Speech Pathologist, Reading Teacher, and Your Reading Coach

Who Is Jim Larrabee?
Jim Larrabee has a Masters of Science degree in Speech and Hearing from the University of Arizona and has completed reading courses from the university's Special Education department.

He worked as a reading teacher and speech pathologist for schools in the Tucson Unified School District for more than 30 years.

A Letter From Jim Larrabee:

In 1970, while working as a speech pathologist for Tucson Unified School District, I was asked by the Director of Special Education to come up with a more effective and efficient way to teach articulation in younger children. I noticed how frequently young readers were incorrectly pronouncing the words they were learning to read. For example, a child with a lisp might say "thick" when they were presented with the word "sick". Every time they would do this, they were reinforcing the substitution of /th/ for /s/. How could I change this within the classroom, without having to pull a student out for special speech services?

The students I worked with were being taught traditional phonics. However, they were not really being trained in phonemic awareness and not being taught correct production of sounds or how to easily blend a series of sounds into a recognizable word.

I decided to try combining my knowledge of sounds and articulation with the encoding (spelling) and decoding (reading) of sounds to see if I could correct articulation without labeling a child as speech handicapped. The idea was tried in five regular first grade classrooms. The results surprised even me! Not only did most of the articulation errors correct themselves, but the reading scores on standardized reading tests also improved dramatically.

Over the next 25 years, I fine tuned reading program and used everywhere, from learning disabled, bilingual, and regular students from first grade through middle school. The results were exceptional gains in all groups.

In 1996 I was contacted by Judith Bliss, the CEO of Mindplay. She was looking for a phonics program and was referred to me. I was wary at first because I had seen many computer programs where children simply guess at answers until they are allowed to play a game. I was not interested in such a program and insisted that if Mindplay wanted to use my program, it must be a true teaching tool. Now, six years later, we are in the 3rd edition of "My Reading Coach".

I am excited and very pleased with the result! The students going through this program range from young elementary students through adults. Virtually all are progressing faster and with better results than those achieved when I was teaching the program personally. I, who don't "do" computers, had no idea that a computer could be so interactive that it literally teaches students to read!

Why is this program so successful? That is a question with several good answers.

First of all, the Mindplay team has developed a program where I, as the teacher, am there every step of the way. I present the lessons, ask for the responses and (thanks to Mindplay's patented Teacher Smarts) am able to give immediate congratulations on a correct response or encouragement and repetition after an incorrect one.

It is also interesting how hard the learners work for the computer. Because the computer is anonymous and non-threatening, they are not reticent to try a response. They seem truly amazed that I know what they have typed and can respond to them as individuals.

Teachers are pleased because, with most of their class on the computers, they have time to work individually with students having difficulty. Even more helpful is the fact that the computer keeps track of each individual student. There is a record of how long each student has spent on each lesson, what mistakes they have made, their percentage of correct responses and where they may need help. This not only assists the teacher in keeping track of each student, but is also a very concrete way to discuss student progress with parents or with the students themselves.

Each lesson consists of instructions, word building, auditory discrimination and sequencing, writing, and a spelling test. The progression of the lessons follows the developmental sequence for speech production. In other words, easy sounds to produce and discriminate are introduced first, voiced and unvoiced sound pairs are together, and so forth. Each sound is mastered in all positions of a syllable before a new sound is introduced. Starting with only 4 sounds in the first lesson, My Reading Coach proceeds until students are reading and spelling multi-syllable words such as "circumlocution."

Many teachers find this hard to believe, but I have seen it many, many times. The overall beauty of the program is that every learner is allowed to progress at his own rate while having a private tutor to instruct and encourage him along the way!