the Reading Doctor

by Julie Ostermanphotography by Mark Lipczynski

Dr. Eldo Bergman brings literacy to life for struggling readers in the Bayou City and beyond.

About 40 percent of today’s students read and comprehend below their grade level. Dr. Bergman

is making a difference in their lives.

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On a quiet Friday morning in west Houston, Dr. Eldo Bergman meets with a couple concerned about their daughter. Their faces are lined with worry and despera-tion, but Bergman calmly reassures them that he can help.

You might expect the white-haired, bespectacled man with the gentle bedside manner to be dressed in a white coat, and the parents to be discussing a serious illness in a hospital waiting room. Instead, they sit in the makeshift conference room of the Family Literacy Network, a beacon of hope for countless families of struggling readers.

A pediatric neurologist before launching the non-profit organization, which continues the work of the Texas Reading Institute, Dr. Bergman is the first to argue that literacy is a serious problem. This problem is why he’s devoted his time, his energy and, for the past two decades, his career to helping children and youth with reading difficulties through an intensive, methodi-cal program called explicit reading instruction.

“Learning to read English is a beast,” Dr. Bergman says. “Some do quite well no matter how you teach them, but about 40 percent of kids just really struggle.”

The statistic he refers to is known as the Nation’s Report Card, or the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In the 2013 report, 34 percent of fourth grad-ers scored “below basic,” which means these children cannot pick up their science or history book and com-prehend what they are reading.

“If we do the right things, most of those kids can learn to read at grade level, and almost all of them can develop reading skills that are useful for self-care, self-entertain-ment and job training,” asserts Dr. Bergman, whose high-caliber staff of reading clinicians currently serves 120 students with challenges ranging from attention deficit and English as a second language to dyslexia (which affects spelling and reading), dysgraphia (writing), dyscalculia (numbers), autism and mental retardation.

A PARENT’S DILEMMAThe father of five children, Dr. Bergman’s passion for lit-eracy began as he witnessed severe cases of poor readers in his medical office. But when two of his own sons began to fall behind in reading, the passion became a quest.

“I remember when my second son, Philip, was in the 6th grade and I would help him with his spelling,” Dr. Bergman recalls. “And the tears start coming down your cheeks involuntarily—you can’t control it. You’re just so frustrated in trying to be positive, but you don’t know what to say to make the words understandable. You just don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Despite Dr. Bergman’s efforts in getting his son’s school to adopt a systematic phonics approach, the prog-ress was grim. Philip entered high school at a 5th grade reading level and by the time he graduated, he had only advanced two grade levels. Meanwhile, Dr. Bergman delved through research from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and made cold calls to Switzerland and Wales to glean knowl-edge from the world’s major reading researchers.

Convinced that explicit instruction was the only way to achieve results, Dr. Bergman worked intensively with Philip after high school and three years later, he was finally reading at an adult level. Today, Philip is one of Family Literacy Network’s reading clinicians and has been the examiner or teacher in five NICHD studies.

A FAMILY’S CHALLENGEOn this particular Saturday morning, Philip Bergman works with 9-year-old Rachel Payne and her mother, Tricia. They are situated in a small room with two worksta-tions, separated by privacy dividers and simply equipped with a table, several chairs and a few instructional

OFounded by Dr. Eldo

Bergman, the Family Literacy Network helps

children and youth with reading difficulties

through an intensive program called explicit

reading instruction.

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materials. The walls, a calming pale yellow, have telltale scuffs from the back of a chair. But a new coat of paint can wait. There is important work to be done here.

Just outside the room are five other workstations filled to the brim with children, clinicians, observers and the steady buzz of one-on-one instruction. Even Dr. Bergman’s office is occupied with diagnostic testing.

Rachel, a third grader from The Woodlands, comes to a particularly difficult word: religious. Philip directs her to break it into “chunks” and “build” the word. But she’s just not getting it. He brings out a white board to try a different approach. She keeps trying, but at one point turns to her mother with pleading eyes and whines, “Mama.”

Her mother and instructor offer patient guidance. Rachel sticks with it and she eventually gets “religious.”

But it’s seeing this anxiety in her eyes that brought George and Tricia Payne to Family Literacy in the first

place. They noticed signs that Rachel might learn dif-ferently as early as preschool with the unconventional way she formed her letters. In kindergarten, it was obvi-ous she was just memorizing words, not reading with understanding, Tricia Payne recalls.

“By the first month of first grade, we realized we were in a crisis,” Payne says. “She was not going to develop [to the next level] because she did not have the phone-mic awareness.”

The Paynes hired a tutor for Rachel, but a year later, realized it wasn’t enough. In desperation, they discovered Family Literacy Network online and had Rachel tested. The results revealed dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia.

Although Tricia Payne was nervous about the long drive to the office and the challenge of serving as “tutor” at home, Rachel experienced immediate results. After just a few months in the program, she was reading

Nine-year-old Rachel Payne has been going through the intensive reading program. After just a few months, she is reading at grade level. “That was incredible,” says Rachel’s mother Tricia Payne (far right).

+ scan this pagewith Layar to see Dr. Bergman’s team at work with Rachel Payne.

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what is

Explicit Reading Instruction?

The term “explicit instruction” has existed in education since the ’80s (Rosenshine, 1986), if not before.

According to reading expert Dr. Joseph K. Torgesen, explicit instruction “does not leave anything to chance and does not make assumptions about the skills and knowledge that children will acquire on their own.”

Simply put, every concept is fully explained. Children don’t have to memorize or guess unfamiliar words, a source of frustration and anxiety for any struggling reader. This method identifies a child’s specific reading obstacles, and tailors lessons to overcome these hurdles in an intensive, systematic approach.

Unlike most school reading programs, explicit instruction doesn’t rely on “sight words.” The focus instead is on “building” words and providing students with the skills to improve phonemic awareness (understanding that individual sounds make up words), segmenting (isolating sounds) and blending (putting sounds together to form words)—all at their own pace.

“If steps are small enough, you can restore confidence in the child,” says Dr. Eldo Bergman, director of Family Literacy Network. “If you work at the level of their current achievement, then it’s easier for them to add things to it.”

At Family Literacy, the process looks something like this:

+ The student is tested to determine the status of the knowledge and skills needed to learn to read. This determines the appropriate instructional level.

+ One-on-one instruction begins, typically once or twice a week during the school year. An intensive program is also available for out-of-state, homeschool and summer students.

+ Family Literacy provides support materials and trains parents on new coaching strategies and appropriate daily support at home.

+ Parents send in weekly recordings via Internet and Skype, and instructors give feedback for optimal success.

+ The student progresses through the program’s scope and sequence, moving up to the next level as new skills are gained.

+ With consistent daily practice, students of explicit reading instruction make significant strides in accuracy, fluency, vocabulary, syntax, spelling and—the epitome of literacy—comprehension.

at grade level and earned her first B. “That was incredible,” Payne says. “Because we are

diligent about working with it at home, we can see her success, and she sees her success.”

A PHYSICIAN’S BREAKTHROUGHFor Dr. Bergman, leaving medicine was a 10-year pro-cess that culminated in 1992. His focus shifted to the efforts of his nonprofit and he began a doctoral pro-gram in psychology to “get the statistical tools to be efficient,” he says.

The instructional materials that the Family Literacy Network uses today were written entirely by Dr. Bergman and his staff—a gradual process over 25 years.

“We originally didn’t plan to write our own materials for our own program,” he says. “We were thinking we could take books from different programs and mix and match.”

+scan this pagewith Layar to hear Dr. Bergman’s take on learning English.

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But after reviewing materials from 20 existing pro-grams, including 906 student readers, Dr. Bergman con-cluded that the task was impossible because of the lack of consistency in scope and sequence. So in 2001, he began devising his own materials with the cooperation of researchers, constantly updating and revising as new issues and challenges arose for his students.

In the meantime, Dr. Bergman participated in a groundbreaking NICHD study with the University of Texas, which used brain scans to show how the visual, sound and language centers of the brain interact while reading. The brain scans of readers were markedly dif-ferent from nonreaders or poor readers, in this case dyslexic students ages 7 to 17. After the initial scan, each student began one-on-one explicit instruction, two hours a day for two months. The follow-up brain scans showed astonishing results, published in 2002.

“This study was the first demonstration that explicit reading therapy not only brought reading into the aver-age range in just two months,” Dr. Bergman says, “but also led to massive shifts in brain activity, normalizing the brain scans.”

A STUDENT’S CLIMBIn recent years, Dr. Bergman has become fascinated with the study of how languages differ in their reading demands on students.

The biggest problem with the English language, he says, is the complexity of the code. “You can show people right away that you can say the letter ‘o,’ but you have to know the context of the word to know how to pronounce it.”

In English, many letters have multiple pronunciations depending on the structure of the word they appear within. This is not true with most other languages. Children in Finland, for example, learn to read with remarkable ease. Dr. Bergman explains this phenom-enon with gusto.

“In Finnish, you have single letters, each representing a sound, and each sound you hear is always represented by the same letter. Period. End of the reading task. No exceptions. No digraphs. After the first 10 weeks of ini-tial reading instruction, the average Finnish child is 90 percent accurate,” he says.

EARLY INTERVENTIONLearning to read English, on the other hand, Dr. Bergman compares to climbing a steep mountain—a journey that takes children an average of 2.7 years, according to Philip H. K. Seymour in his 2005 research, “Early Reading Development in European Orthographies.”

Using explicit instruction, Dr. Bergman strives to “carve a staircase around the mountain” with small, manageable steps.

“Some kids are going to catch their breath after one

step,” he says. “The important thing is to go up step by step, whatever the rate is, because as you go up, the view of the valley becomes more interesting. It becomes motivat-ing and you want to continue climbing to get to the top. And, of course, at the top is grade-level comprehension.”

Dr. Bergman’s vision for students and families dealing with reading challenges is simple: early intervention. He plans to conduct a study with a local university using explicit instruction in a lab school kindergarten class-room, in the hopes that the subsequent findings will urge all schools to adopt the method.

“The best research shows that about 95 percent of children could learn to read in the average range if they received appropriate instruction,” Dr. Bergman says.

For now, he encourages parents, teachers and friends of struggling readers to call Family Literacy Network for help—the sooner, the better.

THE THRILL OF SUCCESSAsk Dr. Bergman about his average success rate com-pared to other approaches, and he responds not with statistics but with success stories.

Like the sixth grader, a nonreader with an IQ of 43, who reads at a mid-first grade level one year after start-ing at Family Literacy. Or the child with muscular dys-trophy who moves out of the resource class and receives a “Ravenous Reader” award. Or the autistic third grader, homeschooled by mom, who achieves grade-level reading after 18 months. Or Rachel Payne, whose reading, once choppy and monotone, is now fluid and full of inflection.

It’s stories like these that keep Dr. Bergman’s passion for literacy alive.

“I suppose I will never retire until I’m buried,” he says, only half joking. “You see them responding and that’s gratifying. You see them not responding and you want to know why and what can you do about it.”

And thus, his quest continues.

Explicit reading instruction identifies a child’s obstacles and tailors lessons to overcome these hurdles. Since starting the program, Rachel Payne (right) earned her first B in reading at school.

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