ThatReadingThing

Edit: April 2009- If  you’re an adult literacy practitioner, please visit my new site.

Episode 1

What an hour! There was so much right and so much wrong that it’s hard to know where to start.

Here’s what was right:

• Phil himself as the choice of a teacher who is compassionate and daring. He was also honest about his own lack of experience with adults and the difficulties of teaching a class of adults with a wide range of abilities and struggles.

• The public denouncement of the “Skills for Life” curriculum. I know it was clever editing but the Skills for Life instructor’s last words were, “They pass their exams; that is what it’s all about”.  OK.  (Please note: I don’t like SfL but I would never condemn the amazing teachers out there in Adult Ed – just in case anyone thought I was having a go at the people who serve daily in the trenches!)

• An accurate portrayal of what it means when an adult says “I can’t read”. The range of reading ages and the variety of barriers to learning were realistic and moving.

• The passion and emotion. A lack of reading ability isn’t just a clinical issue. It’s not about statistics and exams and certificates and government funding. It’s about humiliation and pride, fear and hope, frustration and joy.

• Phonics. To quote Teresa, “Those sounds have given me life”. Phil was so right to question why the Skills for Life framework doesn’t include comprehensive decoding before anything else. What we didn’t learn is that SfL sees learning the sounds of letters as too patronising for adults. I think we should pay Theresa as an adult literacy consultant and have her repeat that sentence until someone listens. “Those sounds have given me life.”

So what was wrong?

• “I’m using a method for children because there’s nothing out there like this for adults.” Um, Phil, you have a free set of ThatReadingThing materials. I guess I should have followed that one up better…. I could see that he was using materials that didn’t require any training and it was interesting to see the cost of that. All teachers need the basic information in Explicit Language!

• While I use, approve of and enjoy alternative teaching methods, I’ve learned how important it is for seriously struggling older readers to have a very structured programme at the early stages. I think all three of James, Linda and Teresa could have got even further if they’d had one-to-one input as well as the group activities.

• Keep it about reading and writing. I so wanted to hand Linda a dry erase pen and the TRT boards and get her writing letters and saying the sounds – simple words and limited sounds to start but always about reading and writing rather than sign language and “tricks”. I did like the initial building of words using pipe cleaners because it interrupted Linda’s classroom panic but it didn’t help James and some intensive and encouraging one-to-one might have. (I like to think)

• Rules. Whenever I’ve been tempted to teach a rule (and damn the exceptions!), I find that the student spends far too much intellectual effort remembering the rule rather than the fact that you say “oe” when you see the symbol oa.

Looking forward to next week.

Episode 2

Again, the programme was both heart-warming and heart-wrenching. Lessons learned?

1. Teachers (and parents) have a lot to answer for.

2. “Not like school” is paramount for people who feel that they failed every single day they walked into a classroom. I’m not convinced that Phil ever understood what he did wrong by writing quickly on the board and using words like “connectives”.

3. Commas are important for some people and not for others (yet).

4. General knowledge builds vocabulary which increases comprehension. Kelly didn’t understand her son’s report because she wasn’t sure what was meant by “reading between the lines”, not because she couldn’t read the words. Phonics is an essential ingredient in learning to read but not the only one; that’s why for every hour TRT lesson, I suggest 45 minutes of TRT and fifteen minutes of talking about a wide range of subjects.

5. The squiggles on the page represent the sounds we say and nothing in teaching reading and spelling should go against that fact.

It’s this last fact that hasn’t been used to its full potential. Adults who struggle with reading and spelling need to know that English is limited and learnable. You can use all sorts of activities to accommodate various learning styles but it’s not fair to allow people to continue to believe that the language is utter chaos.

Yesterday, Kelly got stuck on the word “touched”. She should have had all the tools to read “t” _ “ch” and “ed”. Even if she had read “towched” she probably would have got to the right word instantly.

So the answer to, “What word is t-o-u-c-h-e-d?”, is (learner in italics):

Say the sounds and tell me what you hear.

“t” “ow” “ch” “d” “towched”?

Do you know a word towched?

“Oh – touched!”

That’s usually how it goes. There are only 4 sounds represented by the ou spelling. (house, you, touch, soul)

That leads to Linda’s experience with cutting up the word trouble. Phil suggests tro-u-ble “troe-oo-bull”) as a suitable “spelling strategy”. This caused me to yell “NO!!” so loud that my husband asked if I was ok. And I wasn’t.

The problem with using a phonics method for children is that it doesn’t present the code in an adult way. Phonics isn’t just for communicating that “c” “a” “t” says “cat”. It’s also for communicating that /ou/ is a normal way to spell the sound “u” in common words like trouble and touch. For a more in-depth explanation, read through this: ThatReadingThing – The Basics.

It didn’t look as though Phil gave his students time to understand the more complex English code. If he had, Linda would have been encouraged to cut her spelling word into sounds: t   r   ou   b   le. Then I would have had her write the word, saying the sounds clearly as she wrote. The only difficult bit of “trouble” is remembering that you spell the “u” sound ou.

Phil’s assertion that Linda is a “whole word learner” is condemning her to a life of poor reading skills. She will never be able to memorise enough words to read the books that she has on her shelves. She is certainly very visual but she needs to practice associating what she sees with what she hears. Read more about working with an adult visual learner here and here.

In short, use every gimmick available if that suits your style of teaching, (I quite liked the space-hoppers but could never carry it off), but don’t lose sight of how the language works. Linguistic principles don’t change according to learning and teaching styles. If we translate that into maths, every learner needs to know that 2 is less than 3 and more than 1 – whether they learn best by manipulating cuisenaire rods (my favourite) or by writing sums.

Roll on episode 3.

Episode 3

There’s not much to say about this episode so I’ll let John speak about the exams they were asked to sit:

“Bollocks. No point at all for what I need for my reading and writing.”

There’s no doubt that Teresa seemed to benefit from writing the tests, but I’m not sure it was worth the cost to Kelly, James and John (or any of the others that we didn’t see).

But I come to the exam debate with my own cultural baggage and at least Phil could demonstrate that some of his students had made huge progress in a short time and at the hands of a self-confessed amateur in the adult education classroom. Overall, we have to congratulate Phil and be thankful that the whole world of struggling adult readers has been accurately portrayed on television.

I know (because they call me) that there are individual instructors and whole college departments out there doing what they can on very small budgets to make phonic based reading instruction available to their students.

So, overall, thanks Phil for sticking your neck out.

Thanks for taking risks and demonstrating that everyone learning to read needs to figure out the connection between the sounds that they hear and the squiggles on the page. There IS age-appropriate material out there. Just ask.

And finally, thanks for showing us the people behind the statistics.

For more from Phil, see today’s Guardian.