Phonological Awareness is Not Enough! Rapid Naming and the Fluency Link

Phonological Awareness is all the rage in the world of dyslexia and for good reason. Many years of research all over the world has found phonological awareness is critical to reading accuracy and spelling.

What is phonological awareness? Well, it is our ability to identify individual sounds and manipulate them.

While we can certainly all agree that phonological awareness is critical, we now know that it is not enough. Just like we understand that phonological awareness contributes to reading accuracy and vocabulary contributes to comprehension; we now have sold evidence that Rapid Automized Naming (RAN) contributes to fluency.

Put simply, RAN is the ability to retrieve the information we need so we can quickly name things. It is sometimes referred to simply as rapid naming.

A few weeks ago my 5-year-old dyslexic daughter and I went to the zoo. That evening she described in great detail the gorillas and their interactions with each other. However, she couldn’t recall that they were called gorillas or what color they were. She showed us how many there were with her fingers but couldn’t remember the name of that number. Does this sound like your kiddo? If so, your child may also struggle with RAN.

If your child has had a learning evaluation, their RAN was tested. If not, consider how hard it has been to learn the names of things like colors, letters, numbers, and people. Most children who struggle with reading have difficulties with RAN.

The good news is that RAN can be improved. However, teaching Phonological Awareness does not improve RAN (nor does teaching RAN improve Phonological Awareness). We must teach both. These findings were recently concluded in a study published in 2018, which was conducted by Caroline Vander Stappen and Marie Van Reybroeck.

The RAN intervention in this particular study involved sixteen 25-minute sessions with 2nd graders over 2 months. The results were impressive. The intervention resulted in improved reading speed and lasting effects 6 months after the research was conducted.

These results are perhaps even more impressive when we consider that there was no reading or letters involved in the sessions. Small images of common items were placed on a page lined up from left to right and top to bottom. Kids were asked to name the items tracking along the page in the same direction that they read. They were encouraged to try and get faster at these exercises over time.

As I reflect on this study, I am asking myself how this information can help our kids make progress. Of all the things we ask our dyslexic kids to do, this one doesn’t strike me as the worst. It could be kind of fun to race the clock plus we could incorporate our kid’s interest into the pictures. If you do plan to give this a try, I would suggest looking at the research for all the details of the intervention. If you’re looking for something with less setup work, other researchers suggest that Charade and Pictionary games will also help with RAN skills.

At the same time that we work on these skills though, we must acknowledge that a RAN deficit is unbelievably frustrating and makes progress in other areas so hard to achieve. When we have worked tirelessly on teaching something as simple as naming the colors, with little progress it can be so easy to feel like we are failing our kids. But this is not your fault.

You are not failing your child. And this will get easier. I know because I have a 13-year-old who spent 5 years working on the letter names before she got it and I know for sure that those 5 years of slow progress will most certainly never hold her back! Our kids require more patience than any of us really want to bear, but they do get there!

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