‘Turn left, turn right, you’ll see the Railway pub’.
I want to talk about relieving the anxiety experienced by struggling readers. Some hide their anxiety and suffer quietly while others express it in disruptive or self-harming behaviour. There are young people in every secondary school and adults in every functional skills classroom who panic at the sight of text.
Many have a vague idea that they should ‘sound out’ words they're not sure of or work them out from the rest of the sentence, but those strategies are like telling an anxious person to ‘chill out’. They're likely to cause more upset than the person was already feeling.
Why? Because they don't provide enough precise information. They don't override the automatic stress response to text or give students a clear place to start. They cause more anxiety at exactly the moment we want to be alleviating anxiety. Here’s what I mean from a personal perspective. It's in a different context but, if you know a person who is anxious about reading, you'll recognise the experience.
I have never struggled with reading, but I am famous amongst those who know and love me for not being able to manipulate space. That includes but is not limited to:
- left and right (both hands make plausible Ls so please don’t go there)
- moving any diagram from one plane to another (banned from using a friend's electric cooker because I can’t flip the dots on the knobs to the stovetop plane)
- directions.
Actually, I’m pretty good with directions when I'm calm and have the time to use what I think of as the intellectual space in my brain. I can think myself into turning left but I can’t process directions intuitively. Here’s an anecdote about something that happened recently. I wrote the notes for this post on my phone on the way home, still feeling a little raw (and stupid) from the experience.
🟣 I take the train to town to pick up my new glasses. I need to be back for something so have planned my trip with this deadline in mind. In other words, I’m in a hurry and don’t operate very well ‘in a hurry’. You might have students like that. When I get to the station, my familiar exit is closed. I can usually walk to the shop in 10 minutes, but I have no plan for this other exit. Now I’m in a hurry and feeling a bit anxious.
I get outside and it starts to rain. So now I’m in a hurry, feeling a bit anxious and getting wet. I guess at what looks like the right direction but it’s a dead end. I can't visualise where I am compared to where I should be and the anxiety builds. I go back to the station and phone my husband who gives me very normal instructions:
‘Turn left, turn right, you’ll see the Railway pub’.
He has given me exactly the instructions that would help most people, but I head off with a storm of anxiety still raging in my brain and those instructions are only helpful if I’m calm and have extra time to process them. I turn what feels like left then right and see a pub but it's not the right pub. I call him back and we have a little shouty thing where I insist he sent me in the wrong direction and I hang up! (I may be self-aware about my directional difficulties, but that can be overridden by my certainty that I’m right. He’s a patient man.)
In fact, I had turned right instead of left. I'm NOT GOOD AT DIRECTIONS and I end up standing in the rain, angry and very frustrated with myself and the world. There may have been tears.
When a struggling reader gets to this point, they might storm out of the room or throw something. They will probably say how stupid reading is and give up.
But I’m a woman in need of her new glasses, so I take a few deep breaths and consciously talk myself out of the panic mindset. I’ve got myself to thousands of places and can do it today. I get out my phone and open the maps app. Amusingly, when I stop to look at the map there are 3 young men doing the same thing and one of them says, ‘Here’s someone else who doesn’t know where they’re going!’ I break it to them that I know exactly where I’m going; I just don’t know where I am.
With the phone map and some calm self-talk about what I’m going to do next I finally see a landmark I recognise. A little later than I want, I pick up my glasses and get home where I apologise for being snarky.🟣
It turned out fine for me but please understand that I feel the anxiety just reading about it. These situations don't happen to me too often, but a struggling reader experiences this kind of anxiety constantly.
Every day.
For years and years.
The only thing they end up planning is how they’re going to avoid reading.
Knowing they’re supposed to ‘sound out’ an unfamiliar word or guess it from context is likely to leave a struggling reader frustrated with themselves and the world and still not reading. Instead, they need:
- a tightly structured SOR approach that works with the logic of English as well as the wiring that already exists in their brains
- a person they trust to calm the anxiety and walk with them through the process
- a new script in their heads for when they meet an unfamiliar word.
That Reading Thing offers all of those things which is what makes it so appropriate for anxious (angry, frustrated, self-doubting) teens and adults.
Watch our 20 Minute Intro Video