In 1984, a good friend of mine, a clinical audiologist at a Boston teaching hospital where I was a clinical speech pathologist, asked me if I would be interested in doing clinical assessments of children with reading disabilities. These children, who while otherwise seemed capable, were entering the 3rd grade unable to read. Through our collaboration, we were able to identify a pattern of behavior that was consistently present in the profile of these children. The behaviors included difficulties in working memory, rate of retrieval, phonemic awareness, segmentation and sequencing skills.

A review of the literature suggested that children with such a constellation of difficulties combined with reading difficulties did significantly better when instructed in a multisensory, rule governed, systematic approach. The components of this type of teaching strategy include multisensory presentation involving visual, auditory and tactile/kinesthetic modalities. Additionally, all material is presented in a highly structured and systematic manner, with consistent review of previously presented concepts. Explicit instruction of sound/symbol correspondence and the rules that govern the structures of language are an essential component of this type of programming. [The Dyslexia Puzzle: Putting The pieces Together, by Lorna Kaufman, PhD. and Pamela Hook, PhD., Newton, MA: New England Chapter International Dyslexia Society (formerly the Orton Dyslexia Society), 1996].

While impressed with the research that supported this intervention for children with reading difficulties, a recurring question occurred to us. How do the children with language based learning difficulties (LLD) that co-exist with their reading difficulties negotiate the decontextualized language of instruction that accompanies rule governed programming? Such language of instruction typically includes temporal markers such as before and after, contingency language i.e., if...then, sequential language and an assumption of linear thinking that translates on the page to a left/right orientation.

It occurred to us that if we could facilitate the manner of instruction, we could accelerate the student's progress in retrieving and applying rule governed strategies. Our first challenge was to transfer decontextualized language into a meaningful context for children. We decided to use storytelling as the approach to create a context surrounding rule governed concepts. Our stories were centered around what we call "playground behaviors". We soon found that even a child with an impoverished fund of knowledge could resonate with stories that he sees unfold everyday at school.

For example, instead of only identifying the letters "th" as a digraph, or two letters that equal one sound, we tell the children a story. Embedded in the sound picture card that accompanies this story is an image of the sound articulation (tongue between the teeth).

I tell the students that this is a story about two letters that don't get along with each other. One was sticking his tongue out at the other. Because they were misbehaving, they had to stay in at recess and figure out how to get along. However, every time I looked at them, one was sticking his tongue out at the other. So, they are still together trying to figure out how to get along. There are two letters but I only heard that one sound, the "sticking tongue out" sound |th|. To retrieve the sound the children learn to systematically identify whether the sound is quiet or noisy through color coding used in the images, and to tell the story that accompanies the sound picture card.

Short vowel sounds have presented persistent problems for children with auditory analysis difficulties. Often they have trouble discriminating between |i| and |e|. To help teach short vowel sounds we tell children stories about the letter sounds. |i| is a guy with such long hair that he hates to wash it, so when he touches his hair he says "Ick".

|e| is my Uncle "Ed", who refuses to go fishing unless he is wearing his lucky hat. The children look for the hat to assist them in identifying the character, the story and ultimately the sound.

The purpose of these stories is to make the phonemes more easily distinguishable. Because they have been given "faces" short vowels are easier to retrieve and the student's progress in mastering sound/symbol relationships is accelerated.

As we now understand, children with auditory analysis difficulties often have difficulty identifying where one sound ends and the next begins. We are careful to attach no more than one consonant sound to the short vowel (preferably unvoiced) to ease segmentation. Limiting additional phonological information i.e., presenting "Ick" vs "igloo", eases the segmentation of the short vowel phoneme for the child.

The storytelling approach continues through teaching the definition of a syllable, identification of the syllable types, and counting the number of syllables in a word. There is even a story about a sports team "choosing sides" which we use to teach breaking words apart into syllables. Students of all ages quickly "get" the stories and are able to explain to themselves how to think about applying strategies to successfully decode written information.

We have trained speech pathologists, resource room teachers, special educators and regular education teachers in this program for the past seven years. Educators report that the methods are easy to learn and engaging for the students. Our approaches are being used as developmental curriculum in grades K-2 and as a direct teaching strategy for students K-12 who need additional support.

Through the teaching of thousands of children with this technique we have learned that presenting rule governed programming in a storytelling context addresses students who have difficulty with the application of rules regarding the sound structure of language. Equally important, it also supports that student in finding his way through decontextualized instructional language that would otherwise be confounding.

In response to requests from other professionals we have made our materials and techniques available as a complete teaching program called "Reading by the Rules".