Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 13, 1995                   TAG: 9503140033
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: NANCY GLEINER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO LEARN HOW TO READ

- Albert Einstein

Barbara Murray was struggling with the word she was reading, but she was persistent.

``Sp, spl, spl,'' she tried.

``It's part of a word we know,'' tutor Julie Pizzino coached patiently.

``Spl, splend,'' Barbara read.

``Excellent,'' praised Pizzino.

``Splend'' and other nonsense words are used to teach students with learning disabilities in reading. Nonsense words are real applications of phonetics - there is nothing to associate with them so they must be read letter by letter.

Murray was reading both nonsense and ``real'' words from a list in a reading workbook. She had already conquered several pages in the sequential system during a few months in The Achievement Center's after-school tutoring sessions.

Now in its 20th year, the center is a private, not-for-profit day school serving students with learning differences from pre-school through age 16. It offers individualized instruction, with a lot of one-on-one, in the Orton-Gillingham method of teaching.

``A lot of kids are taught to read without realizing that there is a letter that represents a sound,'' Pizzino explained. ``You can get by with that for the average child who will start filling in on his own. For a child who doesn't have that whatever-it-is - the synapses don't connect correctly - you can't get by with the gaps. They have to be filled in at some point.''

``Usually kids learn a whole-word approach,'' said Kevin Agee, a teacher and coordinator of the tutoring program. ``They learn a list of words, see the words in sentences. With an LD child, sometimes those connections aren't made. When you teach someone decoding, you're giving them another strategy.''

Murray read ``dat'' as date, automatically associating the letters with a word she knew. She quickly corrected herself and explained her error.

``In decoding, we're simply taking them through the sounds of the alphabet, starting with one short vowel and a few consonants until they learn to put those sounds together into words,'' Director Barbara Whitwell said.

One day, Peggy McCoy excitedly told Agee that she had read some signs in the mall. Before she found the strategy that worked for her, the words on the signs were like looking at pictures on a wall. Decoding gave her another way to look at those pictures.

The tutoring program is offered to students and adults outside the center's community who need extra support to be successful in their regular classroom settings or who need another approach to learn to read.

For an adult like Barbara Murray, who holds college degrees but never learned these strategies, there are holes, even at the foundation of her reading skills.

``Even for Barbara, I had to start at the beginning,'' Pizzino said. ``But when she covers this material, she will have 85 percent of the English language down. There's 15 percent of the language that breaks phonics rules. Those must be learned both through reading and writing.

``If LD students or adults are not taught in the ways they can learn, they can go on being thought of as dumb or retarded forever,'' Whitwell said.

``But it's never too late. It doesn't matter how old you are, you can still learn.''

The Achievement Center: 615 N. Jefferson St., Roanoke. For more information on its programs, call 982-0128.