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And
yet statements on remediation just as often recommend training the child
on 'simpler' materials - pictures, shapes, letters, sounds - all of
which require a large amount of skill to transfer to the total situation
of reading a message which is expressed in sentence form! To try to
train children to read on pictures and shapes or even on puzzles, seems
a devious route to reading. One would not deny that many children need
a wide range of supplementary activities to compensate for barren preschool
lives; but it is foolish to prepare for reading by painting with large
brushes, doing jigsaw puzzles, arranging large building blocks, or writing
numbers. Preparation for reading can be done more directly with written
language.
Having established that printed forms are the remedial media, one can
then allow that simplification, right down to the parts of the letters,
may at times be required for some children. However, the larger the
chunks of printed language the child can work with, the more quickly
he learns, and the richer the network of meanings he can use. We should
only dwell on detail long enough for the child to discover its existence
and then encourage the use of it in isolation only when absolutely necessary.
As a reader the child will use detail within and as a part of a pattern
of cues or stimuli. The relationships of details to patterns in reading
have often been destroyed by our methods of instruction. It is so easy
for us as teachers, or for the designers of reading materials, to achieve
that destruction.
There have been many attempts to match teaching methods to the strengths
of groups of children. The child with good visual perception is said
to benefit from sight-word methods; the child with good auditory perception
is thought to make better progress on phonic methods. One author writes:
'Children are physiologically oriented to visual or auditory learning.'
Another says, 'Teaching phonics as a relatively "pure" form
will place a child at a disadvantage if he is delayed in auditory perceptual
ability'! Such instruction would place all children at a severe disadvantage;
they would have to learn by themselves many skills that their teachers
were not teaching, if they were to become successful readers.
Such matching attempts are simplistic, for English is a complex linguistic
system. The way to use a child's strengths and improve his weaknesses
is not to work on one or the other but to design the tasks so that he
practise~ the weakness with the aid of his strong abilities. Rather
than take sides on reading methods which deal either with sounds that
are synthesised or with sentences which are analysed,
Close
observation of a child's weaknesses will be needed because he will depend
on the teacher to structure the task in simple steps to avoid the accumulation
of confusions. For one child the structuring may be in the visual perception
area. For another it may be in sentence patterns. For a third it may
be in the discrimination of sound sequences. For a fourth it may be
in directional learning. It is most likely to be in the bringing together
of all these ways of responding as the reader works sequentially through
a text.
It therefore seems appropriate to seek diagnosis of those aspects of
the reading process which are weak in a particular child soon after
he has entered instruction. The Observation Survey has been used to
provide such information for children taught in very different programmes
for beginning reading (in New Zealand, Scotland, Australia and the United
States). Children in different programmes of instruction do not score
in similar ways but the Observation Survey provides a framework within
which early reading behaviour can be explored irrespective of the method
of instruction. What will vary from programme to programme will be the
typical scores on the tests of the Survey after a fixed time in instruction.
In what follows there is only slight emphasis on scores and quantifying
progress. The real value of the Observation Survey is to uncover what
a particular child controls and what operations (see below) and items
he could be taught next.
Reading instruction often focuses on items of knowledge, words, letters
and sounds. Most children respond to this teaching in active ways. They
search for links between the items and they relate new discoveries to
old knowledge. They operate on print as Piaget's children operate on
problems, searching for relationships which order the complexity of
print and therefore simplify it.
The end-point of early instruction has been reached when children have
a self-extending system of literacy behaviours and learn more about
reading every time they read, independent of instruction. When they
read texts of appropriate difficulty for their present skills, using
their knowledge of oral and written language and their knowledge of
the world, they use a set of operations or strategies 'in their heads'
which are just adequate for reading the more difficult bits of the text.
In the process they engage in 'reading work', a deliberate effort to
solve new problems with familiar information and procedures. They notice
new things about words, and constructively link these things to both
their knowledge of the world around them, and their knowledge of the
printed language gained in their short history of successful reading
of simple books. The process is progressive and accumulative. The newly
noticed feature(s) of print, worked upon today, becomes the reference
point for another encounter in a few days. 'Television' as a new word
becomes a reference point for 'telephone' in a subsequent text. Children
are working on two theories - what Smith (1978) calls their theory of
the world and what will make sense, and a second theory of how written
language is created.
