Teaching Reading
Sun., August 31, 11:47 AM
How were you taught to read? (Actually, I really can’t remember when I couldn’t.) The method of choice used to change regularly when I was a child. When I was in first grade, the schools were teaching via the sight method. That is, they showed the kids a word to learn and remember. My mother had already taught me to sound out a letter at a time — the phonetics method. (The term phonics didn’t turn up till much later.) Most of the kids in my reading group were well ahead of all the others; many of them, however, were reading by sight.
Naturally, the teacher did not spend much time with our group, because we could read already. There were others who not only not reading yet but would not be reading for another couple of years. (And no, they were not required to repeat the grade. Policy was not to hold pupils back nor to skip a grade because “they didn’t want to separate them from their friends.”)
Between observing my younger cousins and then my own children, I realized there were lots of ways to teach kids to read; a combination seems to work best. Many kids learned to read in spite of the methods. One of my kids came home with picture cards to learn the sounds of the letters; for the sound of F, there was a drawing of an angry cat. Cat, F? I was sure I was reading something wrong. Fine print on the back explained that a spitting cat makes the sound of F. Fox, Flower, Frog — and the best they could do was a spitting cat.
Eventually, as a literacy volunteer, I would realize that sometimes phonics simply does not work. I should have known. Discussion in a college linguistics class pointed out a flaw in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the assumption that everyone would pronounce words just about the same way. (The IPA has been adjusted somewhat in the last forty years…) As one girl pointed out, “They say the A in fan and in hat are the same. I don’t pronounce ‘hat’ that way.” But another student did pronounce them the same; it is a regional thing, that slightly nasal shading to the short a. I think the regional differences are probably more obvious with vowels.
In the 1960’s, when I worked in the public library, I saw a book called The NBC Handbook of Pronunciation, which was just that. All announcers on radio and television were expected to speak Standard English. You could not tell by listening to them whether the speaker had come from New York, the Midwest, or the South. My brother and I were interested in this concept, especially because he was considering radio as a career. In general, however, it was not a problem for us, because our mother had consciously patterned her speaking according to what she heard on the radio. She had gone from the Scottish burr of her childhood to sounding like a “Noo Yawkah,” and she knew that she needed to sound “American.” Like most kids, we learned to talk by imitating our mother.
Times change, and maybe we’ve become a little more tolerant. No one was going to make John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson change the way they talked. Dan Rather never completely lost the sound of Texas, even though he was an announcer. We began to accept that people would talk as they had been taught and that regional was not automatically bad. (It’s only bad if your listeners don’t understand you.)
Back to teaching reading. I found that there were two roadblocks to teaching an adult to read. The first is behavioral. My student had gone through her whole life without knowing what a wealth of information and entertainment can be derived from reading. She liked having me read to her, whether it was an article from the newspaper, part of a book, or something I had written especially for her. But she really had no desire to read for herself.
The second constraint was that she did not pronounce the way I do. It was not my job to say to her,“You don’t talk right. You’ll have to change the way you talk in order to read.” But how could I teach her that “ever” and “every” are written differently, when she pronounced them the same way?
The one thing I was able to do for her was go over her weekly Bible chapter. That was something she needed, and I continued until I got a temporary full-time assignment and could no longer meet her during the day. Neither one of us could drive in the dark.
As I have heard, in a teaching relationship, the teacher often learns as much as the student.
