Looking for Literacy©
An Introduction
I was originally trained in the USA as a secondary teacher of English and Drama. In the USA that would only have qualified me to teach in a secondary school. We did no basic skills work, and didn’t explore reading and other literacy skills. I would have had to do additional training to teach in a primary school.
When I was sent by the Peace Corps to teach in Nigeria, I was expected to teach English as a second language to young men, and also to teach them to teach literacy in primary schools. I realised that I had no idea how to teach reading and writing. I experimented, tried things out in the college and in primary schools, and most of my students left as fairly capable teachers, certainly better than most of the ones they had been taught by.
When I moved to England, they wouldn’t accept my American teaching qualifications, and insisted I did a post graduate certificate in education. I decided to do the nursery/infant course so that I could learn all the things about literacy that I should have known in Nigeria. Alas, I learned nothing at all about literacy, except to examine lots of primary literacy schemes! Over the next ten years of tackling poor literacy amongst perfectly intelligent secondary pupils, and reading my way through mountains of books on literacy, I realised that we didn’t really seem to know how human beings became fluently literate. We had theories, and teaching strategies that sometimes worked for some children, but not for all, and not very quickly.
For the most part, what I have read, what I have been advised by experts, what I have seen other teachers doing, and what I have heard at numerous courses and conferences, didn’t seem to offer an effective strategy for fluent literacy.
I am a fluent reader, writer and speller of English. Mostly I came upon these skills by myself, reading fairly well by the age of four. By the age of eight I had the literacy skills of an average university student. It wasn’t until this age that I learned phonetics. I hadn’t needed them to be literate.
That doesn’t mean that I can read every word, of course. Occasionally when I am reading, I come across a word that is unfamiliar. I may stop, sound it out perhaps, maybe guess its meaning by the ‘family’ it belongs to, perhaps by the sentence context, or maybe I have to go and look it up to understand the sentence. Or I could decide that it isn’t important and ignore it. This is a slow and laborious process which interrupts my understanding of the text, and may mean that I have to go back and re-read several sentences.
Sometimes when I am writing, I want to write a word which I do not know the spelling for. I have to stop, say the word to myself, decide if it can be sounded out, maybe look it up, or if I don’t have a dictionary, find another word that means what I want to say, and which I know how to spell. This is also a slow and laborious process, and stops my train of thought.
Yet, these two processes, which as a fluent reader I only use when stuck, when my usual fluent skills aren’t working, are exactly the processes we teach to children as the way to read, write and spell. Wouldn’t it be kinder to teach them the fluent method?
In my early study of NLP skills, I came across Robert Dilts’ spelling strategy, which he modelled from many good spellers. Modelling is an NLP term meaning that he discovered the internal mental strategy, the physical and mental states, and the external behaviour which are involved in performing a skill, in this case spelling English words.
Because neither of my children could spell, and I had no idea how to teach them, I was fascinated by this concept. I checked it out in my own head, and it seemed to be what I did. I taught it to my children (23 and 25 by then) in about an hour, and suddenly they could spell. For the last 20 years I have been teaching a process for installing Dilts’ strategy in anyone’s head. It always works. It’s always easy. I called it Magical Spelling®. As time went on, I discovered that many children whom we taught to spell this way, dramatically improved in reading and writing as well. At first we put it down to increased confidence, but the improvement was much more systemic than that.
In thinking about what we were teaching when we teach someone to spell with the Magical Spelling® technique, I realised that it might well be part of a circular process, a loop, that enables human beings to become literate. Some people seem to happen upon this process effortlessly. Some people make the connection themselves, while being taught reading at school, though they never seem to have been taught the ‘loop’ itself. Some people never make the connection, and devise some alternative process that allows them to decipher written information in an ineffective and inefficient process that never evolves to fluent literacy. Some never learn to read or write at all.
We are calling that ‘effortless’ group natural readers, spellers, writers. We have been modelling some of these people, and are gaining an insight into how they do this. We think you can quickly and easily teach other people to do it; maybe everyone. This is our first attempt at how it could be done.
