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Teachers
and parents of 11- to 16-year-olds often believe that schools have done
nothing for the reading difficulties of the young people they are concerned
about. Yet the older child has probably been the focus of a whole sequence
of well-intentioned efforts to help, each of which has done little for
the child. This does not mean that children do not sometimes succeed
with a brilliant teacher, a fantastic teacher-child relationship, a
hardworking parent-child team. What it does mean is that the efforts
often fail for want of experienced teachers, and for want of persistence
and continuity of efforts. They often fail because they are begun too
late.
It seemed to me that the longer we left the child failing the harder
the problem became and three years was too long. The results of waiting
are these.
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There
is a great gap or deficit to be made up.
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There
are consequential deficits in other aspects of education.
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There
are consequences for the child's personality and confidence.
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An
even greater problem is that the child has not only failed to learn
in his three years at school, he has tried to do his work, he has
practised his primitive skills and he has habituated, daily, the wrong
responses. He has learned; and all that learning stands like a block
wall between the remedial teacher and the responses that she is trying
to get established.
A remedial programme
must take what has to be unlearned into account.
Why have we tended to wait until the child was eight or more years old
before offering special assistance?
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We
believed, erroneously, that children mature into reading.
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We
do not like to pressure children, and we gave them time to settle.
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We
knew children who were 'late bloomers' (or we thought we did).
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Our
tests were not reliable until our programmes were well under way and
we were loath to label children wrongly or to use scarce remedial
resources on children who would recover spontaneously.
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We
did not understand the reading process sufficiently well.
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We
thought a change of method, a search for the great solution, would
one day make the reading problem disappear.
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We
believed in simple, single causes such as 'not having learned his
phonics'.
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Teachers
have real difficulty in observing which children are having difficulty
at the end of the first year of instruction, often claiming there
are no such children in their schools.
In 1962 when I
began my research I asked the simple question, 'Can we see the reading
process going wrong in the first year of instruction?' It was, in terms
of our techniques at the time, an absurd question. The answer is, however,
that today this can be observed by the well-trained teacher. And it
is much simpler than administering batteries of psychological tests
or trying to interpret the implications for reading of neurological
examinations.
At the end of the first year at school, teachers can locate children
who can be seen to need extra resources and extra help to unlearn unwanted
behaviours or to put together isolated behaviours into a workable system.
Simple observation tasks will predict well which young children who
have been in instruction for one year are readers 'at risk'. The children's
performance on the tasks also gives the teacher some idea of what to
teach next. The second year at school can then be used as a time to
catch up with the average group of children.
The
sensitive observation of reading behaviour
First
steps in the prevention of reading difficulties can be taken in any
school system by the sensitive appraisal of the individuality of school
entrants, and the careful observation at frequent intervals of children's
responsiveness to a good school programme. Predictive tests may be available
but are prone to error because they try to estimate how well a child
will perform in an activity he has not even tried yet. They can be supplemented
or replaced by systematic observation and recording of what children
are doing as they perform the tasks of the classroom. Observation of
children's behaviour is a sound basis for the early evaluation of reading
progress. Children may stray off into poor procedures at many points
during the first year of instruction.
I refer here to a controlled form of observation which requires systematic,
objective recording of exactly what a child does on a particular (sometimes
contrived) task. It must be carried out without any accompanying teaching
or teacher guidance. This contrasts with several things - observation
while teaching, casual or subjective observation, or judgemental conclusions
based on remembered events from fleeting observations during the teaching
of many children.
Of 100 children studied in one Auckland-based study (Clay, 1966; 1982)
there were children making slow progress because of poor language development
and whose real problem lay in their inability to form and repeat phrases
and sentences. There were many children who wavered for months trying
to establish a consistent directional approach to print. There were
children who could not hear the separation of words within
a spoken sentence, nor the sequence of sounds that occur in words.
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