Stride Ahead: An Aid to Comprehension

The Stride Ahead Manual is for anyone who can read, but who still has difficulty in understanding what they are reading.

Stride Ahead is the natural ‘next step’ from Toe By Toe. Toe By Toe teaches ‘decoding’ skills. This enables students to read more fluently with good pronunciation. However, many still need help in making sense of the written word. This is what Stride Ahead helps to improve.

Stride Ahead has been written for students who can read but have difficulty in understanding what they are reading. I believe that this is the result of their minds being too taken up with the mechanics of decoding the written language to be able to give adequate attention to meaning.

 Often these students become so adept at disguising their poor reading skills (by guesswork allied with contextual clues) that their teachers may not even be aware that they have a problem. In effect, they are on a 'reading plateau' and they often remain there throughout their school careers and on into their adult life.

In the late 70's Keda Cowling created a unique syllable division which was incorporated into the reading manual Toe by Toe. Over the last few years this system has successfully taught thousands of people - dyslexics and non-dyslexics alike - to read (i.e. decode). This success has been due to the application of this easy-to-use syllable division and the structured over-teaching of the phonemes in question.

The aim of Stride Ahead is to make these phonemes so familiar to dyslexic students that they become able to recognise them instantaneously and without concentrated mental effort and thus they can get on with the process of understanding the text in front of them. Timing is the key to this process and careful timing forms the essence of the Stride Ahead method. Is useful in its own right, or as part of a teaching plan involving Toe By Toe.

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Keda Publications (20 Aug 2001)