Using Multisensory Methods in Reading and Literacy Instruction

The use of multisensory approaches to reading and literacy instruction has proven not only beneficial but also pleasantly stimulating for students as well. The approach is especially valuable for students that are underachieving or have special needs; in which these types of students may have more learning ability obstacles than their peers. Multisensory lessons will prove useful to any population in order to help achieve the desired goal of any unit. Moreover, educators can also gain positive experiences from using multisensory methods with their students to insure an interactive, fun and beneficial alternative to traditional teaching of reading and literacy. Using Multisensory Methods in Reading and Literacy Instruction Learning how to read is the foundation of elementary education in which all young children will either learn with ease, or with difficulty and hesitation. Reading requires the memorization of phonemes, sight words and high frequency words in order to decode texts; and through active experiences, children construct their understanding of the world (Gunning, 2009). Being active learners in the classroom can come from many methods such as hands on, musical or a kinesthetic approach to instruction. According to Smolkin and Donovan (2003), comprehension-related activities need not wait until children are fluently decoding but may be used during comprehension acquisition. This means that in this stage, students can use multisensory methods to begin decoding grade appropriate texts even before they begin to read. This literature review examines the use of multisensory methods on students that are beginning to read and learn from literacy instruction. Learning Through The Senses: Below Grade Level Students In most cases, beginning readers will be taught different strategies using body movements, songs and rhymes in order to memorize the alphabet or learn phonics. Using a multisensory teaching approach means helping a child to learn through more than one of the senses (Bradford, 2008). Teachers unknowingly have always used methods to teach initial readers that require the different senses including, sight, hearing, touch, taste and even smell (Greenwell & Zygouris-Coe, 2012). Therefore, rather than offer more reading strategy instruction, teachers must offer a different kind of instruction—instruction that defines reading strategies as a set of resources for exploring both written texts and the texts of students’ lived realities (Park, 2012). Different approaches to reading instruction that include multisensory instructional approaches can be used on all types of students including under or over achieving students, special needs and English language learner students. A recent study conducted by Folakemi and Adebayo (2012) investigated the effects of multisensory in comparison to metacognitive instructional approaches on vocabulary of underachieving Nigerian secondary school students. The multisensory approach was tested against the metacognitive instruction approach on vocabulary amongst one hundred and twenty students, sixty male and sixty female. The investigation took place in an Ilorin, Nigeria secondary school in which only underachieving students who consistently scored below 40% in English language were selected for the study (Folakemi & Adebayo, 2012). The researches hypothesized students that underachieve will need more attention compared to their overachieving counterparts. They noticed throughout the experiment that although the less able students are still fully capable of learning, they have difficulties and all too often give up easily and soon become disillusioned. The interest in using a multisensory approach to combat underachieving students stems from noticing not only the teacher’s dull attitude, but in the student’s attitude toward traditional instructional approaches. Most teachers have failed to see the importance of using teaching aids, which can be used for presentation, practice, revision, and testing in the ESL classroom. Students’ interest is killed because they are bored with the traditional ‘talk and board’ teaching approach (Folakemi & Adebayo, 2012). Teaching efforts needed to be directed towards this set of students in which multisensory methods can have the potential to give students the tools needed to learn through the different senses. In the study, the students were separated into four levels of independent and dependent variables of treatment and control (Folakemi & Adebayo, 2012). Different control groups in which one group was taught vocabulary using the multisensory approach and another group was taught using metacognition instruction approaches were investigated in order to come to a conclusion. The researchers hypothesized that for the under achiever students, English language teachers would need an explicit and distinctive multisensory approach to teach them (Folakemi & Adebayo, 2012). They included textbooks, video, audiotapes, computer software and visual aids to provide support for the underachieving students. These manipulatives were used during class instruction time when teaching English language arts and most exclusively, vocabulary lessons. In order to test their findings, the researches used a variety of tests to collect data for the investigation; the study was conducted into several stages. Stage one is the pretest and stage two is the administration of the test while stage three included a posttest. All the 120 subjects selected for the study are divided into the three experimental and one control group, they all took part in the two tests. The test consisted of one hundred questions, twenty questions for each vocabulary dimension while each of the experimental teachers was attached to a particular group of underachievers. The results indicated that: “MSIA (Multisensory Instructional Approach) is the most effective, followed by MCIA (Metacognitive Instructional Approach) and MSIA+MCIA. This means that the three approaches are more effective than the conventional approach. Therefore, significant difference exists between the three instructional approaches and the conventional instructional approach. This result indicates that the multisensory instructional approaches had significant effect on students spelling achievement of the underachieving students” (Folakemi & Adebayo, 2012, p. 21). The significant difference in the overall achievement in English vocabulary of the underachieving students using the four instructional approaches concluded that the three experimental groups performed significantly better than the control group with the multisensory instructional approach group performing best (Folakemi & Adebayo, 2012). These results in regards to multisensory instruction positively affect how a student learns and is becoming a more widely used tactic within the classroom. In 2007, Wendy Johnson Donnell also conducted an experiment in which she tested the effects of multisensory instructional methods in underachieving third grade students. According Bowey (1995), children from lower socioeconomic groups and minority groups tend to be further behind their peers in early literacy skills on kindergarten entry and that this gap increases over time. This gap sets up these students to be behind in their schooling and potentially become underachieving as the curriculum becomes more rigorous. Donnell’s (2012) study focuses on students coming from a low-income area to test the effects of multisensory lessons within the classroom. Before the study was conducted, she studied students at several elementary schools in the Kansas City, Kansas area. Reading records and written work of the third grade students were analyzed to come to a conclusion that, “an obstacle to reading success for many children in the third grade was automaticity in the application of the alphabetic principle, specifically vowels” (Donnell, 2007, p. 469). After reaching this pre-research conclusion, Donnell decided to research a multisensory instruction in a whole-class setting. The study consisted of using 60 whole-class multisensory word study lessons for third grade students; each of the lessons took approximately 20 minutes for a total of 20 hours instruction inside the classroom. The lessons varied from children’s oral language, to phonological and phonemic awareness, to phonics, to specific vowel-spelling patterns. Because the district the research was being conducted in already adapted the Animal Literacy program, the lessons were built to incorporate Animal Literacy. The multisensory features of the word-study lessons are both receptive and productive, with auditory, visual, and kinesthetic components (Donnell, 2007). With each lesson requiring these components, individual lesson plans were developed to target a specific purpose such as phonics or phonemic awareness to insure that a level of commitment to memory was supported. During the experiment, the study required that all 450 participating third graders all stemmed from the same district where the socioeconomic status was similar in all participating elementary schools. A uniformed population was a key component in researching the multisensory lesson plans within the classrooms. Another key component in the research was providing all the contributing teachers that were going to incorporate these independent variable multisensory lesson plans with preparation and guidance during the research as well as being taught how to distribute tests. The dependent variables, tests used within the research, included the Names Test, Elementary Spelling Inventory, Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills and Oral Reading Fluency assessments. To test reading comprehension, the Scholastic Reading Inventory Interactive was used as well. After the all dependent variable tests were given, teachers collected the assessments in order to compare student results.  The results that developed from the research indicate that