http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/11/15/3366348.htm

I am also reading Iain McGilchrist’s book, The Master and his Emissary, Yale University Press, the early chapters of which seem relevant.

Two quotes from the book:
  
1. “the comprehension of language is distinct from that of speech”
What effect does this have on teaching reading by sounding out words phonetically, rather than understanding the meaning of the word?

2. “the right hemisphere sees things whole, and in their context,
This is the way that both the excellent readers, and the people who taught themselves to read, do reading.

where the left hemisphere sees things abstracted from context, and broken into parts”
Is this the effect of sounding out letters to figure out what the word is?

McGilchrist argues in his book that the two hemispheres fight for dominance, and that once established the dominance is lasting.  Is it possible that with massive attention to phonetics, we are ‘teaching’ children to have a dominant left hemisphere for reading, when the competent model is bilateral, with a strong emphasis on the right hemisphere?  Some children do not seem to make the shift.  It leaves their reading slow and laborious, and their spelling faulty.

When teachers insist that children sound out each letter, the child loses the ‘metaphor’ of the word. They believe that reading is sounding out. This is probably why many children never develop into competent readers from this highly phonetic approach. Some children make the leap themselves, but many don’t.

I regularly encounter children who cannot ‘read’ for meaning, but can ‘sound out’ the words in a sentence fairly competently. They think that this is reading, and that it is very hard, and useless. Not surprising that they have given up.

And if many people can learn to read before they go to school, and learn that on their own, it cannot actually take four years to teach it, if we learned to do it better. That is what I am trying to do. Robert Dilts got the model for spelling, but didn’t develop a method for teaching it to people who might be missing necessary skills that make up the strategy; Magical Spelling is the teaching strategy that installs all of the skills. I am fairly confident that I now have most of the ‘model’ for becoming literate; I just need practice to be able to develop a foolproof teaching strategy. This takes both a lot of practice, and lots of unusual learners. As happened in Magical Spelling, I am no longer interested in children who learn to read straight away. (Their parents are though, and that funds my research.)

A ‘natural’ way to learn to read

An Overview
For a number of years I have been modelling how people who learn to read, by themselves, before they start school, accomplish that skill. The people I modelled came from diverse economic and educational backgrounds, and had diverse levels of intelligence. As far as I can tell, this ‘learning to read’ model is consistent; they all did it the same way. I wondered whether you could teach this very efficient model to children who have not happened upon it themselves? I taught it to reception children in two primary schools, with some intake from areas of severe deprivation. I worked with non-reading children below the top level of the classes. In general, I saw the children once a week, for twenty minutes to half an hour, in small groups of one to three children; depending on concentration levels. I saw most of them about ten times. The class teachers were not carrying on the method during the week.

The answer is yes, you can teach this modelled method to other children. Eight of these children became fluent readers by the end of the scheme, some of them in five sessions. They knew lots of sight words; they could tackle new words by context, syntax, phonetics or family; they actively sought out new books to read, and were well above their age level in reading. All of the children learned to read many words.

I also used the method with older children (six through nine years) who hadn’t grasped reading yet. It worked just as well with them. These results were regardless of diagnosed specific learning difficulties like dyslexia. I have not tried teaching this to learning disabled children yet.

The Model
Those who learn to read by themselves start by learning specific words which are interesting to them. Usually the pattern is an echo of how we begin to speak: nouns (milk), adjectives (big milk), verbs (drink big milk), adverbs (drink fast), and then structure words (I drink the big milk very fast). There were some exceptions because of particular interests or because of specific books.

Once they knew a number of sight words, the children began to discover phonetic patterns for themselves, and used them (as well as pictures and context) to decipher new words they met.

Typically, these children read silently unless asked to read out loud. One commented that her mother was astonished to discover that she could read the stories herself, that were being read to her at night, at four years old. The girl thought that the ‘done’ thing was to listen to her mother, and hadn’t thought to say that she could read it herself.

As older readers, these children seldom used phonics. They sometimes read words out loud that they pronounced incorrectly, though they understood the meaning perfectly.

What is reading?
If we say a person can read, we expect that they can see words, know their meaning, and understand the specific meaning of them in the context of the sentence, paragraph and chapter where they find them. They do NOT have to be able to pronounce them to understand them. In fact, profoundly deaf, (signing) people can become literate in English, even though they never hear or say any of the words. In addition, pronouncing doesn’t always indicate that they can understand the words. We listen to children pronounce words, because it is an easy way for us to discover whether they can ‘read’ a passage. What we really want to know is whether they understand the passage. Pronouncing isn’t the same as reading and comprehending.

Children who have had hearing problems, which have made their speech difficult, can sometimes sound out words according to the phonetics they have been taught, but don’t recognise the words which they have sounded out, even though the teacher recognises them. The same is true for children who have heavily accented speech. Much of the recorded early success of synthetic phonics may be due to teaching children from Glaswegian primary schools to speak ‘British received pronunciation’ so that the phonetics work better. The skill learned does not always seem to lead to older readers. When a black southern USA teenager was shown the word ‘asked’, he knew exactly what it meant, and pronounced it ‘axed’. No wonder he was not learning to read with the phonics scheme his literacy unit was using.

How can you teach people to read this way?
In the best of all possible worlds, I would teach individual children with magnetic words of their choosing. Once they recognise a few words you can start adding in some more. They can arrange and re-arrange them to make new or longer sentences. Have lots of ‘and’s. What you are looking for is the recognition that individual words have a stable meaning, which is modified by the context, and that the sentence tells them something interesting, funny, or just enjoyable. When I am tutoring at home, this is what I do. Children MUCH prefer to learn to read their own sentences. If you try to fob them off with a ‘nearly like’ word which you have in stock, they visibly lose interest. You need some magnetic strips of paper, so you can quickly write the exact word they want. I have recently found a virtual fridge poetry computer programme, which I am going to trial. I think it will solve this problem.

In schools I am limited in both time and materials, and usually work with three or four children at a time, so I start with sets of words which I prepare and bring in. The words are chosen partly because the things they represent are in nearly every classroom. They also have some visual similarities, because I want the children to learn to visually discriminate between fine differences in the words.

The nine words I start with are: window, table, chair, pencil, book, door, floor, bin, box. I have sets of these words printed large on coloured card (a different coloured set for each child; saves on the sorting at the end!). Each child puts their words out on the table, so they can see them all. Then I hold up one of my words, and ask them to find the one of their words, which looks just like mine. I don’t say the word. I continue variations of this game until I am fairly sure that each child can match one of their words to the one I hold up.

Next I stick each of my words around the room, on the thing it names. We might walk around and look at them, and say the name of the thing the word is on. Then I ask them to pick up one of their words, walk around the room, and put their word near the one like it, and say the word. We continue until all the words are out, and then gather them back in, saying each one again as they pick it up. After several variations on this task, and when I think they can match all the words, I take down my words, and ask them to put their words on the correct object.

The next step is to get out some structure word phrases on card. The ones I have been using are: Put the, on the, in the, under the, Can you put the, Point to the, Sit on the. These are a bit random, and are calculated to make as many sentences as possible with the words we have been learning. I start out with Put the and on the, and tell them what the phrases say. Then I get them to give me one of their words, maybe pencil, so now it says Put the pencil, and then another word after on the, so it might say Put the pencil on the table. I keep changing the sentences, with the words they offer me, and start to point out that some of the sentences are ‘serious’ (make sense) and others are silly. They far prefer the silly ones. Put the door under the pencil. Once this concept is grasped, they are asked to say whether they think the words they have chosen will make a serious or silly sentence, before they put their words in the spaces between the structure words. This allows me to be sure they understand the meaning of the structure words and the nouns. Each time a child constructs a sentence from the nouns and structure words, they read it, and maybe another child does as well. As soon as they have grasped the idea, I ask them to read the sentence silently and do whatever it says, without speaking. Sit on the floor. Put the pencil under the table.

Once the children can do all of these things (between two and four sessions) we start on easy, repetitive picture books of their choice, available in most classrooms. Choosing one they want is more important than getting the ‘right’ level. I usually get them to read several sentences together, so that what they have read always means something.

The rules for this ‘reading’ are: they say all the words they know or can easily guess, they look at the pictures to see if they can figure out the meaning quickly; if not I immediately tell them what the word says. If there has been a break in continuity while they are ‘discovering’ a new word, I get them to repeat the beginning of the sentence. They are not asked to sound out the word if someone is there to tell them what it is. “Stuck on this word!” one boy shouts, after his strategies to decipher it have failed. Later we start some sounding, for when no one is there to ask. They enjoy reading the passage two or three times, to be sure they have all the words correct.

I am noticing that when children learn to read this way, they automatically can spell correctly as well, even words that they cannot pronounce. This makes sense with the Magical Spelling strategy. www.magicalspellinglimited,com

I realise that this method presently requires more individual time than most primary teachers can find. Perhaps it would mean training parents, or older pupils, to spend ten minutes, several times a week, reading this way with a child. On the other hand, it does not require additional expensive materials, and when successful, releases the teacher to do other kinds of learning with the children.

In September, I will begin working with a reception class (rising 5s) teacher and her pupils, one day a week. Our goal is to teach all the children to read competently, and in a manner which will allow them to be able to, and want to, develop their reading skills independently. We hope we can do this by the Easter break. I’ll keep you posted on this site.

I continuously revise the words they are learning, until they can name them out of context. If I have access to a computer, I print out the sentences they have formed, and revise them. If not, we re-make them with the magnetic words, and re-read them. Any hesitation gets a prompt from me. Parents are present, and I ask them to do the same at home.

I have been working in a school, and 3 five year olds have learned to read in 5 twenty minute sessions! They still need to learn lots of words, but they know how now, and are keen to do so. So far, I know how to do this one to one, and in tiny groups. Maybe the method can scale up to a class, or maybe we need to do a little time with individual children. But my sense is that once they have the principle, and are interested, the rest is easy.

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.