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Fonty works - marked improvement is shown in each setting where Fonty has been tested.
Reading failure is epidemic. Recent studies in the States show, that by 4th grade, 20% of the
children are dysfunctional readers. More than ever, children are formally categorized
as having a disability, placing a stigma on the students themselves and becoming a heavy
burden on the education system’s limited resources. Results of a 1994 national survey of
reading achievement by fourth graders (National Assessment of Educational Progress)
indicate that 44% of school children are reading below a basic level of achievement
(little or no mastery of knowledge and skills necessary to perform work at each grade level).
A major problem for people with reading problems is that they have not yet attained the
awareness of the sound structure of words (in order to make sense of an alphabetic system).
It is important to understand that reading = decoding (each letter stands for a sound).
People who are poor readers have slow decoding skills. It is when a person can decode
(relate symbols to sounds) that he is able to read any new word he meets.
The goal of teaching reading is to bring the child from the state of "learning to read"
to the state of "reading to learn." This is considered fully automatic fluent reading.
Fonty is the outcome of years of research and development -- testing the method on hundreds
of students between the ages of 5 to adult with various abilities, while using clay and
flash-cards. Our reading professionals have been working successfully with dyslexic
students and students with other Learning Disabilities using the methods incorporated
into Fonty, for 17 years. The countless non-LD as well as the hundreds of dyslexic
students we have worked with over the years, have all become fluent readers after
not more that 15 hours of practice.
Using Fonty, a student does not need more than 15-20 hours of practice in order to become an
automatic fluent reader. (This refers to LD people as well). Fonty can be considered a "tool-box"
with which every reader should be equipped when beginning to read. A combination of two
reading methods are deployed in Fonty: decoding and "photographing". These two methods are
used in everyday reading: decoding for words that are phonetic and photographing for the
irregulars (sight words).
The program begins with the phonetic method teaching the art of decoding. In order to
reinforce the knowledge of sound-symbol relationships we use non-words, to separate
it from the meaning. This is especially good for LD people - who find it easier to
concentrate on one "job" at a time. >From single sounds and non-words we proceed to
real words and sentences. At this stage we use the “whole word” approach as well as
the phonetic approach, in order to teach the irregulars and do the transference to
real classroom reading.
The program is multi-sensory and fully interactive with the use of voice recognition for the
correct pronunciation of the words read. The user is active in building syllables and
words, in reading and in identifying symbols while relating them to their matching sounds.
Fonty has been tested among many groups of students. In the US at several schools including
The South Huntingdon school district in New York. It has been tested at the Center for
Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, at the Learning Associates of
Montreal, a non-profit agency that helps students cope with dyslexia, ADHD and
other learning difficulties and many other organizations and institutions. All
participants in the testing were English native speakers between the ages of 6-12.
testing has also been carried out among large groups of LD students in Israel.
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