Once a child has discovered the joys of the written word, their desire to enjoy the process for themselves is awakened and the mechanics of reading are just the next step to more pleasure.
Learning to Read
Words are connected to an experience, so that when your mother says ‘get off the floor’ you know you are not on the ceiling! After a while, the word ‘floor’ means floor. We say to young children as they climb all over the furniture, ‘it’s a chair, it’s for putting your bottom on’ and after a while ‘chair’ means chair – for sitting on. We don’t say the word ‘stop’ to stop the car - when we see the stop sign your foot just goes down on the brake pedal. We apply a meaning that is associated with the experience. The experience of stop isn’t the same as reading the word ‘stop’, but it is the physical experience of ceasing to move that keeps us safe when we see the word.
We believe that making a bundle of letters more important than the meaning of the words is a major mistake. Learning about the meaning of words can and should be fun. For example, we teach children to run over and put the right word on an object, so nouns then become ‘things’. Children learn the meaning of the verb ‘to run’ through doing the action. Children wear stickers with ‘run’/’walk’/’hop’ printed on them so they do the action as they move towards a labelled chair or window, connecting the verb with a noun to start to build sentences that have meaning and make sense. Pronouns, adjectives and adverbs can be added, so the children then jump quickly to the shiny window . When children are taught in this way, the rules of grammar become intuitive; grammar becomes an unconscious process that ‘feels’ rather than ‘looks’ right or wrong. This is an important distinction to make. Yet we teach children to read by sitting still, rather than in a large interactive room.
Remember the value of connecting good feelings with learning (Chapter 2)? When learning is a game connected with good feelings then everyone wants the experience.
This is not just limited to children. A scientist who reads about an experiment in an academic paper instantly makes sense of laboratory conditions and equipment and pays little attention to the words. Most people who have high comprehension of written material think this way. The scientist probably couldn’t recall the precise words s/he had read, yet they could describe the experiment in detail. So it’s like being there. When Richard does this he makes life-size mental pictures with everything full scale, showing different points of view, and can gain more understanding than even the author by taking different positions and perspectives.
Now it is time to raise the on-going debate over the choice of reading scheme and methodology. There is a huge amount of discussion, some of it quite adversarial, over the ‘right’ reading method.(2) It is not our intention to enter into or add to the controversy; we utilise NLP to focus on the processes involved in reading to determine the right strategy. There are three main reading methods advocated and we can utilise aspects of each of the methods once we free ourselves from the rhetoric of the debate. The three main categories are:
Phonics – synthetic or blended or analytic, focusing on the sound of letters and letter sequences. (3)
Whole language – focusing on the meaning of the words. (4)
Look and say – focusing on the shape and recognition of a word.
60% of children will learn to read with any given reading method. Either the method will suit the way they like to learn at that time or they are able to adapt and translate the methodology and make it work for them. The other 40% may struggle. Change the methodology and the statistics will be the same, but the individual children involved will be different, because the new scheme will suit different children. So the solution is to understand what goes on in the brain when learning to read and have a number of different methodologies available to suit each child.
When a child doesn’t read, it may be more a question of the flexibility of the teacher and the methodology, not the child’s abilities. Change the method and the child will read very quickly. Our experience of teaching reading is that when a new approach is introduced a child will immediately get results after 1 hour and, provided the method is continued, the child will catch up in a matter of weeks.
Before a child can make use of phonics in English s/he needs to be able to sight recognise between 50 and 100 patterns that make up words. This means looking at the word and knowing what it says and how it sounds. If children can’t do this they are likely to become bad spellers, because English is full of weird anomalies and a child needs to have a rudimentary understanding of these to make sense with phonics. For example, take ‘through’ ‘threw’ ‘true’ and ‘trough’. Try working these out without any knowledge of the structure of the English language!
One young boy who engaged his mother in a conversation about ‘abory-jines’ had worked out how to pronounce the word aborigines by using phonics, and a Lancashire girl wrote ‘slayd’ in her story to describe her favourite activity in the park (the slide) based on how she pronounced the word in her accent. These children were being creative too quickly! Phonics is very inefficient in English, although it works better in some languages such as Spanish, and in others it is irrelevant. Try learning Japanese phonically!
Synthetic phonics is now prescribed in English schools and is working well in some of them.(5) However, we observe that these schools often have enthusiastic teachers who actively engage the children in the process of learning. The children are enjoying themselves and having a complete experience where all the senses overlap (synaesthesia), so of course they learn well. This begs the question - is it the process of being engaged or the model of synthetic phonics that is accelerating the learning process in some schools?
Take a lively and enthusiastic group of teachers, committed to teaching children to read with one system or another, and most of the children will learn easily. Take the same system and give it to a reluctant and unenthusiastic group of teachers and the children won’t be engaged, won’t learn easily, and may well struggle.
Strategies which encourage learners to make pictures of words, rather than sounds of words, encourage learners to read swiftly and efficiently. The most efficient readers are sight-readers. These readers don’t say the words or make the sounds, either on the inside or the outside of their head. So why do we assess reading ability through speaking out loud? It’s another case of doubt and certainty! The early reader will often read aloud in a doubt-filled voice, which makes it more likely that they will feel doubt when they read. The teacher may know that the child can read a particular word, but the unintended consequence is to slow the reader and the reading down.
Once a reader begins to develop a degree of competence it is preferable to ask him/her to read some pages and tell you what they are about. This begins to encourage children to read for meaning and understanding. Testing whether they can read certain words can be achieved through writing. Testing if they understand what they have read can be achieved by asking them to tell the story or act it out in their own words.
A common misconception is that a person uses the same strategies for reading as they do for spelling. The following example also illustrates what happens when there is insufficient focus on the meaning of words. A father told Kate that he had become concerned about his young daughter’s reading ability. Dad, with a little NLP experience, had attempted to coach his daughter to make a picture of each word listed in a recent homework, in the same way as described in chapter 3 for the spelling strategy. However, the task was not a spelling one; it was a comprehension task to match the most appropriate word within each sentence listed. The child struggled and everyone became frustrated – how could the father’s NLP spelling strategy fail? The answer is that the spelling strategy works for spelling and was not the correct strategy for this challenge. What was needed here was a strategy to assign meaning to each word, not to recall or spell a word. She would then know which words went where based on their meaning. For example:
Take your shoes off and ____________
in the grass
It rained so the _____________ in the park ended
Choose the correct word:
yield, blossom, romp, ambush
Here are some useful steps to teaching reading. First, teach a child to enjoy the reading process so that they want to do it for themselves and have great feelings about stories.
The strategy for building a love of reading looks like this:
Contentment and anticipating the story
Ki – Kinaesthetic internal
Child listens to the story
Ae - Auditory external
Child imagines pictures, movies
Vi – Visual internal
Child experiences a range of feelings (scary, happy, intriguing etc.) and finally excited, enjoyable and wanting more!
Ki – Kinaesthetic internal
Next create associations between objects, their meaning and the image of the word to build sufficient language structure and encourage sight-reading through games and fun activities.
See Activity 1 at the end of this chapter.
Use some phonics to enable a child to work out any unfamiliar words and encourage private reading with discussion to ensure progress. Encourage comprehension and understanding through discussion.
If you encounter a child or adult who isn’t accessing reading easily, the trick is to use strategy elicitation to discover what isn’t working. Take Emily, for example. When she was eight, her reading development was way behind her peers. Watching and listening to her read, it quickly became obvious that she just didn’t get the phonics system she was being taught at school. Saying the sound of the letters one after the other didn’t get her to the word: ‘c……a……t c...a…t c..a..t – DOG’ , was one such response. She was basing her thinking on the picture (it looked like a dog) and what she already knew. However, her sensory acuity was fantastic; she never missed a trick and would notice immediately if something was moved in the room. She also loved to be active, especially singing, dancing and acting. So the new game was to put the names of objects on things around the house, then collect the labels, mix them up, and label the objects again. Next she moved on to labels for activities (verbs) and it took just 3 weeks for her reading to catch up with her peers. A few weeks later she was given a play to narrate and this year, aged 9, she is top of her class for reading.
Reading to Learn
Mr Beadle was very frustrated with his group of 14-year-old History students. He would ask them, ‘did you all read chapter 4 of the textbook?’ Yes would be the answer. ‘So what were the key messages?’ Response – silence! They can read the words as instructed, but may not have been taught how to extract the information from the text.
Once a child has mastered the mechanics of the reading process, more strategies are needed to be able to read for meaning or pleasure, or skim and scan to extract information. We don’t think our education system pays enough attention to developing these skills, Even though processes like SQ3R. Survey Question Read Recite Review(6) , are useful, there is no mechanism to teach the reader how to survey or question or review. Fortunately, NLP offers more.
A strategy to extract Information and Meaning
When it comes to reading for meaning, the most important thing is for the reader
to have a good question in their head as they look at the words. A question like ‘what is this about?’ is a good start. Ask students to say this to themselves as they take 30 seconds to look over 2 or 3 pages, then answer the question. This creates an overview of the subject – the big picture!
The next step is to have them ask themselves, ‘what are three main points on these pages about this topic? ’, scan through the pages again and answer the question.
The third question is ‘find three things about each of these three key points’ and there you have it - within 2 minutes they can tell you 13 pieces of information about those pages.
You can try this for yourself. Pick a new chapter of this book. Before you look at the first page ask yourself ‘what’s this about?’ and make a mental note of the answer. Secondly ask yourself ‘what are 3 key points in the text?’ and make a mental note of your three answers. Thirdly ask yourself to ‘find 3 additional points about each of the 3 key questions’ ; and make a mental note of three pieces of information you have arranged under the first three headings. Now close your eyes and pay attention to how you know the answers to these questions. This will give you a better understanding of your personal strategy for learning key points.
A strategy for Speed Reading
During a Teaching Excellence seminar in Amsterdam, Kate was asked for help from Maria, who said she read very slowly and wanted to be able to read much faster than she did at the moment. What was interesting is that Maria was an extremely effective and efficient speller, but she read really slowly. She used a strong visual strategy for spelling but a slow auditory strategy for reading, saying each word to herself. She was taught the strategy outlined above and it helped a bit, but she was still struggling with the instruction ‘scan your eyes down the page ’. Her eyes kept stopping on words whilst she said them to herself, until Kate said, ‘not those eyes – use your spelling eyes!’ Maria said, ‘OH, RIGHT! I was using the wrong eyes – now I can scan the page easily!’ In her excitement at discovering a new strategy she went home and spent the whole evening reading everything she could find.
To speed up reading for meaning you need to stop saying the words inside your head and it’s important to teach the student this as a skill. When asking themselves the first question, have them just scan their eyes down the centre of the page. Ask them to do this quite steadily at first, just looking with the focus on the middle of the page. Their peripheral vision will take in the rest of the words well enough to know what the page is about. They can then repeat this process with the other questions and demonstrate easily to themselves how quickly they can take in information. This is the essence of speed-reading techniques. But don’t tell anyone – you’re supposed to go on expensive courses to learn to do this!
The lady in Amsterdam already had the right strategy in place and just needed the key to access it. It’s worth noting that there may well be a place for her original strategy, such as reading poetry out loud. Every strategy can be useful in the right context.
During the course of researching this book, we made a study of how good readers extract information from a book and observed some key patterns. Firstly, lots of people have a kinaesthetic process to begin with. They will turn the book in their hands to get the feel of it. Then they will look at the front and back covers. Some people go straight to the end and look at the last page. One lady said she wanted to read the last page to decide if it had a good enough ending or not. That was how she decided it was worth reading the rest of the book. The next thing people did was skim over a few pages. When asked what they were doing, they said they were looking to see how well written it was. Some people find bad style irritating while others are drawn to a style they like, so the visual input led to a kinaesthetic response in this instance. At this point, most of the good readers were deciding whether to read the book or not. Once these criteria were fulfilled, they went on to read using variations of the strategies outlined above.
Remember that NLP is the study of subjective experience – and if you want to help someone do something, a good place to start is by studying what they can already do well. It’s a matter of being able to back up from the particular difficulty and ask the questions about what is going on or what is not going on subjectively, and what needs to happen before the person can perform a particular task or skill. By studying the subjective experience of people who are already skilled in a particular task, we gain the resources to teach others to do the same.
summary
Now you have the fundamental strategies for teaching anyone to learn and enjoy reading. You have explored the strategies that progress students from the mechanics of reading to effective, efficient and pleasurable reading. These skills give y
ou the opportunity to free others from limitation and have access to their fundamental human rights to information, decision-making and choice through the written word.
references
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson 1837 The American Scholar: An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, MA
2. Kim JS. 2008 Research and the Reading Wars. In: Hess FM When Research Matters: How Scholarship Influences Education Policy. Harvard Education Pres, Cambridge, MA 3. Regie Routman, 1991, Invitations, Heinemann Educational Books
4. 2014, What’s Whole in Whole Language in the 21st Century? Carn Press New York
5. Reading the next Steps, 2015, Department of Education
6. Francis Pleasant Robinson (1978). Effective Study (6th Ed.). New York: Harper & Row
activities
Activity 1
Make a set of cards with nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs printed on them. Play the ‘find the word game’ with a child or a group of children. First, put the cards printed with the nouns on objects around the room (or house) with the child/ren. Then collect the cards up and make a game of putting them back on the right objects. Immediately correct any places where the cards are not right yet, and keep going until they are all right. Then move on to the verbs. Give the child/ren the verb cards and have them move in this way to the objects. Add the adjectives and adverbs to the sequence to start building sentences.
Here is an example:
Window
Put the right word on the window
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