Calvin’s Story – Learning To Read

(Image from Huffington Post)

Learning to read and write can’t be taught!

They’re learned in the same way learning to riding a bicycle is learned – by trial and error, by figuring it out yourself in a supported environment.

Learning To Ride

No parent puts a child on a two-wheeler and walks away, they hang on to the seat and walk/run beside the child. They install training-wheels which get adjusted as the child becomes more proficient, until suddenly one day, the child is riding. There are other adjustments you can make to a bicycle to make it easier to learn to ride, but you can’t teach balance, steering, peddling, braking, accelerating, or turning as independent skills — they have to be learned in concert.

Riding a two-wheeler is a complicated task which each rider has to figure out for him/her self :”Riding a bicycle involves continuous use of all the human’s primary sensory capabilities, visual, vestibular [balance] and proprioceptive [the awareness of one’s body and limb positioning]….  The latter involves sensors in the arms providing information about steering inputs.”

It’s amazing anybody actually masters bike riding, and yet billions of people do.

Learning To Read

I got a call yesterday from a friend – I’ve got a “Calvin” story for you!” she tells me.

Last week Calvin (a six year-old) confronted his teacher about his reading: “Test me,” he said to her, “I’m better than that” (referring to the reading level she currently has him slotted into). She politely puts him off, “It’s OK Calvin, you’re doing fine”. “No, test me!” he insists. She still can’t see the point of this and tries to get away. “Test me,” Calvin persists, until she finally sits down with him and has him read for her, and to her astonishment she discovers he’s at least two levels more proficient than she realized.

She calls his mother afterward, to say it’s amazing, and she asks what’s happened?

Leanne, Calvin’s mother, says she’s just accessed some resources in the community that have helped her discover how to support Calvin — “he’s pretty much done this on his own”, she says, “with a little support from me.”

The “community resources” — that’s me!

Calvin, Leanne and I met about a month ago. Leanne and I had arranged a visit with Calvin and me, they had come by my house and I had spent some time conversing with Calvin, reading with him, writing with him, to find out what he could do independently and what he could manage with support.

A week before their visit, my friend had called me to ask if I’d be willing to talk to Leanne about Calvin’s reading difficulties.  When I spoke with Leanne I learned she was worried about Calvin’s reading, his avoiding just about all literacy tasks, and as first grade was drawing to a close she didn’t think we was doing very well. She’d been told he had a learning disability; she’d had him to one of the local literacy places for assessment and tutoring — it wasn’t helping him much, and she was frustrated the staff wouldn’t discuss Calvin’s situation with her in any real depth; they weren’t offering her strategies to help him at home.

I was certainly willing to meet Leanne and Calvin. We made an appointment for the following Monday.

We sat ourselves at my dining room table. Calvin was cooperative, he knew how to write his name, his phone number, knew where he lived and his birthday. He’s left-handed so his writing (I mean putting marks on paper, not cursive) was immature and he was orienting the paper as if he were right-handed — obviously nobody had shown him how to position the paper for a left-hander. He was OK with arithmetic for a 6 year-old. And then we began to read together.

I was sitting on Calvin’s right (he’s left-handed, remember); Leanne was across the table from us. I was interested in finding out precisely what strategies Calvin had at his disposal, how he managed text independently, how he did with support.

I’d asked Leanne to bring some books Calvin could read independently. He arrived with one of the early reading books he was bringing home from school (I can’t remember the title). As he read to me I could see his range of strategies were limited — when I asked him what he did when he came to something he didn’t know, he told me he “sounded it out” — except it was clear he didn’t know what to do with that strategy. “Do you ever do anything else?” “Not really.” “Do you ever just skip it and keep on reading?” “No,” he said. That’s a typical conversation with a struggling reader. Furthermore he’d been discouraged from using information in the illustrations (which in this particular book weren’t terrifically informative), and he was reading too slowly for the flow of language to help him along.

When we finished his book, I hauled out a predictable book: “I Was Walking Down The Road.” (Sarah Barchas and Jack Kent). We started reading it together, me taking the lead with him pointing, then Calvin read each page on his own (with help if he needed it). I wanted to see if I could turn him into a fluent reader with the predictability of the text, the support of the illustrations, the flow of the language. Didn’t take too many pages before he was having a run at the page on his own (with my support if he hesitated). We finished the book and he then read it again this time pretty much on his own.

The point of the exercise was to see what sort of support would allow him to experience being a fluent reader, and to demonstrate a variety of ways of being supportive for Leanne. She’s sharp, she understood what I was doing. After Calvin and I finished reading, Leanne and I discussed predictable books and supported reading. Then I asked her and Calvin to go home, make a list of all the books he could already read on his own, then to go through his collection and choose some books they would work on, adding titles as he was able to read new stories by himself. I assured Calvin that when he’d listed between 50 – 75 books he’d be able to read anything he wanted to.

I also suggested Leanne read much more advanced books to him at bedtime, with Calvin pointing as she read so he could watch the text and experience the connection between what was written and what he was hearing.

That’s pretty much all I did. And in a month Calvin improved two levels by working with his mom. I was simply thrilled for him on two counts: first he was confident enough to approach his teacher and be persistent when she wouldn’t take him seriously! And second, that he’d actually improved two levels!

I haven’t seen him since then, although I hope to have him visit again — I’d like to work on his fine motor skills/handwriting, spelling, story writing; again my point would be to help Leanne understand how to support him and what to watch for.

Calvin didn’t need intensive remedial teaching — he needed to experience reading in a supported context. He’s obviously begun making sense of reading for himself in a very short time.

Reading is a complex activity — our brains have to use visual cues which our eyes take in from the marks on the page, and coordinate that input with what we know about orthographic patterns, syntactic structures, as well as what general knowledge we have stored about the world, and that all has to happen quickly so short term memory can hold the information as it flows through.

Reading is first and foremost a meaning making activity. It’s a mistake to fragment the process into “skills” and expect someone to get the hang of what’s going on. About half of all children figure out reading for themselves (a surprising number before any formal schooling) and they are largely oblivious to the formal instruction they might receive — they don’t need it because they have figured out reading more or less on their own. It’s those who haven’t figured it out before getting to school who often run into trouble — what instruction calls “reading” just makes the whole process very difficult.

It’s not that what are called the “skills” of reading are irrelevant — knowing something about letter/sound correspondences (phonics) provides clues that narrow down the possibilities of what that next word might be, but a heavy emphasis on this particular cuing system bogs the entire process down, making it so slow that short term memory loses all the other information that supports meaning making.

Remember, learning to read is like learning to ride a bike — the learner has to figure out how to coordinate a complex array of clues fast enough for meaning to carry them forward. Nobody can “teach” that. Learners have to figure that out for themselves and that takes confidence. Each learner has to believe he or she can do this successfully.  When they start doubting their ability to make it all work, that’s when they back away from the task.

Nobody likes feeling a failure. Which is why reading compelling stories to children, having them read simpler texts along with us, allowing them to fill in aspects of meaning will take them farther, faster. Providing this kind of support allows insecure learners to experience themselves as fluent readers. Not all children are as determined as Calvin was, but helping them feel more in control of their learning can take them a very long way on the road to becoming confident, capable readers.