“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.

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.

Letter and number reversal is something that tripped me up for years - I have evidence still in a scrapbook where, at the age of seven I wrote what looks like PIGG. In fact, it’s 1966.

I know it’s related to difficulties with spacial awareness; even today, telling left from right and reading a conventional clock require my full concentration. In October I felt compelled to tell to a prominent dyslexia specialist that it is of NO help whatsoever to tell someone like me that you can tell your left from your right by making a capital L with you thumb and forefinger; they BOTH look like plausible L’s to me. And just yesterday I amazed my husband by confessing that I don’t know the difference between a 3 and an E until I write them down. (He considers this to be a sign of genius, for which I’m grateful.)

So I fully empathise with Linda’s problem and her struggle to deal with letter shapes in the air.

So what can be done?

DON’T make a “bed” by curling your thumbs and forefingers into a b and a d and hope that this will solve everything.

This is by far the most popular suggestion for fixing b and d reversal. Imagine seeing a 17 year old doing this while he’s trying to fill out a government form. HE’S AN ADULT!! And anyways - someone with a brain like mine will only panic at having to deal with very similar shapes in the air.

DO make this about writing and muscle memory. Associate writing the letter correctly with saying the sound clearly. Demonstrate the following for your student.

Draw 5 x’s on an A4 drywipe board. x x x x x

Using the x as a starting place, make a strong line down saying “b” (the sound, not the letter name) as you make the movement, then follow through with the “ball” part of the letter b.

Do that five times in a row then let your student have a go. Make sure they say “b” (the sound, NOT the letter name) every time they write the downward line.

Clean the board and draw 5 more x’s.

This time, using the x as a starting place, make the circle saying “d” (the sound, not the letter name) as you make the movement, then follow through with the up and down line of the d.

Do that five times in a row then let your student have a go. Make sure they say “d” (the sound, NOT the letter name) every time they write the circle.

This is the best solution I’ve ever encountered and I’ve used it with success many times. I don’t know where it origninated but would be very happy to give credit to whoever thought it up. You may have to do this exercise at every lesson for a while but it eventually becomes automatic for both writing and reading.

I think the “b” is the most memorable and the “d” is remembered by elimination. I’ve seen a seriously struggling reader get to a word, quickly and surreptitiously move his forefinger down and read the work fluently. More grown up and less “special needs” than giant quasi-sign language.

Here’s what was right:

• Phil himself as the choice of a teacher who is 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”. Beautiful: apt and self-condemning. If the adult education system knew anything at all about older struggling readers, they would know that learning to read is about so so so much more than passing exams. (later edit: 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.

Think of learning to read as the downward descent from the top of a mountain. Most people get to the bottom (where all the books in the world exist) sometime during childhood. Struggling readers get caught on a ledge somewhere and most give up hope of rescue.

It’s our job, not to helicopter the stranded one off the mountain but (and pardon the potentially violent imagery), give them a good push off the ledge. You can only do this if they know for a fact that they’re all roped up and won’t be dropped. It’s not easy to get to the bottom but it’s safe and it’s possible.

The scripts you learn in training are the “shove” required.

• Say the sounds and tell me what you hear.

• How many syllables are in serendipity? Say them clearly.

• How do spell the “ee” sound in belief?

A Word About Comprehension

Most of the criticism that I’ve heard about phonic-based reading programmes is that there is no room for comprehension, that students are taught to “bark at print” with no regard for the meaning of the words they are decoding. It is more than obvious that the only reason for a teenager or adult to be reading is to get meaning from the text. However, the extent to which this is successful is related to how much is understood at word level.

Level 1

Understands the word when listening, recognises and understands the word when reading and uses the word comfortably in conversation.

Level 2

Understands the word when listening but doesn’t “just know” the word when reading. Can understand it if able to decode it.

Level 3

Doesn’t understand a word when it’s used in speech and therefore finds no meaning even if able to decode the word perfectly.

For most of us, the majority of words that we come across in speech and print fall into Level 1. For struggling readers, that level is usually severely restricted. Many (even most) of the words that are in Level 1 for us will be Level 2 or even Level 3 for our students.

Make sense of the following:

Most older struggling readers are sesquipedaphobic

I would bet a month’s wages that the last word falls into Level 3 for most teachers. How do you make sense of it? If your Latin is better than mine, you might guess that it’s the fear of big feet—but that seems a bit odd for the context. To get any meaning from the sentence, you will have to look it up in the dictionary or ask someone. (See page 40 for the answer.)

Now here’s a word that you’ve heard but it’s written in a way that will force you to segment each sound until you can “hear” it in your head.

ekszajirait

That’s much more like the experience of a struggling reader who is trying to read a word that they don’t recognize by sight but which is in their spoken vocabulary. The huge challenge is to help students increase their vocabularies so that they can continue to read more and more.

Our students will read better when they have richer vocabularies. They will develop better vocabularies as they listen to new words and use them in speech. (Anyone want to start a Conversation Club?)

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