Teaching Reading

IT HAS been estimated that about one third of the children in the early years of school have some difficulty in mastering reading, writing, and spelling. Some of the causes are low intelligence, illness, poor eyesight, partial deafness, malnutrition, fatigue, immaturity, lack of interest, emotional blocking, and poor teaching. There are in addition a group of children representing 10 to 20 per cent of the school population who have none of these problems. Their reading failure comes from specific language disability.

The mother of an extremely intelligent thirteenyear-old boy recently told me, “Bill did poorly in reading in the first grade. His teacher said not to worry, that he would probably catch on next year. At the end of the second grade his teacher remarked that he still hadn’t caught on but that he had finished with the first reader and next year would probably be a better year for him. Next year came and went. The teacher’s comments were, ‘Well, he is below grade level in reading and spelling, but he has such a winning smile and personality they will carry him a long way.’ By the end of his fourth year, he was so hopelessly behind that we had to seek outside help. It has taken a long time, but he is finally able to cope with the reading at his present grade level. His spelling is still unreliable, however, and he has difficulty keeping up with his written work.”

Bill is typical of many intelligent youngsters who have specific language disability. They do not respond to the “ look-say” method of reading and spelling instruction which has been used in our schools for years. This method teaches children a memorized vocabulary of a hundred or so words and then gives them brightly illustrated primers which use the words over and over again. Some of the reading failures wind up in our mental health clinics or, if they are fortunate and an alert family or school physician is on the job, they are referred to the language clinics. Here, if they have no physical or mental problem which is interfering with their ability to learn, they are taught reading and spelling according to an alphabetic-phonetic approach by specially trained teachers. Hundreds of case studies from these clinics show that this method works very successfully.

Parents and teachers who have seen the results of such instruction immediately raise the question, “Why wasn’t this done before?” The answer is simple. Most teachers have not been trained to teach children who have special difficulties with reading and spelling. They are taught to teach reading according to the manuals of the commeicial reading texts which are used in the schools. As a matter of fact, the bulk of new teachers coming out of schools of education and teacher-training institutions have had only one course in the teaching of reading and possibly one in the teaching of the so-called language arts — spelling, grammar, and composition. Yet at the primary and elementary level, reading is one of the most important things they teach.

When a teacher has difficulty in teaching a child, she sends an S O S to the principal or to the reading supervisor, if there is one. The child may get some help in a small group or individually outside of the classroom. Usually this is a patch-up kind of job, and the youngster is sent back to the classroom when it is over. Sometimes he holds his own for a while, and then new problems come up. By this time, the person doing remedial work (who is already overworked) has to set up a list of priorities. Perhaps there is someone who is worse off, and then the child who received help initially must wait. In the meantime, his problem becomes greater. With the work load that most remedial teachers have to carry, it is impossible for them to give all the required help to all of the children needing it.

The classroom teacher can do one of three things with regard to these particular children: ignore them, give them more of the same, or determine what their problems are and use techniques required to deal with them.

There has been a decided change in the viewpoint of some leaders in the field of reading instruction. The attitude now is that, if the results of reading instruction are to be improved, the classroom teacher is going to have to develop new teaching techniques.

In the past four years, a group of teachers in the Peterborough, New Hampshire, schools have developed a screening program in the first grade to identify children who might experience failure in reading and spelling. Sixty children so identified have been taught reading and spelling according to an alphabetic-phonetic approach, within the classroom, by the classroom teachers, as a regular reading group. The children are taught simple consonant sounds and one or two short vowel sounds. When these letters are known by their names and sounds and the children can write the letters which make the sounds, they can make them into words. This is synthetic phonics. Slowly, new letters and letter combinations are introduced, and new words arc added and finally used in sentences. The children have responded to this program extremely well, and at present the group which have been through four years of instruction are reading and spelling well up to their ability levels. The town of Lincoln, Massachusetts, initiated a similar program last year, which has also shown surprising results.

In Honolulu, Hawaii, more than five thousand pupils in private and parochial schools have been taught to read and spell phonetically. Recent test scores of children in grades one to eight show that these children are substantially above U.S. norms in both reading and spelling.

The majority of children can learn to read and spell well if they are taught phonetically and are given practice in sight vocabulary and applied phonics.

During the past twenty years or so, the schools have not done much to develop a spelling consciousness in children. Spelling words have been taught in lists. A weekly test is used as a means of seeing how well the words have been learned. Most children do very well on weekly tests but fall down in their written work a few weeks later.

Last year a spelling curriculum based on the alphabetic-phonetic approach was introduced in the Lincoln schools. Children were taught sounds and spelling rules over a period of seven weeks. As the program developed, fewer errors were made. After seven weeks’ work, the class had reduced the total number of mistakes from two hundred per test of twenty words to only twenty-four.

This method of spelling instruction is suitable for all children. It classifies words in three groups: 1) those which can be spelled phonetically, 2) those which can be spelled according to a rule or generalization, 3) nonphonetic words, which must be learned and to which no rule or generalization can be applied. This method cuts down drastically on the memory load.

Before there is any great improvement in the quality of reading and spelling instruction more attention will have to be given to it. Student teaching experiences should acquaint beginning teachers with different reading problems and ways of dealing with them in the classroom. Teachers must be provided with adequate teaching materials to do the job. They must be allowed time to evaluate what they are doing as a group and to work on ways of improving it. Some of this can be done after school hours, but there must be more acceptance of the idea of released time for in-service training, and evaluation, at least comparable to that which is used in modern business organizations.

The schools are in need of a tremendous reorganization in terms of curriculum and the more effective use of teaching personnel. In such a reorganization, more opportunity should be made for experimentation. The majority of teachers are willing to accept new ideas if they are given the opportunity. They know when children are not meeting with success and usually try desperately to help. If they do not know how and they do not have the help they need, then they have no alternatives other than to fail the child or to send him on to the next teacher with a silent praver that everything will be all right next year.