What about Tracing and Other Multi-sensory Teaching Approaches?

I agree with all three of the commentators.

Obviously this is a matter of strong belief. Any idea why research doesn’t support it?

Thanks

Tim

I’ve been involved in a small gold standard study.
Tier 2-3 children ,
Because so much depends on the teacher consistency, both being there, kids getting same number of lessons..
I think it’s hard to prove scientifically but we did equal RR and LLI results 8 weeks faster.
The anecdotal is very strong, parents crying etc..
Teachers feeling very proud..
It’s a winning strategy for struggling kids.
It helps teachers succeed.

I am thinking back to a talk I heard by either Maryanne Wolf or Stanislas Dehaene who mentioned that a benefit of learning cursive could have to do with letters’ directionality and the process of breaking the rule of symmetry generalization in the letterbox of the brain. From that perspective, would tracing while saying the letter name or sound also have the same effect?

Hello Tim and fellow commenters on this interesting post.
While I would need to more specifics about exactly what processes are engaged in the process of "tracing" discussed in the post, it seems clear to me that it is related to practices that are essential -- and often not well understood -- about structured word inquiry (Bowers & Kirby, 2010). In that 2010 article, I briefly address this process, but over the years this practice has become more and more central to my practice working with teachers and students. I describe these practices as "writing-out-loud" and "spelling-out-loud" word structure. These very explicit and prescribed practices build directly on the ideas discussed here about leveraging multi-memory roots, and more. I tried and failed to describe these ideas in relation to this post, but both the length and limitations of a comment box make it very hard to be clear about the practices and related theory and research. Diagrams, images and links to related resources/research are so valuable of this, but not really possible in a comment box.

If you are interested in considering practices that I think are driven by similar motivations as "tracing" but which explicitly target morphological AND graphemic structures, I have created a pdf that you can download from this link:

http://files.realspellers.org/PetesFolder/resources/May_17_comment_on_Shanahan.pdf

Not only do I provide an introduction to the practice, but I link to theory and research that drives it. In particular, I address how this practice draws from cognitive load theory (Shnotz & Kurshner, 2007), Perfetti's Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti, 2007) and the theory that builds directly on these theories which I put forward with John Kirby (Kirby & Bowers, 2017) on morphology as a "binding agent".

I hope readers find it useful.

Cheers,
Pete

I keep circling back to these statements:

"Personally, given more modern descriptions of neural processing (D’Mello & Gabrieli, 2018), I’m more in the attention camp. I’m not convinced that these practices create alternative neural routes or facilitate the paring of alternative paths typical of learning. My own guess – and this is no more than that (and mine is not necessarily any better than yours) – is that the various kinesthetic schemes do little more than increase the amount of time that readers look at the letters and words when trying to learn them and to focus the readers’ attention better on those things that have to be learned. I say “no more than” as if focusing and extending student attention on a word’s construction were a trivial matter. But that is also true of many successful mathemagenic behaviors (those actions that give rise to learning). Think, for instance, of many study skills; they simply get students to spend more time thinking about the ideas in text by highlighting or taking notes (Rothkopf, 1970)."

So many of us have our strategies that we swear by: tracing, spelling-out-loud, or in my case, saying the sound as you write the sound (regardless of how many letters are in that sound: w-eigh-t). And maybe the successes that we seem to have are a result of focusing "the readers’ attention better on those things that have to be learned."

Jo Ann —

That comparison can’t possibly evaluate the effectiveness of tracing.

Tim

Peter

That isn’t comparable to the claims that kinesthetic and haptic movements of the fingers facilitates learning to read as operationalized in several reading programs. Unless you are claiming that finger movement is crucial in learning morphology.

Tim

Explicitly teach the phoneme -grapheme in a systematic curriculum.
Have students listen, say it (articulation of sound connected to shape )and trace it. I use rice trays.
We do it 3 times so it sticks while asking questions.
The kids we teach, not Tier 1 but those that struggle to learn are helped by the linkages.

Because of the population we are addressing, it should not even enter your mind to be condescending.
We both know that since IDA was
Founded it has recommended linking modalities simultaneously.

Interesting question! I'm stuck on the assumption mentioned in original question: "tracing words creates neural pathways."

I thought of Dehaene's "letterbox" and what the brain does with phonemes/graphemes/words as further refutation of whole-word as the powerhouse for linguistic processing.

If we do our work, the brain can then chunk, arrange, retrieve sub-lexical units to form the combinations for infinite words. It's not a unique neural pathway for every whole word per se. It's getting the brain on board with the alphabetic principle? Have I misunderstood or misapplied this?

Seidenberg, I then thought, affirms Dehaene with, for example, his discussion (Language at speed of sight, p 143: No Sight Words) about the high utility of the components of words.

If I'm on track, is this an example of how cognitive neuroscience can help our teaching? If it indicates that tracing words to create neural pathways isn't how the brain seems to work, maybe we can consider other possibilities better aligned with cognitive neuroscience? Kinesthetic doesn't have to mean tracing as used for the last 100+ years.

Or maybe I'm wrong....

I was trained in the Orton-Gillingham method twenty years ago. At the time I was a reading specialist for kindergarten students. With various types of testing we were able to reduce the amount of students who qualified for reading programs in first and second grades and beyond. I definitely give some credit to the program however, teaching reading disabilities requires a whole host of strategies that I wasn't taught in my undergraduate work but learned later when obtaining a Master's in Reading. Often students don't learn sounds correctly because they are use to hearing a slang with a sound from their home life. Reteaching the sound is often necessary for them to put sounds together when they begin reading. There is so much more to reading than a certain reading approach. Being a quality reading teacher is someone who has knowledge beyond the basal, and likely, beyond hundreds of reading programs. It takes a person who can put the reader who is three grade levels beyond in an appropriate book and carefully guide each student to make at least one years progress. I'm a fan of Orton-Gillingham, but I am a greater fan of helping teachers to get more education on the reading process. Those are the teachers who can make the best judgements about the material for their students.

I'm currently doing research on multisensory tactics. The pandemic cut it off before I could get very far (single-subject alternating treatments design with kindergarteners), but I have done extensive background reading (read well over 100 studies going back to 1963) on this and started a comprehensive literature review. I find that the primary reason that we cannot draw a conclusion about existing research is the lack of treatment integrity: Very few researchers describe the multisensory movements with any kind of detail. My first study will look at finger tracing and sky writing (my least favorite), and then I will move on to comparing a multisensory tactic to mental rehearsal. I disagree with the idea that "it never hurt a child"; that is exactly what has been said about whole language approaches. It DOES hurt a child to use a strategy that is not moving a child forward in reading progress. 70%ish of students who score below grade level in 3rd grade do not catch up and are still behind in 9th grade. We not only need EFFECTIVE instructional, we also need EFFICIENT instruction so that "our kids" have a chance to catch up to their peers. If something is not adding to instruction effectiveness AND it takes time, it should be eliminated. You (Tim) gave me an idea about how to finesse my study so that I can capture effectiveness versus efficiency.

Terri
Dr.Judith Birsh
Multisensory Teaching of Basic Language etc
Brooks Publishing

I don’t believe in air writing either.
Also
If you can pick up a book by Beth Slingerland, it will really fascinate you.
I’m excited about your research.
The field needs it.

JoAnne Gross, if all your work did was to "equal RR and LLI results 8 weeks faster," that isn't saying much. What would happen if you compared your intervention to a structured literacy approach, which does have evidence of effectiveness?

Tim, thank you for digging through all the research. The question of whether activities like tracing, drawing in shaving cream, shaping letters out of clay, or sky-writing are evidence-based comes up again and again in numerous literacy and SLP forums I follow. Strongly held beliefs seem to hold sway more than scientific evidence. Then again, it's been hard to know which search terms to look for to capture relevant studies. This post will be a useful response within such discussions. I have never found any basis for the claim that using large-muscles to practice movements transfers to relevant small-muscle memory. If they are different muscles, how does this activity activate both sets of neural pathways at the same time?

I have understood the multi-sensory aspect of O-G methods to mean having students engage as many language-oriented sensory modes as possible, i.e. hearing and speaking for oral language, and seeing and writing for written language. As I remember, it is described as such in Birch and Carrekers's work, and elsewhere. Thus when it comes to tactile and kinesthetic modalities, I think in terms of handwriting. Berninger has written about the effectiveness of practicing letter formation by following a set pattern of marks, supported cognitively by orally rehearsing a letter formation script. The student would be using a writing utensil on a writing surface, not their finger on embroidery netting or on a tray of shaving cream, and not writing into the air. Any further thoughts on this?

Thanks for prompting me to articulate another rabbit hole for me to chase down.

Lauren raises a critical distinction. Tracing letters as she well describes is a very different thing from tracing words (original question) for many reasons. I discussed with some neuroscientist colleagues. Short answer about word tracing: it overwhelms the system.

Neurobiological studies also indicate that multi sensory integration of information places additional demands on systems that may already be straining.

On another note, I teach Montessori (Dr. Maria Montessori was a scientist/doctor before an educator) where we introduce sounds using sandpaper letters to trace with the index and middle finger. The sandpaper letters serve a couple of purposes: to lay the foundation for penmanship, to introduce a sound to a symbol, and then to teach the letter. Students see how the sounds they hear are written. Children learn the shape of the letter, then associate the sound they are already familiar with, with the visual symbol or the letter. Montessori emphasized that writing comes first, then reading. Later, by blending these sounds together, children begin to read phonetic words without laborious effort. This method, which engages three senses, visual, auditory, and tactile, contrasts sharply with the traditional approach of looking at letters to memorize them. I think tracing individual letters is a better method than tracing words and helps solidify sounds. I do not endorse air writing as the sensory component is missing.

Dr. Steven Hughes is cited in "The Neurology of Montessori", which states that "Reading requires three separate brain functions: capturing visual symbols, decoding each symbol’s sound, and assigning each symbol meaning. While each of these brain functions can be taught separately, Montessori materials such as the Sandpaper Letters and Moveable Alphabet encourage simultaneous use of each function, resulting in neurological networks that coordinate reading. Hughes also focuses on the tactile methods of Montessori as they relate to brain development, asserting that the hands are a child’s strongest link to the brain. When motor movements are repeated they become templates in the brain that serve as a starting point for new experiences."

I was interested in looking up the D’Mello & Gabrieli, 2018 article you mentioned but don't see it in the reference list. Can you give me the full annotation for that? Thanks!

I believe tracing is most useful for pupils with extreme dyslexia; those who cannot decode words using their letter sounds. If you read Fernald's book, "Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects" you'll see that her tracing method works for 100% of such pupils. One can conclude that learning to read words by tracing builds a visual "word bank" in a pupil's memory, enabling them to recognize words without having to decode them. Eventually they can recognize new words, without tracing them, by their similarity to known words. I built an online model of the Fernald method at https://DyslexiaHelper.com. It gathers detailed statistical data of the pupil's activity which can help prove the efficacy of Fernald.

I disagree with all comments above and agree with the article. 100 years of evidence [or the lack thereof] usually means the science is pretty close to settled. We already know that all the theorizing and belief in 'learning styles' are pseudoscience, so it is no surprise that multisensory learning lacks evidence. It's honestly frustrating that otherwise good structured literacy programs can be watered down with this stuff, and you have this enormous group of teachers and true believers who are ready to defend it at all costs based on rationale that isn't grounded in the research.

What is the difference between the terms multimodality and multisensory in regard to reading instruction?( VARK vs. VAKT)

Why is the VARK approach acceptable and VAKT approach thrown "out the door"? Aren't they very similar?

Sara--

There are differences between VART and VAKT... but they are not important. What they have in common is a lack of any credible research supporting either approach. VAKT is basically a memory theory -- promoting the idea that memories are more durable if they are formed through visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile activity or analysis. Despite the age of this theory (almost 100 years now), there is little research on it and what is there is not supportive. VAKT is used in some phonics programs that have been successful, but that doesn't mean that feature of those programs matters. VART on the other hand is a learning style theory -- arguing that there are individual differences in how people learn best (visual, auditory, reading, kinesthetic) and that instruction should match those strengths. There are no reliable, valid measures capable of identifying those kinds of learning differences and no evidence that catering to them is beneficial in any way. (Such approaches and the "evidence" marshaled on their behalf are generally treated by scientists as fake science.)

tim

There are current studies showing that writing notes is superior to typing notes on a computer since writing helps students pick out the more important info and recall it. I remember so much more when I write notes than when I only read and highlight. I'm surprised there isn't more research on the effectiveness and efficiency of writing words.

Mary--

Writing is quite different from tracing physically, functionally, and neurologically. Engaging students in writing -- including activities like invented spelling -- have been found to have very positive impacts on word reading. To write -- as opposed to copying or tracing -- students have to think about the structure of the words and the sequence of the orthography. Copying and tracing require neither.

tim

Thanks for your blog. I believe this is another way to improve comprehension through discussions.