Failure Free Reading was founded in 1988 by Dr. Joseph F. Lockavitch, former classroom teacher, school psychologist, university professor and special education director. Throughout Dr. Lockavitch’s career he continually searched for reading programs to help his students that tested in the bottom reading percentile (15-0%) virtual non-readers. He found that while there were several good programs for students that tested above the 15-20th % there was nothing for his students that fell below those numbers.
Through Dr. Lockavitch’s research he realized that these students that so desperately needed help had three things in common: they were Environmentally Denied, Language Deprived, and Phonetically Deaf. More striking was that there was no reading program out there that took into account these characteristics of non-readers. So through his research Dr. Lockavitch created The Failure Free Reading Methodology. The Failure Free Reading Methodology reduces reading to its simplest form by controlling for the three instructional elements crucial to reading success: repetition, sentence structure and story content. It also takes into account the three characteristics of non-readers.
The methodology is designed to provide a highly structured language development lesson that teaches word recognition, comprehension and fluency. Failure Free Reading offers a wide range of programs infused with The Failure Free Reading Methodology, from the Failure Free Reading Online subscription, FFR’s Rapid Response to Reading Intervention, FFR’s CD-Rom version, and multiple colorful books that coincide with Failure Free’s talking software.