Interview with Tony, age 20, March 2012.
Tony started That Reading Thing with Worth Unlmited volunteer, Lindsay, in May 2011.

Q: What have you got out of That Reading Thing?
A: Confidence. Like at work ‘cos I have to read forms etc.

Q: How did you feel about reading before you started?
A: I couldn’t read. I could read words here or there. College work was really hard. Eventually I finally got help and the read the questions to me but I felt embarrassed. Before that I would either skip the question or I had a go at a few. I was used to not reading but I wanted to be able to read as well.
I didn’t think That Reading Thing would go this well. I was a bit nervous. I didn’t think I’d be able to get to read this fast.

Q: How do you feel about reading now?
A: I feel proud of myself.

Q: What’s changed now that you can read?
A: I feel different in myself. I know from when I was in school, I was meant to get help a  long time ago but everyone kept letting me down but now I’ve done it myself (through TRT).
I can read books. That’s good ‘cos you learn things from books. It’s helped with my job ‘cos I had to read few things I had to sign: I had to read them and then they asked me questions about them: like health and safety things and what to do and not do customer wise.
Before That Reading Thing I would have been able to read my letters about housing. I was ignoring them; I had about £2000 of fines from landlords, etc which I didn’t know about. I had opened the letters and tried to read them but didn’t understand it. I put them in the drawer and left them and hoped everything would be fine. A litter would come a couple of months later and I would do the same thing.
Now when letters arrive I read them. If I can’t understand them now I take them to my aunt’s and she helps me deal with them. I understand most of them now.

Q: What’s Lindsay been like? (the volunteer)
A: Helpful, understanding, has a lot of patience. She praises me.

Q: Did TRT help you pass your college exams?
A: No – it was too soon. (the exams were in June 11)

Q: Did TRT help you look for work?
A: Yes it helped me on the internet, looking for work on the internet. I needed help before but after TRT I could do it on my own.

Q: Did TRT help with getting a job?
A: Yes. I could read the questionnaire on the internet to apply for the job. My sister helped me but it was less help than I had before.

Q: Has doing That Reading Thing affected your behaviour?
A: I remember when I was in one class and the teacher asked me to read a book or something and I read it bad and at lunchtime the other students they took the piss out of me for it. I had a fight and got excluded for about 2 weeks. People used to pick on me when someone would ask me to read. It happened 2 or 3 times a week.
Now I try to avoid fights with people. I’ve grown up now – there’s no point in fighting. The change came when I started getting used to reading. It was partly the job and partly ‘cos I could read. I don’t hardly get angry now at all – apart from with my sisters! I don’t really get frustrated anymore. Now I know I can ask for help from family and friends. That’s as a result of working with Lindsay.

Q: How would you describe yourself in three words?
A: Confident, more dedicated and kind.

Q: How would you describe yourself before you started That Reading Thing?
A: ‘A little shit’.

In Sandwell & Dudley, it looks like this:

A young person comes for reading help. She’s really struggling and self conscious and, for the first few sessions, her youth worker/tutor Ellie thinks she may not make any progress. Then all of a sudden it clicks and she’s off and reading -using her new strategies to attack the long words required of a secondary school student.

And what do her teachers notice? Yes, her reading has improved and she’s able to engage in lessons, but the equally important thing is that this Year 10 pupil has, for the first time, got friends at school. For a teenager, improved reading is about so much more than books.

At another school, youth worker Amy is sent a young woman who has serious self-esteem issues. The school assumes that these problems will be sorted by Amy in her mentor role. But it turns out that this student has been laughed at by classmates because she’s been forced to read aloud and just can’t do it. (That’s another blog post altogether  – some teachers should be named and shamed.) Anyway, Amy, as both trained youth worker and reading tutor helps this young woman to hold her head up in a classroom because she can now read.

If you’re interested in how youth workers can support reading in your school, get in touch here.

From our first moment of meeting, 17 year old Chris made it very clear that he didn’t “do education”. He used the word never and no way to describe his feelings about what I was proposing. So instead of an assessment, we chatted. I asked if he would try a bit of one of the assessments and promised that it was nothing like school. He said he would after a cup of tea. He made a great cuppa, we swapped a couple of recipes (no kidding), then he kept his side of the bargain. He could decode every word on the first page except for one little error. When I showed him the page, he corrected it easily.

He did the same with the second and third pages of the word reading assessment. I don’t usually show a young person their results but Chris needed to know. He said that he never got anything right at school. After some more chat he said, “I don’t usually do anything like education but I think I might do this. I hate when I have to fill out a form and I write like a two year old.”

In the course of our meetings I learned that he was “special needs” so he couldn’t read. He learned that the label was a huge weight that had been weighing him down and discouraging him from even trying. On the fourth meeting he was reading a book that I’d brought from home off my own bookshelf, a book that I’d read and enjoyed, a history book with long words and complex sentences. We took it slowly and talked about what was going on in the story.

In the penultimate paragraph is this sentence:

“The public conscience was at last awakened and soon after that there were changes.”

I told Chris that he had read that as though he really understood what it meant and I asked if he could say it in his own words. He hesitated and thought carefully before he spoke.

“It means that people finally saw what was going on and it was bad so they changed things.”

This from a lad who considered himself so “special needs” that he couldn’t learn, who likened himself to a two year old and who, apparently, never got anything right. He’s got a long way to go. He may not get a degree or even a GCSE. His life is still difficult. But, he now knows that he’s not stupid or thick or a failure and he’s got some new strategies for getting things down on paper. And our lessons? We only ever had four because he decided he could handle a college course.

Not all relationships are so dramatic but every young person who takes even a few educational steps accomplishes something worth celebrating. For me, the most exciting thing to see is a young person feeling safe enough to make a mistake in my presence.

Then my dear friend andGet into Reading facilitator, Helen, commented that she used it often- and she got even less lol. (sorry, Helen)

Better explain myself.

If we’re being honest about the English language, we have to admit that it comes with a complex written code.  There are an awful lot of ways to represent the sounds that we say. However – and this is a big big deal in my world – the code is limited and learnable and NOT adequately represented by GBS’s old chestnut.

But that’s not what this is really about. This is about unwittingly creating higher barriers to reading when we should be tearing them down.

Helen and I share two key things:

1. a commitment to the educationally vulnerable and
2. a desire for our vulnerable learners to experience some of the riches that reading can bring to one’s life.

Because of this, I am desperate not to alienate people who struggle with reading by suggesting that the English code is beyond their grasp.  In fact, in my experience, there are very few people who can’t master the skills and knowledge required for decoding. If they struggle, it’s because they haven’t had a chance to discover these things for themselves in a safe and structured educational environment.

This week the government published an update of the 2003 Skills for Life Survey. Jonathon Douglas blogs about it on the National Literacy Trust Policy Blog and I’ve highlighted a bit of that post here.

…there are still 15% of adults at or below entry level 3 (the equivalent of the level expected in the National Curriculum of11 year olds). Worryingly, the number with entry level 1 (the equivalent of the National Curriculum’s 5-7 year old) has grown slightly between 2003 and 2011, from 3.4% to 5%. The research estimates this group to be 1.7 million.

“Low hanging fruit” is an ugly term, but the statistics do suggest that the approaches of the last decade have been successful in improving the literacy skills of adults who have already mastered the basics, whilst not impacting significantly on the 1 in 6 for whom the issues are more complex.

In the past 10 years I’ve met a few older strugglers who will always find decoding difficult due to a learning difficulty.  However, many of those “1 in 6″, with or without a diagnosed learning difficulty, simply don’t know that the squiggles on the page represent the sounds that we say out loud. Instead, they have memorised loads of little words by sight and they guess (badly) at the longer content words.

During the first few hours of That Reading Thing, they learn to read from left to right through the big words and listen for a word they know. The goal is to get them from reading words like fax and plug to words like conditioning and instructions in 5 hours or less.  Most will be able to spell accomplishment in hour 3.

Generally, learning to decode is not a huge challenge but a joyful ride. The biggest barrier to reading at this stage is a tiny vocabulary. I can get almost anyone to read the following in a few lessons:

The instructions were simple but the desk was difficult to assemble.

However, this will be meaningless if the learner doesn’t know what it means to assemble something. That’s where Get Into Reading comes in.  It’s marvellous, amazing and I wish I’d thought of it.

I find myself dreaming of literacy instruction (you know, in the Land of Abundant Time & Funding) where adult struggling readers get one-to-one time where they practice blending and segmenting and discover the ins and outs of the English code and then spend time in a group discovering wonderful literature and increasing their vocabularies. It’s the element of discovery in both situations that make them so compatible and so appropriate for older learners.

So what’s a better way to explain the complexity of the code?   Here’s a little PowerPoint which can be borrowed. Just let me know if you’d like to use it.  Why Phonics for Adults?

Thursday & Friday: 

Black Country (where Canadian ears have to work quite hard just to understand the banter)

Training Venue: Ormiston Sandwell Community Academy

Trainees: 16 Year 12s and 13s who want to work as reading mentors with younger pupils.

What a positive and energetic bunch of young people. I can’t wait to hear the stories of TRT making a difference in this school. There will be improved reading, but the peer mentoring approach will also mean enriched relationships amongst students and boosted confidence for those 6th form mentors.

Amy from Worth Unlimited will support and mentor the mentors. Double decker youth work! What a privilege to work with this project. 

Saturday & Sunday: 

Walthamstow

Training Venue: Worth Unlimited head office

Trainees: 7 adult volunteers from the community.

Thankfully, just a little less energy – but lots of fun. The highlight for me was hearing from two volunteers who trained at the beginning of the year and are working with young people.  

Danny volunteers at the Walthamstow Youth Offending Team and has a steady stream of referrals coming his way.  The boys love that he’s there just for him.  The YOT loves what’s happening in the lives of the young men. 

Lynsey volunteers with a local young man who just wanted to improve his reading.  His big news, 20 weeks into TRT, is that he has a job!  We’re thrilled for him and so grateful to Lynsey for her commitment. 

TRT without committed volunteers is nothing. 

What’s  next?  Back to the Black Country to train up more 6th formers at a different school.  30 of them! Stay tuned.

We go back almost 13 years – all of those spent working on getting excellent reading help to those who need it.

For anyone working with adults, especially in a classroom situation, Phonics for Adult Literacy offers the basics of using phonics as a tool to help adults improve their reading.

Content is now organised in pages rather than in blog style. Future content will be added on request – so please request!

Phonics for Adult Literacy

However, the new contact page seems to have a glitch so, if you tried to get in touch and didn’t get a response, please try again.

Tricia