Learning Language

The English language is extensive. We speak it, write it, spell it, and comprehend it. However, before we can do any of that, we have to understand it. If you or your child are struggling with any of the following areas, ETC is the solution. We use the Orton-Gillingham Approach build language skills.

Definition: Knowledge of words and the meanings of words

Having a broad, deep vocabulary increases one’s ability to read, comprehend and write well. We tutor vocabulary in various way including…

Student-friendly definitions, multiple exposues to target words, teaching common prefixes, roots, and suffixes, and many others.

If your child encounters a word that is already in their oral vocabular, they will understand it in printed text. However, if they’ve never seen or heard a word before, they must use other methods to find the word’s meaning.

Our goal is to improve the size of your child’s vocabulary. 

Definition: Ability to read, speak, and write easily, smoothly, and expressively

Having fluency skills means someone could see a larger segment of text as a whole and use it to aid in reading and writing faster.

Those who are fluent require little effort to track ideas in text. They are quick, accurate, use expression (rhyhm, intonation, and phrasing), attend to punctuation, and have strong comprehension.

We will help your child immediately recognize letters and common groups of letters, learn frequent words by sight, and grasp phrases as wholes. 

Definition: Method of teaching beginners to read and pronounce words by learning to associate letters or letter groups with sounds they represent.

Knowing the sounds of letters without the ability to put them together would be grunts and groans, not saying actual words.

We will check to see if your child knows letters by sight and sound and can match letters with the appropriate sounds and vice versa.

The act of reading is accomplished by blending these sounds smoothly together to produce the sounds within a word.

We will focus on reviewing vowels, consonants, and part-time vowels. And we will answer questions like: When do you use “ay” instead of “ai”? Why does the letter “i” sound different in fish and ice cream?

Definition: Manipulating the sounds of spoken language, without involving printed text at all.

Beginner skills include rhyming and chanting, knowing how many words are in a sentence, and counting the number of syllables within a word.

Good phonemic awareness is illustrated by isolating individual sounds within a specific word. We will ensure that your child can hear, count, and repeat all the sounds (i.e. phonemes) in a word.

Even if your child cannot yet match written letters to the sounds, he or she should still be able to blend sounds to “hear” a word and be able to pull the sounds apart in a word. 

Definition: Ability to understand the ideas and facts presented in a text. Comprehension adds on being able to use context and prior knowledge to aid reading and to make sense of what one reads and hears. 

Fluency and comprehension go hand-in-hand. Improving one skill improves the other. The shared goal is understanding and remembering what you read.

74% of children who are poor readers in third grade will remain poor readers in 9th grade, without getting proper instruction.