The Halifax Learning advantage

When you enroll in a program at Halifax Learning you or your child will be working with expertly trained reading practitioners, not tutors. Our clinics offer the gold-standard in SpellRead™ instruction, our reading practitioners are rigorously trained and receive on-going training and support and we are a research hub for experts in the field. In addition to instruction in evidence-driven programs such as SpellRead, Halifax Learning families receive:

• On-going feedback. 
• Communication with support staff (i.e. psychologists, teachers, etc.)
• Initial, progress and exit assessment reports. 

SpellRead™ is scientifically-based and designed to meet the specific needs of struggling students to ensure effective, sustainable results. 

• SpellRead™ provides a comprehensive program that maximizes student success.
• SpellRead™ targets essential reading skills. 
• SpellRead™ is focused on results and closes the reading gap. 
• SpellRead™ is not tutoring, but scientifically-driven, ensuring sustainable results.

Grounded in research

Halifax Learning and our SpellRead™ program consistently meet – if not surpass –   expectations. Robust third-party assessments confirm that teachers trained by HLC gain valuable skills and their students achieve meaningful outcomes. Our ongoing research doesn’t just validate our efforts, it also informs our program improvements and offerings.

SpellRead™ produced statistically significant and important results for struggling readers’ word decoding skills, a foundational part of a student’s reading journey. The program also has positive impacts on word reading accuracy and reading comprehension. Receiving SpellRead™ instruction in small groups increases students’ reading skills and helps make progress in closing the reading gap.

HLC is fortunate to collaborate with Dr. Jamie Metsala, Gail and Stephen Jarislowsky Chair in Learning Disabilities. These additional research studies conducted by Dr. Metsala, while smaller in scale, show strong results and merit attention. Some highlights from that work includes:

• SpellRead's™ speeded practice of sublexical patterns (i.e. practice rounds of reading syllables quickly) made important contributions to students' increased reading fluency and comprehension skills (i.e. it helped kids both read better and understand what they read better, too). 
• SpellRead™ improved reading skills for older, at-risk students.
• SpellRead™ was effective for boosting reading fluency and comprehension for students who are struggling with reading fluency in particular. 

How Does SpellRead™ Align With Expert Opinion?

Experts recommend: 

• small instructional groups. 
• clear and concise explanations. 
• explicit instructional sequences. 
• more opportunities for immediate positive feedback and error correction. 
• more skillful orchestration and integration of elements.

→ Visit our Research Library for past and active research projects. 

Phonological awareness to the point of automatcity

Struggling readers almost exclusively lack the foundational skills required to become fluent readers. Students in the SpellRead™ program develop this skill with an emphasis on phonemic and phonetic activities using a multi-sensory approach. The goal is to automatically recognize, process and manipulate any combination of the 44 sounds of the English language. 

SpellRead™ develops phonological awareness and achieves automaticity in each lesson during the "Linguistic Foundations" portion of the class. What this means is SpellRead™ students take part in105 carefully sequenced lessons, over the course of three program phases. They are explicitly and systematically taught all the sounds and spellings that form the foundation of the phonetic and alphabetic system of English.

Further, at SpellRead™ we’re continually assessing how automatic our students are becoming and how this phonological automaticity impacts reading fluency. Want to learn more? Check out this research article by Dr. Jamie Metsala and Dr. Margaret David: Improving English reading fluency and comprehension for children with reading fluency disabilities.