It’s quite possible to start at any point on this language ‘globe’, and travel to any other point, in a variety of ways. We could start with heard words, associate them with meanings, travel to uttered words, then to seen words, then to handwriting movement words. But equally, we could start with meaningful seen words, then travel to uttered words, and from there to handwriting movement words. The method of travel is identical for similar routes – i.e. words are associated with their meanings in the same way, and matched with other forms of language in the same way. So the processes of learning are the same for every child: groups of youngsters do not learn the same things in different ways from other children.

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  But what is the case is that, for some children, some of the routes are blocked.

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  This is always a sensory blockage of some kind. For profoundly deaf children, all routes connecting with heard words are blocked; blind children cannot travel to or from seen words. Dyslexics also come up against a sensory blockage. Because their mental images of written words are jumbled and unreliable (see Section 6), the route between seen words and their meanings is partially blocked, and so is the route between seen words and handwriting movement words (causing the spelling problems so characteristic of dyslexia). However, the route between seen words and uttered words is wide open, which is why learning phonics is so crucially important for dyslexics, allowing them to access all points on the language globe, albeit in a roundabout fashion.

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  The ideal is to enable all children to travel by all the routes, as soon as possible. It really doesn’t make much difference where they begin, so long as they do learn to match the different word forms with each other bit by bit, and practise doing so until the process has become instinctive.

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  If all the routes are available, to all children, any child who encounters a blockage, even without his teacher’s knowledge, can circumvent it, and still reach his destination, by way of a different route.

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Sign language

  Deaf people can learn to communicate with each other through sign language – a series of meaningful gestures mainly by the hands and arms. It is not an articulated form of language (i.e. made of moveable bits), so it cannot easily be matched with the word forms on our language globe. (In this, it is more like an ideographic written language – sign language gestures are often designed to ‘look like’ their meanings.)

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  Teachers of deaf children tend to disagree passionately over whether to teach sign language or not. Some feel that it is too restrictive, and hampers the deaf from establishing adequate forms of communication with hearing people. Others maintain that it is so easy and straightforward for their charges to learn, and boosts their confidence to such an extent, that all deaf children have the right to learn it.

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  I myself cannot see that there is a problem. I have always been a ‘both-and’ sort of person, rather than an ‘either/or’ one. Hearing children can learn any number of different languages, at a very young age. If eight of a child’s family members speak eight different languages/dialects, the toddler will learn all eight, and moreover will communicate with each family member using their own particular language form. Once we see how easy it is to help deaf children learn to read; understand spoken language by way of lipreading and cued speech; and speak by way of phonics (see Section 8, How about deaf children?) – I don’t see why we can’t press ahead on that front as rapidly as possible, and still teach them to use sign language, of a high standard, among themselves. Whyever not?

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  In fact sign language can play a significant part in helping deaf children to read! Use the appropriate signs to make clear the meanings of particular written words, and this will boost a child’s reading ability no end.

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Testing the theory

  Like all scientific theories, this one needs to be tested. But we don’t test it by setting up yet more expensive trials, comparing children taught in one way with children taught in another. As we have already seen, such experiments are doomed to failure because they are based on the wrong questions.

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  One of the startling analogies to emerge from our language globe is that written language functions exactly like spoken language. Understanding print is exactly comparable to understanding speech; and sounding out written words bit by bit (phonics) is exactly like sounding out heard words bit by bit, when we learn to speak. (See Section 8, How about deaf children?)

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  We can test this analogy, in time honoured scientific fashion, by asking ourselves ‘What follows? If written language is indeed precisely analogous to spoken language, what must be the case?’

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  Well, it must be possible for children to learn to understand print directly, without any reference to spoken language at all. I tracked down Helen Thompson’s work with deaf children (Section 8), showing how easy it was for her pupils to learn the meanings of written words just from their physical contexts – actual contexts at first, and then imagined ones (see Section 7). I later corresponded with Glenn Doman (Teach Your Baby to Read), and discovered that he had taught scores of deaf babies to understand print, by working with their parents. It was even the case that hearing children had been taught to read ‘non orally’ – their teachers gave no indication that written words could ever be matched with speech. (James E. McDade, ‘A Hypothesis for Non Oral Reading’, The Journal of Educational Research, Washington DC: Heldref Publications, 1937.) I think this was at a time when ‘speed reading’ was in vogue, and it was felt that children would be able to read more rapidly if they didn’t have to worry about saying the written words to themselves.

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  In fact we all learn the meanings of many written words from their context, rather than by reference to their spoken equivalents. This is evident from children’s mispronunciations – e.g. when my five year old daughter pronounced ‘moustache’ as ‘mowstake’. As none of her family went round talking about ‘mowstakes’, she could have learned the meaning of the word only by reading it. Most of us can remember similar mispronunciations from our childhood, without realizing that this is further evidence of the power of written words to convey meanings all by themselves, without reference to spoken words.

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  Then, if learning phonics is just like learning to speak, it must be possible for very young children to learn that process too, as well as reading. I certainly had no difficulty in teaching phonics to my own daughters, at the ages of three and two – because I concentrated on showing them how to do it, with as much help as they needed, until they were fully independent. (See Section 4, What about phonics?)

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  I also worked with two Hindi speaking little girls, aged five and four, teaching them English through reading. (This was when my husband was working in Tanzania.) At the end of six months, Renu and Anita had read eight books, they had an English reading vocabulary of some three hundred words, they knew all the sounds for the letters and combinations, and could sound out about fifty different words. Unfortunately, our tour in Tanzania then came to an end, and I lost touch with the family, but as their father had been an enthusiastic participant in the project, I’m pretty sure the children continued to forge ahead. (See my first book, Reading and writing before school, written when my name was Felicity Hughes, and published by Jonathan Cape in 1971.)

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  Longniddry Primary School, in East Lothian, Scotland, discovered how easy it was to cover my whole phonic programme in a single year with their Primary One (Reception) children – again, because they used an experience based approach, and just showed their pupils ‘how to do it’. (See Section 4, What about phonics?)

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  So the analogy between written language and spoken language is supported by all the available evidence, and there is no contradictory evidence.

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  Which brings us to the most exciting question of all. What are the implications for our literacy teaching methods, whenever and wherever children learn to read and write?

 

Implications for teaching methods

  Yet again, the answer is wonderfully simple. Children have been learning spoken language, with no trouble at all, for thousands of years. So all we have to do is model our literacy teaching methods on the natural spoken language teaching methods which parents instinctively use, and the way forward is clear.

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  We mustn’t fall into the trap of supposing that spoken language is not both taught and learned. Children who don’t experience it, for whatever reason, don’t develop it by themselves. There have been cases of ‘wild’ children in the past – Peter the Wild Boy, found in the fields near Hanover in 1723; Victor, known as ‘the Savage of Aveyron’, captured in that district of Southern France in 1799; and two little girls, Amala and Kamala, taken in the vicinity of Midnapur, India, in 1920. One thing we know definitely about all of them: none of these children could speak in any tongue, remembered or invented. (See Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art.)

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  No, children have to hear plenty of meaningful spoken language, in order to understand it; and as they begin vocalizing, they need to hear the sounds they are producing reflected back to them by others, if they are to carry on doing it, and so learn to talk.

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  The key word is ‘plenty’. The more spoken language a child hears, the more he will learn to understand. The more his vocalizing is supported and encouraged by others, the more easily he will learn to speak.

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  The same is true of learning written language. We need to give children massive experience of understanding written words, in big, bold, colourful print. (See Section 3, The experience approach to reading.) And it’s worth noting that, when our emphasis is on helping children to see meanings in written words (rather than sound them out), long words are easier to learn than short ones! They are often more interesting, for a start, and can have more distinctive patterns – tall bits poking up in various places, and other bits hanging down. Provided that we focus on showing our pupils what the words mean (instead of trying to find out what has been learned), then the more written language children experience, the better.

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  When infants start to babble, they cannot help but notice that the same heard sounds always match the same feelings of utterance – so remembering how to produce particular sounds at will is easy. This doesn’t happen when it comes to matching letters with sounds; therefore, we must make it happen. We must give children massive experience of matching letters with sounds, all the way along written words; and keep on showing them ‘how to do it’, until they can carry out the process by themselves, without really thinking about it.

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  Recognizing that understanding print, and reading aloud, are two separate processes, also helps us to pinpoint what has gone wrong with our literacy teaching in the past. For example, the ‘whole language’ philosophy swept British primary schools in the 80s and 90s, like a breath of fresh air. Children were encouraged to begin reading with any book; parents were welcomed into the classroom to read to and with their children (and others); teachers shared books with one child, or several, or whole groups. (See Liz Waterland, Read With Me: An Apprenticeship Approach to Reading, Thimble Press, 1985.) Children, too, shared books with each other, recommending a particular discovery to another child with passion and delight – “You’ll like Cat on the Mat, you have to spit when you read it!” It was quite magical; but eventually came unstuck because its proponents assumed that phonics was an alternative reading method. If their pupils were learning to read perfectly well without sounding out written words to any great extent, then surely ‘incidental’ phonics was sufficient.

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  It wasn’t. Children need to be able to sound out all written words, regardless of whether they can read them or not, so that the process is well established when it comes to writing and spelling. Secondly, as we have already seen, phonics is a brilliant aid to speaking, as well as reading. The younger a child is when he starts reading, the more likely it is he will learn the meanings of a large number of words by reading them first. Phonics enables him to transfer these words to his speaking vocabulary, so they are available for instant use when he is talking (despite occasional mispronunciations, which don’t really matter). Thirdly, many youngsters struggle with whole word approaches to reading and spelling, and need to learn systematic phonics in order to bypass the blockages. These children were probably the biggest casualties of the whole language approach, and the main reason it was abandoned.

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  Synthetic phonics, ‘first, fast and only’, moved to the fore once again. (It had been the reading method of choice during the second world war, but was ousted by ‘look-and-say’ after the war was over – do you get the feeling of déjà-vu?)

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  ‘Synthetic’ means that the different letter sounds are taught separately, first. Then children learn how letter sounds are put together to make words; then they practise reading by working through a series of phonic reading books; until, finally, they are allowed to tackle ‘real’ books, by ‘real’ authors.

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  Now, synthetic phonics does have huge advantages, the main one being that the process is in place before children move on to independent reading and writing. So they cannot help but use it as an aid to speaking, writing and spelling, as well as reading. Phonics is the unblocked route par excellence, and enables all children to reach all their literacy destinations. That is why we keep coming back to it, again, and again – and again…

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  But the main disadvantage of synthetic phonics is that it is, inevitably, performance based. Plus it postpones the joy of reading until the process has been thoroughly mastered. Many children cannot see why they have to jump through these peculiar hoops (when they would far rather be doing something else), and give up before they have travelled very far.

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  Nor does synthetic phonics always produce the desired results. It became official policy in English primary schools in 2006, after a government review of literacy teaching methods. But recent findings show that 10% of children are still leaving primary school with a reading age of seven or less – that is 10% too many, in my view.

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  Armed with the analogy between written language and spoken language, we can resolve this apparent impasse at a stroke. Let’s reintroduce real reading, and enable all our children to fall in love with real books, from the outset. Liz Waterland has shown that it can be done, ‘even’ in a classroom, and her book Read With Me is well worth revisiting, in spite of its limitations.

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  At the same time, we must teach systematic phonics (not synthetic phonics), as a process in its own right, alongside reading. East Lothian has blazed the way in this regard, and has achieved stunning results. And it’s actually much easier to teach phonics when we can begin by showing children how to sound out words that are already meaningful – then they grasp straightaway what the process is for, and how easy it is to use.

 

  The key is to teach understanding print, and systematic phonics, as two separate processes, and everything falls into place. All the routes, to every area of literacy, will then be available to every child, from the beginning – so persistent literacy problems are less likely to emerge. Children learning English as a second language will benefit, because it is easier for them to learn the meanings of English words by reading them first: this in turn will help their understanding and use of spoken English to develop more quickly. And best of all, classrooms will once again become joyous places to be, alive with the discovery of books and authors, and the whole magical world of written language.

 

 

When should we start?

  But there is another question to be asked, in the light of our analogy between the two forms of language – at what age should we begin helping children to read? The first three years of life seem to be the optimum period for learning spoken language, especially the year between two and three, when most children’s hearing and speaking vocabularies grow at an exponential rate. So should they start reading far earlier than is presently the case?

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  Doman (Teach Your Baby to Read) certainly thought so. He points out that beginning reading is easier at four than at five, easier at three than at four, easier at two than at three. I started teaching my own two daughters when they were three and two, and found that Doman was right. Gwynneth, aged two, would drop everything else the minute I suggested ‘playing the reading game’ – I had to work that little bit harder to engage Helen’s attention.

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  We might just as well introduce written language in our nursery schools, helping children to stick labels on the various items around the room, sentences on the walls, and plunge into the excitement of books and reading. Parents are often more closely involved in their children’s nursery education than they are later, so can share ideas and approaches with the teachers, and carry on with the whole thing at home. We will be using an experience based approach, so there will be no pressure, no possibility of failure – and there will be plenty of time for all the wonderful art work and play which is so characteristic of British nursery education. (In fact reading, and sounding out written words, will become additional forms of play.) Nor should there be any problem about accommodating early readers when they move up to primary school. They can simply carry on reading books at their interest level, like everybody else – and if they are already skilled at sounding out written words, why not ask them to help other youngsters with this exciting procedure?

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  As we can now see, Doman was way ahead of his time, and it is a shame that his work seems to have fallen into disrepute. Part of the difficulty, I think, is that he didn’t have the complete analogy – like many other advocates of ‘understanding print’, he was unable to work out how phonics fitted into the picture. But he was spot on about reading, and his work with brain damaged babies, and deaf babies, was breathtakingly original. It made a huge difference in their lives, and deserves to be reinstated in our provision for such children.

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The magic wand

  All too often, self styled ‘experts’ pontificate on our airwaves, and in the press, declaring solemnly that, when it comes to literacy teaching, there is no magic wand.

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  Well, they are mistaken. There is indeed a magic wand, but it has remained at the back of a drawer, overlooked and gathering dust until now, because it is composed of three sections.

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  The first section is understanding print, as a process in its own right. The second section is sounding out written words, as a process in its own right. And the third section is using an experience based approach, rather than a performance based one.

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  Put these three sections together, and there is no limit to what our magic wand can do. We can indeed achieve total literacy, for all children, by the age of seven.

  

  At the latest.

 

 

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Acknowledgements

  To my grandson, Morgan Hughes, himself dyslexic, who gave me the initial impetus to set up a website exploring the analogy between written language and spoken language, and its hugely exciting implications for our literacy teaching. Plus he has now transferred the website to a new host, with all manner of highly professional improvements along the way. Thank you Morgan!

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  To my two daughters, Helen and Gwynneth, and their families, for cheering me on, unstintingly, in the undertaking.

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  To my sister Beth, for walking beside me on the long journey.

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  To my friend Debbie Smith, who transformed my work with her wonderful, funny and magical illustrations.

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  To the many youngsters I worked with, who so often pointed me in the right direction.

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  To my fellow teacher Pam Clark, who pioneered my approach, at primary level, in East Lothian.

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  Most of all, I owe everything to my friend and colleague, Ian Holden. He and his wife Yvette came round week after week, month after month, to help me design the website, and sort out all the baffling little details that had me totally stumped. I don’t know what I don’t know about computers. Ian, on the other hand, knows what he doesn’t know – and he also knows how to find out. If something doesn’t work, he will keep on – and on – and on – trying, until he discovers something that does.

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  Without Ian, my website wouldn’t have happened. Simple as that.