An
excerpt from Reading Through Tears
b-d-p-q CONFUSIONS.
(Jean)
Gary had letter reversals.
Long before he went to school he knew that a cat was
still called a 'cat' regardless of which direction it was
facing. In other words he had learned to name objects in
terms of their shape, not by their direction.
When he first saw the letters 'u' or 'n', he therefore
assumed that they were both the same letter, simply because
they were both the same shape.
By the end of grade1 he had mastered the vertical
differences between n/u and m/w and p/d but still had
problems with the more difficult horizontal task of
discriminating between b/d or p/q. He couldn't even POINT
to matching letters, let alone tell you which sound
belonged to which letter.
The problem was that nobody had actually sat down and
taught him the differences and so, being a bright lad, he
worked out his own remedy. Whenever he wanted to write a
'b' or 'd' he simply wrote the capital. His essays were
therefore littered by words like 'noBoDy'.
I showed him that a b was the same as B with the top half
rubbed away, I then wrote Bb and Dd at the top of every
writing page so that whenever he wanted a lower case b he
simply looked for the capital B at the top of the page and
wrote down the adjacent lower case b.
He immediately had mastery of b/d differences and gradually
found that he didn't need to look to the top of the page
and eventually discontinued the Bb heading.
However, I still needed to teach him which sound goes with
which letter. I remembered a lecture on auditory
discrimination by that brilliant audiologist Eddie Keir
during which a tape was played of a male and female saying
different things simultaneously. It was quite impossible to
understand a word of the babel (it sounds exactly like my
house, where everyone talks at the same time).
Keir then said 'Now listen only to the female voice' and
miraculously I could suddenly hear clearly every word that
she said. If I switched to listening to the male voice,
that too then became perfectly clear. I could tune in to
either one.
I tried this with Gary. Having got him to the stage where
he could trace/copy the bdpq letters from memory I turned
to the differences between b,d,p,q sounds. I said 'knock on
the table whenever you hear a /d/ sound' and then I hid my
mouth and sounded aloud the letter sounds b, d, p and q in
random order.
Within a minute he was 100% correct. The sound of 'q' was
easiest; the b and p took a bit of concentration but he
never looked back after that lesson.
Later on we extended the work by knocking on the table
whenever he heard a WORD containing b, d or p and later
still he had to write the sound down instead of knocking on
the table.
But it all started however by just getting him to first see
and then hear the differences.
A
few years ago I was having a coffee with a group of
dedicated teachers. I was quite shocked when some
complained that they had received no specific training in
how to remediate bdpq confusions and routinely were
reassuring parents that their child would ‘grow out’ of the
problems.
I was
shocked because, if you look back at the earlier statistics
on failing children, you will see that many failing
students are still making bdpq errors even in high school.
One of the objections to allowing children to ‘grow out of
it’ is that it may take many years and those are critical
years of quite unnecessary failure. Along the way many
children develop strategies such as writing in capitals as
Gary did in the story above or, worse still, they learn
that since they have a 50% chance of being right, they
should merely make a guess without thinking about it at
all.
Some teachers underestimate the IMPORTANCE of bdpq
reversals. The importance stems from the fact that 56% of
simple (3-4 letter) words, so important to the beginner
reader, contain one or more of the bdp letters. 56% is such
a large proportion of a child’s vocabulary that bdp
confusions almost invariably are associated with low
confidence in reading.
Some teachers also underestimate the EXTENT of the problem,
particularly those teachers who are encouraging children to
read to the end of each sentence and then to guess unknown
words. For example in the sentence ‘The cat was chased by
the dog’, the child with b/d confusions is not going to
misread the word ‘dog’ as bog or pog. They can guess the
word ‘dog’ from the words that preceded it; they therefore
don’t attract remedial attention. However had the infant
teachers simply presented tested the word ‘bog’ in
isolation they would have realised that the child needed
help.
Our current study showed that most (about 94%) of superior
and average readers had mastered bdp confusions by the age
of 8. Failing readers however still displayed a very
different picture with 30% of children in their last year
of primary school still repeatedly displaying bdp
confusions. That is a terrible indictment of our infant
schools’ detection and remedial strategies.
There is however another, hitherto unsuspected,
factors: VAS interacts
with bdp confusions!
See also 'Letter
Formation'.
v
