California Superintendent Touts New Method For Helping Struggling Readers

The Tri-City (WA) Herald (3/1, Von Lunen) profiles Lou Gates, superintendent of schools in Burbank, California, who has penned an article in The Reading Teacher in which he "introduces a method to teach struggling readers he said is more reliable than existing strategies. Now that his method is peer-reviewed and published, it might grab the attention of textbook publishers and other school districts. The core innovation in Gates' research is that he showed English to be more predictable than previously thought. Instead of a lot of confusing and shifting rules about which sounds one should say when reading certain letters put together, every word in a child's vocabulary now falls into one of five categories." Gates has dubbed his system "Phonguage."