| No one knows how children learn to read: how they master the mammoth code-breaking task | ||
| of matching spoken language to a series of small black marks on a page. | ||
| Until now, teaching children to read has been a very hit and miss affair. More than any other | ||
| area of the school curriculum, reading has attracted a mass of schemes and gimmicks designed to | ||
| 5 | get children painlessly over the hurdles which bar their way to school learning and professional | |
| success. Like freely available medicines, some of the goods are sounder than others; they work for | ||
| some children and teachers, earning their promoters a fortune, while others sink without trace. | ||
| Each new broadening of education, from the arrival of printing and of Bibles in the mother | ||
| tongue in the 15th century to the introduction of universal, compulsory education in the 19th, has | ||
| 10 | boosted the market. | |
| Some children scarcely seem to need all these paraphernalia, learning to read almost | ||
| imperceptibly. Others defy for years all the efforts of teachers armed with reading schemes and | ||
| flashcards, plastic letters and coloured bricks. Most manage to crack the basic code by about | ||
| seven or eight, but too many, perhaps as many as 20 per cent, fall at the next hurdle: the ability to | ||
| 15 | use their skill as a means of gaining knowledge and enjoyment. In the last year new light has been | |
| shed on this old mystery. Like pieces of a jigsaw, research studies set up several years ago because | ||
| of national anxiety at levels of illiteracy - have been brought together to yield a picture | ||
| that has revolutionary implications both for parents and primary school teachers. | ||
| Extending Beginning Reading by Vera Southgate, Helen Arnold and Sandra Johnson confounds | ||
| 20 | many dearly-held beliefs. In particular, the authors found that teachers who try to hear all | |
| children read aloud frequently, hinder their progress. Children learn best if left in peace to read | ||
| the books they choose for themselves. Learning to read is so highly personal a business, it | ||
| depends so much on groundwork before the age of five and the opportunity to practise at home | ||
| and in private, that much of the work must be done by parents. | ||
| 25 | Such a message, while it may seem a welcome dawn of common sense to many parents, is | |
| deeply threatening to many teachers. They are being asked to change from pedagogues to | ||
| managers and counselors, advising parents and children, diagnosing weaknesses, sorting out | ||
| appropriate remedies, organizing teaching materials, stimulating and encouraging. | ||
| It is when this study is set alongside another carried out under the guidance of the late Professor | ||
| 30 | Jack Tizard in Haringey that the full nature of the revolution becomes apparent. Still not published | |
| in full, the Haringey study of children aged between six and nine showed that they made most | ||
| progress in reading when their parents heard them read at home at least three or four times a | ||
| week. The effects were dramatically better than if parents simply read to their children or played | ||
| with and talked to them. By contrast, providing extra reading help in school with a specialist | ||
| 35 | teacher four afternoons a week was found to be almost totally ineffective. | |
| There is, of course, nothing new about parents helping children at home. What is new is the | ||
| official blessing for such activities. The Bullock report (1975) specifically warned against parents | ||
| giving formal help at home. The education world is beginning to realize that parents must be | ||
| taken into partnership in a much more thorough way than anything envisaged by the average | ||
| 40 | parent/teacher association. The days are over when teachers could say to parents, 'you teach them | |
| to tie their laces and go to the toilet on their own and we will do the rest.' | ||
| The Observer Magazine, September 13, 1981 |