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Traditional Approaches

Since I first began to teach children to read more than 40 years ago the teaching problems have remained much the same, although the services have increased and improved and the percentage of children needing special help may have been reduced. What we do have today is an awareness of literacy learning among teachers, parents and the community that did not exist in the 1950s when we were trying to create that awareness.
With the growth of community interest there has been a proliferation of naive ideas about what reading is and what reading difficulties are. Incorrect and misleading ideas are found in the media each week. The following are two examples.

Critics of the schools often assume that people differ in intelligence but they expect all people to reach a similar level in reading. These two expectations are contradictory.

Completely erroneous statements are made about words seen in reverse or the brain scrambling the signals for the eyes or squares looking like triangles. There is no evidence to support such nonsensical descriptions of how our brains work as we read.

These errors of understanding arise from adults who make superficial or poor observations of their own skills or who disseminate misguided interpretations of new concepts, half-understood.
By the fourth year of school a teacher will have a range of reading ability in her classroom that spreads over five or six years. The less able children will read like children in the first or second year class and her more able children will read like young high school pupils. There is a range of reading achievement for which the class teacher must provide. It comes about in part because once a certain command of reading is attained one's reading improves every time one reads. Traditionally, a child has been considered worthy of special help only if his achievement falls more than two years below the average for his class or age group. That criterion had more to do with the reliability of our achievement test instruments than with any particular learning needs of the children.
Teachers and the educational system should make every effort to reduce the number of children falling below their class level in reading, but public opinion must learn to ask appropriate evaluative questions. If all children at every point in the range of normal variation are increasing their skill then the school is doing its job well. All children will not be able to read in the same way or at the same level any more than they can all think alike.
Let me give an example. Livia had many differences in his preschool experiences compared with the average school entrant. He was over seven years before he was able to start reading books. In his fourth year at school he was reading well at the level of children in their third year at school. In one sense he was not a reading problem. His rate of progress once he had begun to read was about average. Livia needed reading material and instruction at his level so that he could continue to learn to read and only in that sense had he a reading problem. If given harder materials to read he would work at frustration level and could even 'go backwards' because he would no longer be practising, in smooth combination, the skills he had developed so far. In this way he could become illiterate for want of appropriate pacing of his reading material.
There is a reading level below which the child may lose his skill when he moves out into the community rather than maintain it. It falls somewhere around the average 10- to 11-year-old reading achievement level. If our reading skill is not sufficient for us to practise it every day by reading the paper or notices or instructions, then we seem to lose some of the skill in much the same was as we lose a foreign language which we no longer speak.
A first requirement of a good reading programme is that all teachers check the provisions that they make for the lowest reading groups in their classes. Is the programme really catering for the range of literacy knowledge which the children have? For learning to occur it is very important to ensure that the difficulty level of the reading material presents challenges from which the child can learn, and not difficulties that disorganise what he already knows. If children in a low reading group are not reading for meaning, if what they read does not sound like meaningful language, if they are stuttering over sounds or words with no basis for prediction, they should be taken back to a level of reading material where they can orchestrate all the reading processes and knowledge into a smoothly functioning, message-getting process. (They will read fairly accurately with about one error in five to 10 words.)