Program. This broad base allows us to be flexible yet systematic in our approach with each student. All of these approaches use direct instruction to provide a highly systematic, sequential, multi-sensory program that can focus on the development of reading decoding skills and comprehension.

In particular, we focus on teaching:

• Phonological awareness
• Sound/symbol recognition, (graphophonics)
• Spelling and english spelling rules and conventions
• Morphology
• Fluency
• Vocabulary
• Comprehension

Writing Program

The Reading Clinic’s own YES! Writing Program are for students who need to focus on the very early skills required for writing success.

The goals of this program are for beginning writers:

• To gain autonomy in printing by mastering letter sounds and letter formation.
• To learn basic parts of speech and simple sentence writing.
• To systematically be introduced to spelling together with capitalization, punctuation and early elements of grammar.
• To work on composing simple sentences and eventually connecting them on a single topic.
• To learn how to write complete simple sentences and how to extend them and make them more detailed.
• To learn how to join simple sentences to create compound sentences with correct punctuation, (complex and compound-complex sentence writing are covered if appropriate for the student).
• To learn how to plan and write well organized paragraphs, (narrative, descriptive, expository).

Evidence-Based Approach

They evaluated the effectiveness of the Reading Remediation Program and explored the student characteristics that predict success in the program.An excerpt from research findings can be seen below:

“The Reading Clinic offers intensive, direct, systematic, scaffolded instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, syllabification, morphology, spelling, fluency and meta-cognition using extended practice and multi-sensory teaching strategies delivered by instructors trained in Multi-Sensory Structured Language Instruction. The 50 children involved in the study ranged in age from 6 to 12.
It was found that the children in the program improved in a range of reading skills approximately three times as fast as they had been improving prior to participating at the clinic and approximately twice as fast as normally-achieving children would in the same period of time.

Kirby and Uyar also found that two characteristics predicted improvement in the program. Phonological memory (being able to remember words or other auditory stimuli) was a strong predictor of all reading skills and naming speed, (the speed with which children can name sets of well-known stimuli, such as digits, letters or objects) was a significant predictor of several reading skills. A further important finding was that phonological awareness, (sensitivity to the sounds within words and being able to manipulate them) did not predict success – this suggests that The Reading Clinic’s program had improved children’s phonological awareness so that it was no longer a problem for them.”