At Cardinal Reading Strategies, we teach decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) forensically. We strictly adhere to the findings of The National Reading Panel, that 14-member panel of reading researchers and experts who studied over 100,000 reading programs and methodologies. And whose members included Dr. Sally Shaywitz of Yale University. (Yes, that Yale.) While school administrators continue to sleep at the wheel, and book publishers turn a deaf ear, Cardinal Reading Strategies offers the evidence-based reading instruction that the National Reading Panel prescribes. Our reading instruction is multi-sensory, explicit, and diagnostic-prescriptive. And now our training is available to dedicated teachers and parents who wish to provide evidence-based reading instruction to children.
This course was specifically designed for use by dedicated parents in home school environments, as well as, by Educational Specialists, Language Specialists, and mainstream or special needs English Departments. If a departmental approach is used, it is recommended that the department nominate one individual, preferably one who is trained in The English Code Language Training System’s Orton-Gillingham approach, to evaluate the appropriateness of its application and to make determinations concerning it continued usage.
The complete language training system has been organized to provide fluidity of information to ensure success. Concepts that build upon other concepts have been placed accordingly. While some of the presentations may seem repetitious, this commonly utilized method enhances the students’ exposure to foreign concepts and fosters mastery.
Throughout this course, I am aware that I have included information that crosses the line into the arena of speech pathology. I do this in order to familiarize those who have not had the exposure to speech pathology that I have received over my twenty-seven-year career. The information that I have gained over this period of time has served to strengthen my grasp of the articulation process and its inseparable relationship to phonemic awareness. In order to pass this information on to struggling students so that they may receive the full benefit of language remediation, parents, tutors, and teachers, themselves, must become familiar with the process of articulation and its inseparable relationship to phonemic awareness. The phonemic details that permeate this book will serve as this resource.
As you progress through this course, you will find that, in our language training system, there are no cute little animals, funny faces, games, or anything else to distract the student from the task at hand. This curriculum is not designed to entertain. In its purest form, I seek to explicitly and systematically teach the intrinsic relationship between sounds and the symbols that represent them in the English code.
As we proceed with our language remediation training, remember the words of the novelist, Marcel Proust, who wrote:
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes…
…but in having new eyes.”
Let us move forward and develop our “new eyes”.