With Sound Express, you can address your struggling readers’ deficiencies in sound recognition and phonological awareness by following the Sensory Integration Training (SIT) used in the Essential Learning Systems software! This series of exercises uses the visual, auditory and motor pathways in the brain to help implant information.

When a student’s ability to identify, distinguish and manipulate the sounds that make up words is impaired, he may exhibit one or more of the following symptoms:

• low scores on the auditory portion of the Learning Efficiency Test-II (LET-II);
• poor performance on a phonological awareness battery, such as the Test of Phonological Awareness (TOPA);
• phonetic substitutions on dictation tasks (shoe written as "choe");
• difficulty learning phonics during classroom instruction.

A student who struggles in any of these areas should use Sound Express to strengthen phonological awareness.

With Sound Express, the student hears a pre-recorded “modeled” sound (categorized by phoneme) and repeats the sound into a headset. His reproduction of the sound is recorded and he is able to compare the correctly modeled sound to his own reproduction. Students work on each phoneme pair or group until they can distinguish the sounds with 90 to 100% accuracy.

This methodology has been successfully proven to provide accelerated results in gaining phonological awareness.