Section 9 – Adult literacy; working with prisoners
Part A – Reading
Because the experience approach to reading, reading aloud and writing always begins at the pupils’ interest level (rather than their ‘ability’ level), it is ideal for use with learners of any age – whether they are pre-school or primary children, teenagers, or well into adulthood.
Sadly, many youngsters (usually because they are dyslexic) leave school barely able to read and write. A significant proportion of these young adults drift into a life of crime, and may well end up homeless, or in prison – a huge waste of their unrealized talents.
The experience approach to literacy offers a rapid, positive and enjoyable way of enabling struggling adults to take possession of the world of written language – so they, and society as a whole, can reap the benefits.
The magical world of books
As always, you start by finding the book they cannot resist when it is read to them, and carry on from there. Go for the works of timeless appeal – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Tintin, Tales from Shakespeare, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, Roald Dahl, Michael Morpurgo, Terry Pratchett, Anthony Horovitz.
Choose editions as lavishly illustrated as possible, in full colour, and bear in mind that many strugglers have difficulty reading black print on white paper (see Section 6, Dyslexia, and the problem of spelling – Coloured overlays). So graphic novels (e.g. The Hobbit, published by Harper Collins) or the Tintin ‘comic’ books (Egmont) can be a brilliant first step on the royal road to reading. (Plus, the speech bubbles in these works offer easily manageable chunks of text to beginning readers, without being patronizing in any way.)
One lad I worked with was distinctly unenthusiastic about the juvenile material he had been given to read at school. “What would you like to read, Ben?” I asked. “Oh – Tintin books.” “Right, we’ll read Tintin books.” Off we went, I would read two or three pages to him while he followed the print, then I re-read just half a page before he read it back to me, helping him whenever he got stuck. (See Section 3, The experience approach to reading). Ben adopted different voices for the various characters, having great fun sounding grumpy, surprised or bewildered in turn. We romped through my phonic programme at the same time, as a separate but complementary process. (See Section 4, What about phonics? – also ‘A phonic programme for adults’, below.)
This was in the spring. By the summer Ben was reading Tintin books on his own, and by the following spring he was devouring unabridged versions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. When I met his mother again some years later she was reminiscing about Ben’s triumphant and rapid progress. “It was like a miracle, Felicity.” Indeed it was; but it was a miracle we could achieve for any learner, of any age, in school or at home, in adult literacy classes – or, indeed, in prison.
Of course you will need to adapt the one-to-one approach when working with groups, but this is quite straightforward, so long as you keep the basic principles in mind. You could involve community volunteers, or other prisoners, to read books to and with the strugglers. Offer a selection of coloured overlays for use by anyone who might find them helpful. (See Section 7, Testing – Screening whole classes with coloured overlays.) Read excerpts from some of your favourite texts to a small group, to whet their interest for later individual reading. Make plenty of audio books available, preferably in word-for-word versions, so your apprentice readers can listen to the text while they follow the print. Invite students to tell the rest of the group about a book they have enjoyed. In one way or another, you can make the magical world of books accessible to all the strugglers, so before they know it they are strugglers no longer, but confident and enthusiastic explorers.