The first baby steps...

Now that the foundations are laid, we may proceed further.

Making sure that the children are ready for the not always easy task of reading and trying to keep it fun and undaunting are prerequisites to a good reading ( or beginning to read) program.

I have been a voracious reader. I devoured books- my love affair started when I was still in pre-primary or kindergarten. The lovely picture books invited me into a world I could not visit physically. The words had a musical quality for me. I may have been sounding them out ( a little more of that later. We will address different learning styles to make learning to read an effective process) and therefore, have still the memories of early words I read.

In class I, when other children were taking early tottering steps in trying to make sense of school text books, I was reading outside the curriculum simply because I loved it! To top it all, we had a teacher who knew not a word of our first language. She was Mrs Nair, a tall, somewhat heavy woman from south India who spoke even English in a heavy south Indian accent. To say the least, she was difficult to understand. For mere six year olds, it was a difficult task. I became the interpreter by default! I could read and speak both Hindi and English, fluently. And I loved the opportunity to be able to do something extra that many others in the class could not do.

In short, reading was a natural talent. I never really faced any difficulty or struggle.

Take a different scenario. A few years preceding my linguistic adventures, another child was trying very hard to fit into a system he found difficult. He could not make much sense of the squiggles people called print and did not want to write. He was not lazy. He was not intellectually impaired. He could learn most of what was read to him without difficulty. However, if he were to read it himself, his eyes had to go back to the beginning of sentences to re-read and form a continuity that kept breaking despite best efforts. This boy, somewhere along the way figured out how to crack the code and went on to top the Medical entrance exam, and further to earn himself a Gold medal in a field that required tremendous hand eye co-ordination as well as fine motor control that is precise and LASER like in quality! He became an eye surgeon.

I am relating my husband's childhood and mine. Two very different skill sets. It was impossible for me to understand the existence of an entity called struggling reader, let alone accept the fact that such a fun activity can indeed be tiring for anyone!

Needless to say, I have struggled with the realisation that reading may not be easy for some children. My daughter finds it tiring to read and write. She is a brilliant girl who is multi-talented and does several activities with an enviable proficiency. She, however, finds it just a little bit too much of a task to read and somewhat more so to write.

Her grasp of verbal instructions and her early efforts to fit into the schooling system made her a teacher's pet. This made the identification even more difficult.

The baby steps then in beginning to read are really in first identifying when and which child is ready to read.

My son began early and revelled in each new successful attempt. So... I have experienced a child who has had a degree of difficulty and one who has had it rather easy in terms of beginning to read.

The first baby steps involve BEING INVOLVED with your children. Provide a rich linguistic experience to them. Read books. Sing songs. Carry on conversations. Introduce words. The more words we are able to give to a child BEFORE he/ she enters the school, easier is the transition into reading.

Most children respond well enough to the early story reading attempts and begin to 'read' the story by rote! Encourage these early decoding attempts. A full throated Hurray! goes a long way in keeping the child at the task of reading. Much longer any way than a blunt or mute response to failed or partially successful attempts to read.
The children will begin to form a visual impression of teh early words that can serve as building blocks for further progress. The first 'o' leads quite easily to 'no', 'go' and 'so'. Then we can move on to 'to', and 'do'. The children always laugh at the travesty of the language that treats the same symbols so differently. But they have formed a memory peg to start their journey. These words often do not pose any problem for the beginners.

The phonics way is my preferred way to go beyond these early attempts. I would suggest introducing the concept of vowels through such poems as Old Mac Donald and creating awareness of the short vowel sound to start with. The concept of 'bat', 'bet', 'bit', 'pot' and 'but' is not very difficult to teach. It is helpful to make an alphabetical grid and help the child along for these early sounds...

'at' sound

1. bat
2. cat
3. fat
4. hat
5. mat
6. pat
7. rat
8. sat

The next steps depend upon and are decided by how well these early steps are taken. Bat could well transform into battle or cat into cattle if the phonics and phonology are clearly laid out for the child.

Struggling readers may need more time and different strategies. These are not difficult, only different. These children are not stupid, they are different! They are smart. And they are tenacious. They hang on to their self esteem despite realising that they may become the butt of class jokes. Or they may crumble.

Early attempts at teaching and learning can define the direction that a child takes.

ANY CHILD CAN LEARN HOW TO READ.

We can help the process. We must.

We can help children READ better....

The first step to good reading ability is really the acquisition of good oral skills.

This means that a child who has good language will read more easily... but it does not end there. A child who is more exposed to books and reading will pick up reading faster than one who is not exposed to the printed words.

Certain natural milestones indicate that the child is ready for formal reading instruction. The child starts experimenting with words, starts to pretend to read and begins to attempt make believe spellings. (S)he will hold a pencil and scribble and even pretend to be grown up and handle grocery lists.

While these automatically indicate the reading ( and writing ) readiness in most children, there will be those who will lack these milestones and will raise alarm bells to some learning problems.

Dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia- have all been hyped by media and a lot is to be said about the often irresponsible and insensitive labeling of children ( and even adults) into categories that get stereotyped and treated as if they are abnormal.

ALL CHILDREN CAN BE HELPED TO READ AT GRADE LEVEL. This is a simple statement . It is a true statement. It only requires effort and dedication and plenty of patience but it can be done.
Once a care-giver is sure there is no organic reason fort the child being unable to read at grade level ( may be he has a visual or auditory handicap?), it is time to tighten your seat-belts and get ready for launch!

English is a difficult language as it morpho-phonemic. The letters often do represent sounds... but there are good many words that do not satisfy any phonemic rules and must be studied and remembered as sight words.

Consider simple counting words! One ( won?!)... two ( too?! or to?!)... three ( is fine) and four ( why not fore?) five is good so is six and seven. But eight!? ( Remember ate?) ... It is certainly not easy to keep a track of the context AND the word for many children.

One has to start with the basic sounding out of words and build GROUPS of words. This is classically done in most curricula today in the form of the initial exposure to short vowel sounds ( bat, bet, bit, bot, but) This makes it easy for young children to develop awareness of the sound associated with a written/ printed word. VArious consonants can then be introduced making it mat, met, mit, mot and mut) or even dab, ten, rob, dot, rub... The consonant sounds can be reinforced in groups. Rhyming is interesting and attention grabbing for the young children and immediately captures their minds and attention.

From here the child can naturally and easily be led into building up words as in making mate from mat or mat becoming material. The transition is easy for the phonically written words. The whole concept breaks down, however, when we encounter what have come to be known as sight words. The simple sight words must be introduced to the children early on and be made fun to play with... to- do- but go? no? so?

The sight word vocabulary will expand exponentially once the child gets comfortable with the idea of holding a book correctly and attempting to read. The whole language method focuses on reading TO the child once, may be twice; reading WITH the child another time and finally being around and letting the child read on his own. The detractors of this method of teaching argue that the child is reading by rote where as he has not really learnt to read the word. One only has to ask- What EXACTLY IS reading? It is reading from memory. With each sweep of the eyes, the brain picks up a group of letters, performs an extensive search in the memory banks for what that group could mean, gives a sound to the written word, converts it into decipherable language and executes the task of reading- all in milliseconds! Reading IS very much a memory task. If we can make the memory stick by repetition, wel... why not! It is easy. It is doable. It only requires time.. and patience.

These early reading strategies are valuable-
Hold the book correctly
Read from left to right
Repeat the phonic content of simple words
Introduce sight words
Read. repeat, read again
Encourage writing effort
Encourage the understanding of alphabetic principle

From here we will truly move on to our journey of the roller coaster of reading fun!
Whooopppie!! Here goes...

Reading decoded!

Reading as a skill at the very basic level requires the reader to 'sound' out the written word into teh sound that it makes.

Each word may be composed of a combination of any of the forty four recognised phonemes of English language. These are independently vowel and consonant phonemes and are quite independent of each other. A detailed account of the sounds routinely used in English language can be found easily on the web http://facweb.furman.edu/~wrogers/phonemes/

In Hindi ( Devnagiri script) this is even worse- each set of grouped phonemes has 5 or 4 for the final two rows, sounds and each of these sounds can be combined with any of the twelve vowel sounds ( maatras) resulting in 68x12 sounds. These combinations are palced spatially all around the consonant sounds- uh sound is denoted by a complete consonant, aah sound by a straight line following it, the short i sound is denoted by a maatra that is placed in front of the consonant it modifies while the long ee sound is denoted by one that follows the consonant it modifies. These are both looped above the zone of active reading. Consider the short u as in butcher that is like a comma under the consonant, and the loong oo sound that is placed in the opposite direction also under the consonant. This spatial jig zaw can be quite confusing for a new reader or for a reader who has reading difficulties.

Each written symbol, then denotes a sound for the reader. These are eventually sounded out in the head as a part of the decoding process, and assigned a combination sound or word. Thus, seeing a written word kicks into motiona complex set of neural activities starting woth actually perceiving the written word, following it with a decoding process and mental sounding out, thereafter comes synthesis of these phonemes into a word.

Once the mind has arrived at a word, it searches its data base, so to speak for all meanings ut has denoted to this decoded combination of phonemes in the past learning experience, and picks teh meaning that is closest in the context. Infact, a child with good phonemic concepts can read fluently and correctly without even knowing the meaning of the words.

One look at http://www.auburn.edu/~murraba/spellings.html shows just how complicated rreading really can be! Imagine that ear has several sounds it can denote- ear itself, hear, heart. And if heart is read HAArt, why must cart not be ceart? And so on!

This mess and confusion prompted George Bernard Shaw to propose an all together new and presumably more appropriate system of language! He proposed that sounds and letters should correspond without overlap. Thus, in his alphabet k could not be represented by c, or by ch. He joked that ghoti is the way English spells what we read as fish!( gh from laugh, o from women, ti from nation. ) In fact several'i' words could as easily be written as 'ai'! TAIM ( Ta- im) Time!

The Devnagiri script for Hindi is much more scientific in this regard. Each sound is represented by a single alphabet. However, the complexities of the added vowel signs all around the consonants complicates the written word.

Study of the brain in the reading task has shown that only the visual cortex is stimulated if the printed symbol is a simple circle/ line etc. This changes dramatically when the printed symbol has a meaning- the alphabet or the pictographs. This task stimulates the visual association areas along with several areas in the language and the analysis related parts of the brain. This is further expanded to include association areas in the latter fields when the symbols are strewn together to form words and words are strung together to form sentences.

The children who are unable to form these associations find the initial decoding difficult. They may be seeing a symbol and thinking another one. It is instructive to try this little test from a wonderful website devoted to understanding these children.

Try this link.... for a reading experiment

Reading comes easy to some. Many others struggle with this task well into adulthood. These are not people with subnormal intelligence. They are people who are wired differently. We, as parents and teachers have the responsibility to connect with them, and see that the decoding can happen easily... without emotional trauma and burden that often accompanies the classroom experiences of these specially enabled children. they will often be highly talented and versatile. they are not lazy and they are not stupid. they are different. Respect that difference!