He Matai Matatupu | Maori Literacy Research | Kia Ata Mai Educational Trust

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Each classroom needs a wide range of reading books to cater for the expected range of reading skills. All children need both easy and challenging books from which they learn different things. Just as you might find it relaxing on holiday to pick up a light novel, an Agatha Christie or a science fiction book, competent readers enjoy easy reading too. On easy material they practise the skills they have and build up fluency.
Perhaps one or two children in the lowest group do not seem to be able to read anything. It may be that they have been forced to read at frustration level for as long as a year or two, and they may even have lost their initial reading skills. Children can go backwards later in their schooling, reading worse than they did at an earlier age. Such children may need individual teaching in order to redevelop an independent attack on books.
In the lowest reading group of many classes there could be a child who has never started to learn to read. Such children may be given remedial attention two and three times a week for several years yet they do not catch up to their peers; they may gain some reading skills but do not usually make up for those years of lost learning and their associated sense of failure.
What are the ingredients of a good reading programme for children of low achievement in classroom settings? For a good programme you need a very experienced teacher who has been trained to think incisively about the reading process and who is sensitive to individual differences. You need an organisation of time and place that permits such teachers to work individually with the children who have the least skills. The teacher helps and supports the pupil in reading meaningful messages in texts which are expertly sequenced to the individual's needs.
The teacher aims to produce in the pupil a set of behaviours which will ensure a self-extending system. With a self-extending set of behaviours the more the learner reads or writes the better he gets, and the more unnecessary the teacher becomes.
The teacher expects to end up with pupils who are as widely distributed in reading as they are in the population in intelligence, mathematical achievement, sporting skills or cooking prowess. But each pupil should be making progress from where he is to somewhere else.
Frequently, someone approaches me with this kind of statement: 'I'm not a teacher, but I would like to help children with reading difficulties. Do you think I could?' My answer is that the best person to help a child with reading difficulties is a trained teacher who has become a master teacher of reading, and who has been trained as a specialist in reading problems. There is no room for an amateur approach to children with reading difficulties, for, unlike many human conditions, failure to read almost never ends in spontaneous recovery.

Early Intervention

All understandings of how we read and of what the reading process is have changed in the last two decades under the impact of reports from intensive research efforts. What the older scholars recommended as techniques still have validity (for example, Fernald, 1943); the ways in which they understood the reading process do not. Theorists now look upon the reading process in a different way and that makes many of the older texts on reading out of date. It is not enough today to recommend old concepts and cures to solve reading difficulties. We now have very good reasons for discarding old concepts that lead to ineffective teaching.
If I believed for example that visual images of words had to be implanted by repetition in children's minds, and that a child had to know every set of letter-sound relationships that occur in English words before he could progress in reading, then I could not explain some of my successes as a teacher. I could not explain how an 11-year-old with a reading age of eight years could make three years' progress in reading in six months, having two short lessons each week. It just would not be possible. A good theory ought at least to be able to explain its successes.
When I surveyed research reports which measured children before remedial work, after the programmes, and then after a follow-up period, the results were almost always the same. Progress was made while the teacher taught, but little progress occurred back in the classroom once the clinical programme finished (Aman and Singh, 1983). One study like this carried out in New Zealand recently had the same result. The children could not continue to progress without the remedial teacher. They were not learning reading the way that successful readers learn. Successful readers learn a system of behaviours which continues to accumulate skills merely because it operates. (Exceptional reading clinicians do help children to build self-extending strategies but they do not seem to do this frequently enough to influence the research findings.)
We have operated in the past on a concept of remedial tuition that worked but did not work well enough. There have been clinicians, principals, teachers, and willing folk in the community working earnestly and with commitment. Individual children have received help but the size of the problem has not been reduced. Some children were recovered, others were maintained with some improvement and some continued to fail.
Why was this so? Lack of early identification has been one reason. In other areas of special education we practise early identification. Deaf babies, our blind and cerebral-palsied preschoolers and others with special handicaps get special help to minimise the consequential aspects of their handicaps. Yet a child with reading difficulties has had to wait until the third or fourth year of school before being offered special instruction. By then the child's reading level is two years behind that of his peers. The learning difficulties of the child might be more easily overcome if he had practised error behaviour less often, if he had less to unlearn and relearn, and if he still had reasonable confidence in his own ability. Schools must change their organisation to solve these problems early. It takes a child with the most supportive teacher only three to four months at school to define himself as 'no good at that' when the timetable comes around to reading or writing activities.

	page 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 Each classroom needs a wide range of reading books to cater for the expected range of reading skills. All children need both easy and challenging books from which they learn different things. Just as you might find it relaxing on holiday to pick up a light novel, an Agatha Christie or a science fiction book, competent readers enjoy easy reading too. On easy material they practise the skills they have and build up fluency. Perhaps one or two children in the lowest group do not seem to be able to read anything. It may be that they have been forced to read at frustration level for as long as a year or two, and they may even have lost their initial reading skills. Children can go backwards later in their schooling, reading worse than they did at an earlier age. Such children may need individual teaching in order to redevelop an independent attack on books. In the lowest reading group of many classes there could be a child who has never started to learn to read. Such children may be given remedial attention two and three times a week for several years yet they do not catch up to their peers; they may gain some reading skills but do not usually make up for those years of lost learning and their associated sense of failure. What are the ingredients of a good reading programme for children of low achievement in classroom settings? For a good programme you need a very experienced teacher who has been trained to think incisively about the reading process and who is sensitive to individual differences. You need an organisation of time and place that permits such teachers to work individually with the children who have the least skills. The teacher helps and supports the pupil in reading meaningful messages in texts which are expertly sequenced to the individual's needs. The teacher aims to produce in the pupil a set of behaviours which will ensure a self-extending system. With a self-extending set of behaviours the more the learner reads or writes the better he gets, and the more unnecessary the teacher becomes. The teacher expects to end up with pupils who are as widely distributed in reading as they are in the population in intelligence, mathematical achievement, sporting skills or cooking prowess. But each pupil should be making progress from where he is to somewhere else. Frequently, someone approaches me with this kind of statement: 'I'm not a teacher, but I would like to help children with reading difficulties. Do you think I could?' My answer is that the best person to help a child with reading difficulties is a trained teacher who has become a master teacher of reading, and who has been trained as a specialist in reading problems. There is no room for an amateur approach to children with reading difficulties, for, unlike many human conditions, failure to read almost never ends in spontaneous recovery. Early Intervention All understandings of how we read and of what the reading process is have changed in the last two decades under the impact of reports from intensive research efforts. What the older scholars recommended as techniques still have validity (for example, Fernald, 1943); the ways in which they understood the reading process do not. Theorists now look upon the reading process in a different way and that makes many of the older texts on reading out of date. It is not enough today to recommend old concepts and cures to solve reading difficulties. We now have very good reasons for discarding old concepts that lead to ineffective teaching. If I believed for example that visual images of words had to be implanted by repetition in children's minds, and that a child had to know every set of letter-sound relationships that occur in English words before he could progress in reading, then I could not explain some of my successes as a teacher. I could not explain how an 11-year-old with a reading age of eight years could make three years' progress in reading in six months, having two short lessons each week. It just would not be possible. A good theory ought at least to be able to explain its successes. When I surveyed research reports which measured children before remedial work, after the programmes, and then after a follow-up period, the results were almost always the same. Progress was made while the teacher taught, but little progress occurred back in the classroom once the clinical programme finished (Aman and Singh, 1983). One study like this carried out in New Zealand recently had the same result. The children could not continue to progress without the remedial teacher. They were not learning reading the way that successful readers learn. Successful readers learn a system of behaviours which continues to accumulate skills merely because it operates. (Exceptional reading clinicians do help children to build self-extending strategies but they do not seem to do this frequently enough to influence the research findings.) We have operated in the past on a concept of remedial tuition that worked but did not work well enough. There have been clinicians, principals, teachers, and willing folk in the community working earnestly and with commitment. Individual children have received help but the size of the problem has not been reduced. Some children were recovered, others were maintained with some improvement and some continued to fail. Why was this so? Lack of early identification has been one reason. In other areas of special education we practise early identification. Deaf babies, our blind and cerebral-palsied preschoolers and others with special handicaps get special help to minimise the consequential aspects of their handicaps. Yet a child with reading difficulties has had to wait until the third or fourth year of school before being offered special instruction. By then the child's reading level is two years behind that of his peers. The learning difficulties of the child might be more easily overcome if he had practised error behaviour less often, if he had less to unlearn and relearn, and if he still had reasonable confidence in his own ability. Schools must change their organisation to solve these problems early. It takes a child with the most supportive teacher only three to four months at school to define himself as 'no good at that' when the timetable comes around to reading or writing activities.
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