I Can Read That

She can... if you show her how

One of my students this year is Jack, a seven-year old student enrolled in Grade 2.

When he arrived for his first lesson with me, he announced that he hated school and reading. He used determined and—inventive—strategies to avoid reading and writing as much as possible. Previous testing by the school identified him as someone who had strong learning abilities but who was plagued by a “learning disability”.

I’m certain something is plaguing him, but it isn’t a disability.

You may know a child with a “learning disability”.  He or she can’t read or write at the expected level. But have you ever wondered whether a child’s reading and writing may be blocked not by some mysterious disability but rather by an inappropriate teaching strategy?

Reading and writing in English is based on an alphabet, consisting of 26 letters. These letters, singly or in groups, have been associated with the speech sounds commonly used by native speakers, forming patterns of rules and relationships, together with some exceptions. This means that learning to read and write involves understanding and remembering such relationships, together with their exceptions.

Unfortunately, for years some educators have assumed that the relationships between English speech sounds and the letters and groups of letters of their alphabet are too unpredictable, that the effort required to learn them can’t be justified. As a result, several educators have devised teaching methods—which are now being used in many schools—that require students to memorize whole words, rather than having them learn English orthographic guidelines–spelling rules, in other words– that underlie both reading and writing.

This is wrong, for two reasons.

First, experience and research show that the spelling of most written English words falls into particular, predictable patterns. Fewer than ten percent of English words have to be memorized as wholes. Second, the strategy of simply attempting to read whole words  seems to have produced numbers of students, some with “learning disabilities”, who don’t read or write very well.

That would include my “disabled” student. The one who hated school and reading.

What happened to him?

We’ve spent several months studying the established correspondences between English speech sounds and the alphabet. He now reads at grade level, is able to explain newly acquired principles of the written forms of English, both to me–and to an audience of stuffed animals. And, if his invitation to join him in his school’s Celebration of Learning is an indication, he is proud of his achievement.

Our work continues.