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This student may have got off to a slow start but he/she is establishing accurate reading and spelling strategies. This is the easiest profile to work with as it is simply a case of continuing from the point of competency.
LVHP (Low VAS High Phonics)
Whenever I see this LVHP (Low Vas, High Phonics) combination I feel like shaking the child’s teacher by the hand.
Why? Because the low VAS aspect was outside the teacher’s control (it develops like height and weight) and her best option was therefore to establish high phonic skills. The HP (High Phonics) part of the LVHP code indicates that this is precisely what the teacher did. The next teacher can build on that foundation without the need to first undo bad reading habits.
“High Phonics” does not mean that the child has achieved mastery over every aspect of phonic instruction; it merely means that the child has achieved an age-normal level of phonic mastery. In an infant that means that mastery is not yet complete and the child may still be trying to break every word down into its component sounds. If that persisted it would slow down reading and potentially undermine comprehension so, whilst teachers still need to maintain the phonic emphasis, they also need to introduce comprehension strategies and some simple sight words into their teaching plan.
But this is yet another area where knowledge of the VAS level is again vital. The capacity for whole word processing is limited by the VAS level. The guessable-word length is roughly predicted by the formula VAS + 2. Let me give an example. If the VAS level is (say) 3 this creates the formula VAS(3) +2= 5 which indicates that guessing words longer than 5 letters is likely to lead to mistakes. For example if the child tries to process the word ‘picnic’ as a sight word, you shouldn’t be surprised if they misguess it as ‘picture’. Of course the word ‘picnic’ can be easily processed phonetically and this should be the preferred mode of word processing.
The child is also going to have difficulties in reading to the end of sentence and then deducing from sentence meaning any unreadable words because the child with a low VAS is confronted by so many unreadable words in every sentence that they cannot develop dependable sentence meaning.
However if the word is irregular and needs to be rote-learned as a sight word (the word ‘where’ for example), a VAS level 3 warns you that this 5 letter word in approaching the limit of their word recognition capacity. An 8 letter word like ‘wherever’ therefore falls outside their 5 letter limit and encouraging the infant to guess the word from context may in fact establish inaccurate word-guessing habits that will be difficult to eliminate in later years. A fuller explanation of this can be found in VAS Theory or in “Reading Through Tears”.
The recommendation in this LVHP case therefore is to increase the phonic skills to the stage where they become fast, accurate and automatic and this is what the teacher must do. The child may be a little slow in reading at first because he may have problems with irregular words but he is laying the foundations for accurate reading and spelling and teachers can base comprehension on that firm foundation. Further, the child is in an ideal position to begin using syllables, thereby bypassing the VAS barrier.
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