What will ReadingDoctor® Online teach my child?

Research shows that improving decoding ability enables students to be better at teaching themselves new words, leading to improvements in overall reading ability. Reading researchers have discovered that a teaching method called synthetic phonics is the most effective way to teach kids to read and spell. ReadingDoctor® Online uses a synthetic phonics approach in its teaching methodology.

Watch this video to hear Dr. Bartek Rajkowski, Speech & Language Pathologist and creator of ReadingDoctor®, provide a brief overview of the purpose and teaching objectives of ReadingDoctor® Online:

So, ReadingDoctor® Online helps your child to improve the skill areas that have been found through research to be essential in developing reading ability. It has a particular focus on the following important reading sub-skills:

Grapheme/phoneme (letter/sound) correspondences

Letter-sound knowledge is knowledge of the letters or groups of letters which represent the individual speech sounds in language.

Letters and letter patterns that represent speech sounds are called graphemes, while the brain's representation of the speech sounds of a language are called phonemes.  If you are unfamiliar with these terms, a hamburger analogy can help:

Phonemes are mental representations of speech sounds made by the mouth, like the /p/ sound in /spoon/. Graphemes are individual letters and groups of letters that represent single phonemes, like the “s” and the “oo” in “spoon”. Letters are the visual building blocks of written words. You can find a more detailed explanation HERE.

ReadingDoctor® Online teaches students grapheme-phoneme (letter-sound) relationships in a clearly defined, incremental sequence. You can read an in-depth guide to graphemes in Australian English HERE. You can also purchase flashcards with the embedded mnemonics used in ReadingDoctor® Online HERE.

Blending

Blending, or the ability to join speech sounds together to make words, is a crucial phonemic awareness skill that helps students to read unfamiliar words.

ReadingDoctor® Online teaches students to apply the highly important skill of blending (joining) phonemes in order, all through a word to read it. This helps students to teach themselves new words when reading.

Segmentation

Segmentation, or the ability to split words up into their separate speech sounds, is another crucial phonemic awareness skill.

Segmentation helps students to develop spelling ability. ReadingDoctor® Online teaches students to apply the skills of segmenting (splitting) words into their constituent phonemes to spell words.

Sight Word Knowledge

Research also suggests that students benefit from being taught to recognise the most common words in English instantly, especially those with irregular spellings such as 'who' and 'said'.

ReadingDoctor® Online explicitly teaches students to recognise highly frequent, and especially phonically irregular sight words.

Other Important Skills

In addition to the above skills, the program is designed to strengthen vocabulary skills by teaching students to comprehend and read thousands of words with accompanying sentences and illustrations.

Activities provide students with an extremely high level of repetition, which is important for developing the skill automaticity required for reading fluency. Research shows that this repetition is especially important for struggling readers.

For more detailed information about the program and how to get the most out of it, please read our guide for parents, which you can read by clicking here.