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Michael W. Kibby is professor in the Department of Learning and Instruction in the Graduate School of Education and director of the Center for Literacy and Reading Instruction.
What is the mission of the Center for Literacy and Reading Instruction?
The center (generally referred to by those who work there as The Reading Center, or the clinic) is a facility for graduate students in the Department of Learning and Instruction who conduct reading diagnostic assessments of children who are finding it difficult to read, and provide reading remediation to these children. The graduate students are literacy specialist majors, enrolled in an Ed.M. literacy specialist program, and most Ph.D. students in reading also work in the clinic at some point in their schooling. The students in the literacy specialist program generally have completed numerous lecture, discussion and seminar courses on the theories, methods and materials of teaching in primary, elementary and secondary classrooms and diagnostically assessing and teaching children who have encountered severe difficulties in acquiring reading ability. It is in the practicum experience in the Reading Center that it all comes together for the graduate students. It is here that they begin to integrate the theory and knowledge they have acquired and apply it to real teaching of real children.
Do parents need a referral from their child's school before they can bring their child to the center?
Children who come to the Reading Center are brought here by their parents, who usually have been referred by word-of-mouth. A fee is charged for a diagnostic assessment and for each semester for remediation. The children generally range in age from 6 to 14. We do not generally work with college students. All diagnostic assessment and remediation are one-to-one. The focus of all instruction is to improve reading.
Tell me about the center's research component.
One goal of the Reading Center is to conduct and disseminate research on topics related to the rationale, methods and materials of reading diagnostic assessment; the materials, methods and milieus of reading remediation, and the nature of children experiencing severe difficulties in learning to read. The clinic and its staff currently are engaged in three research projects. The first project is co-directed by me and William Rapaport of Computer Science and Engineering, and was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. One purpose of this study that pertains particularly to the clinic is understanding the thinking processes readers use when they are reading a text and encounter a word whose meaning they do not know. Most readers try to determine the sense of the word's meaning from context; in our project, we are trying to find out how excellent readers do this to see if we are then able to teach these processes to less-able readers. In another project, Logan Scott, a doctoral student who completed his degree in September and also is director of the Education and Instructional Communications Technology Center, and I have been studying the role of computer simulations in the education and development of reading diagnosticians. The computer simulations are accessed by students in my diagnosis courses before the students conduct a diagnostic assessment with an actual student in the Reading Center. A third project is to study the transfer effects of instruction designed to help children develop reading fluency. Good reading comprehension depends on fluency in word recognition: i.e., identifying printed words in text quickly, effortlessly and fluently (called automaticity in the research literature). Previous research has found that helping children who are having word-recognition difficulties to develop reading fluency facilitates more rapid and accurate reading of the practice texts used during instruction. Our study differs in that after students develop this fluency in reading a practice passage, we study whether or not this fluency transfers to a different passage largely made up of the same words as the practice passage.
What distinguishes the Reading Clinic from others that provide similar services?
What distinguishes the diagnostic assessments and remediation provided by the UB Reading Center from many others is our overriding philosophy, which was put wonderfully into words by a former clinician, who is now a professor of reading at St. Bonaventure University: "There are many places where parents may go for an assessment of what is wrong with their child, but the UB Reading Center is one of those few places that knows the child must learn to read, presumes that the child will learn to read and assumes a responsibility for teaching that child to read." As seen in our basic philosophy, we do not "label" kids as if they have something wrong with them—as the labels of "learning disability," "central auditory processing deficit" and "attention deficit disorder" do. We pretty much take kids as they are and teach them to read. As the old George Washington Carver adage goes, "We start with what we have and go forward, there is no other way." Some children may never read Dickens for the fun of it, but all will not only make some progress in reading, but also gain a more positive attitude and increased self-esteem. Children who do not read so well are just that—children, just ordinary children, who do not happen to read as well as they might. This limited reading has no known cause—most certainly it is not the kid's fault—and terms such as LD, ADD or any other of a long list of labels hung on our children do imply that it is the kid's fault that he or she cannot read. We must come to see how these terms are used. Schools usually do not say that a child "is in a learning disability classroom," but say the child "has a learning disability," like one has asthma, or measles or gout. Terms such as these are labels, and labels blame the victim. To the Reading Center staff, the kids that go there are just kids. Sure, they do not read as well as they could, but they still are just kids.
For a while it seemed that phonics had fallen out of favor as the preferred method of teaching children to read. Has phonics made a comeback, at the expense of whole language?
Phonics is no big deal—anybody who tells you that you can read without phonics is a dope, and anybody who tells you that the only or the best way to teach reading is by phonics first is also a dope. We teach phonics, but we teach a great deal else, too. Good instruction is complete instruction—linking language and reading, reading for meaning of authentic and interesting texts, instruction in word recognition fluency (i.e., sight-word recognition, phonics and context for word recognition), comprehension instruction, meaning vocabulary instruction and in later grades, reading rates and study skills. The view I am espousing here is often called Whole Language or "meaning-based reading instruction." There seems to be a view in the general public that if you use this approach, phonics is eliminated. Nothing could be further from the truth. Reading Center clinicians not only need to know and be able to deploy a full range of reading strategies and skills and a profuse number of reading materials—but they also need to know their phonics. Indeed, in our program, reading students study phonics and must pass a phonics test. Any good teacher of reading knows phonics cold, and teaches it; but that is different than teaching phonics first, phonics last, and phonics only. Too much ink is wasted on the stupid arguments about phonics versus reading for meaning.
What is dyslexia?
Reading difficulty, learning disability and dyslexia are the terms we use with kids who do not read as well as might be expected. The trouble with dyslexia is that it congers up all sorts of nonsense, such as perceptual difficulties, eye-hand coordination difficulties (yeah, Bruce Jenner really had those, didn't he) and the biggest problem of all—reversals. Bah! Every kid learning to read confuses "b" and "d" and "was" and "saw." The first word my own child read was "exit"—we were sitting in a Pizza Hut and she said, "I can read that word (pointing to the red-letter sign over the door in the back), EXIT, t-i-x-e, EXIT." All humans, whether they are children learning to read or adults learning about cheeses, make errors and substitutions of the visual symbols involved in this new learning. I like wine and have much trouble remembering winery names, especially French. But after bicycling through Bordeaux and driving up the Rhone and seeing dozens of wineries, I have much less confusion. That is what it means to learn; to decrease confusion—in perception or memory. There is no known cause for dyslexia; it is just the medical term for not reading very well. It was first used by a Scot ophthalmologist in the 1890s, and though there many exports from Scotland that are good, this is a term that I wish had stayed there.
In this age of DVDs and high tech video and computer games, what is the most important thing you can do to get children interested in reading?
1. Seeing mom and dad reading all the time.
2. A great book—and a wonderful friend, librarian or teacher to sell it.