The Simultaneous Multisensory Institute of Language Arts (SMILA), located in Memphis, Tennessee, is an educational organization that is geared toward helping children with specific language difficulties to develop strong reading and writing skills. SMILA has trained educators in the simultaneous, multisensory approach to language arts instruction since 1992. Since its inception, the Institute has been held every summer and has worked with hundreds of educators and students from public and private schools in the Mid-South area. Our program has a successful history and was initially developed at Lester Demonstration School, a public school in Memphis. In 1996, the SMILA training program moved to Shelby Oaks Elementary School, another Memphis City School, where we still continue to work with educators and students to this day. Every June, dedicated classroom teachers, speech pathologists, and school administrators spend four weeks at the Institute developing and enhancing their knowledge of the following components:
Content: What is Taught
- the identification of individual learning styles of students including their strengths and weaknesses
- phonology and phonological awareness
- sound-symbol association
- syllable instruction
- morphology
- syntax
- semantics
Principles of Instruction: How its Taught
- Simultaneous, Multisensory (VAKT)
- Systematic and Cumulative
- Direct Instruction
- Diagnostic Teaching
- Synthetic and Analytic
SMILA operates under the 501(c)(3) charter of the Binghampton Fellowship Foundation. Our mission is to equip and train teachers in the use of the highly effective and proven research-based methods for instructing students to read, write, spell, speak, and comprehend oral and written language. Accredited by the International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council (IMSLEC), SMILA strives to promote language development and literacy for students in the early elementary grades where research has shown it is most effective and, thereby, leads to a more successful educational experience throughout school.
The multisensory method of language arts instruction allows for teaching to all of the learning styles – visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic. Derived from the Slingerland® Approach, the program trains teachers to incorporate the students’ auditory, visual, and tactile/kinesthetic senses into instruction for learning language skills. Links are consistently being made between the visual (what we see), auditory (what we hear), and kinesthetic-tactile (what we feel) pathways in learning to read and write. This approach teaches children and adults to link sounds of the letters with the written symbol and to feel how the letter or letters are formed. For instance, as students learn a new letter, they carefully trace, copy, and write the letter while verbalizing the corresponding letter name. Students then read and spell words, phrases, and sentences using these patterns. Teachers and their students rely on all three pathways for learning rather than focusing on a single method.
Students who do not display symptoms of learning disabilities as they go through school tend to learn by using all of their senses to take in information, or they may naturally learn best through the same style used by the teacher in the classroom. However, for many students, their strongest learning style has not been identified and is not the one being taught to in the classroom; so they are missing vital information needed to achieve. Since reading, writing, and listening are the forms in which most academic instruction are presented, students who fall behind in the early grades are likely not to catch up and perform well throughout the subsequent years of school unless they receive remediation at an appropriate time and with a specially trained tutor.
SMILA provides teachers with the knowledge of language development and the skills needed to help all students make satisfactory progress in oral and written language, reading, decoding and comprehension. SMILA hopes to reach more students by training a larger number of teachers and program instructors each year.
To learn more about how to become trained in the SMILA simultaneous, multisensory approach to language arts instruction, please go to our Professional Development link.
