I have
written about a British who could read fluently in Japanese and yet was ‘dyslexic’
when it came to reading in English. I have articles by researchers saying that
Italians who could read fluently in Italian could not read well in English. I
personally have taught many dyslexic kids who could read well in Malay and yet
were dyslexic in English. Now, my friend Bob has said that a Harvard professor who wrote the introduction to the 1912 English
translation of The Montessori Method also wrote "That (handwriting
fluency) might work for Italians, but it would never work for Anglophone
students".
How can we incorporate handwriting with
what I have been writing in my blog on teaching ‘shut-down’ learners?
As explained in my post on shut down
learners a majority of kids shut-down when things taught to them are
inconsistent with what they have learnt earlier. Why do they shut-down when it
comes to learning to read in English but not when they learn to read in
Italian, Malay or any other orthographically consistent language? Let us take
Malay for illustration purposes. Each letter in the Malay language has only one
phoneme/sound except for the letter ‘E’ which has 2 phonemes. This does cause a
little problem for students when they come across a new word with the letter ‘E’.
But, other than words with the letter ‘E’ anyone can read Malay by the time he
goes to grade 2.
As explained in my earlier post, this is
not the case with the English language where all vowels have more than one
sound and even consonants are not spared.
How then may we combine handwriting and
learning to read fluently? My suggestion would be to teach the names of the letters
of the alphabets which the kids can learn to write while they sound out the names
of the letters.
The teacher should then teach the kids
that all vowels have more than one sound. Start by teaching words commencing
with the letter sounds first. For the letter ‘A’ they can start by learning to
write and sound out words like: Ace, ate, add, age etc and then the teacher can even teach them to
write words with that particular sound in the word like: face, race, lace etc.
On another day the teacher should
introduce another sound of the letter ‘A’ while saying that this is another
sound of the letter ‘A’, for instance: Ago. Again, Agree, Around, Ado etc.
Similarly the teacher should teach the
kids words with the letter ‘A’ which has other sounds.
The fact that the teacher has taught
them that all vowels have more than one sound will open up the minds of these
kids and they will be prepared for different sounds of the alphabets thus
preventing them from shutting down.
In fact after teaching just one sound of
the letter ‘A’ as in the family words bat, cat, fat, mat, pat, rat, and sat we
can teach them to read sentences just by teaching them 2 sight words like ‘on’,
and ‘and’,
My first book on phonics which I had
written with pictures drawn by some school students, I teach the following and
my dyslexic students are elated that they can read.
My first book is something like the
following:
A fat cat
A fat cat sat on a mat
A fat cat and a rat sat on a bat
Etc etc
Having taught the kids that the letter ‘A’
has more than one sound and having taught them the sound of ‘a’ as in cat and
fat, I introduce another sound when I teach them the words ‘A fat cat’. Now, I
tell them that the sound of ‘A’ as in ‘A fat cat’ is different from the first
sound of the letter 'a' they had learnt.
The above is all a teacher needs to
ensure kids do not shut-down. NOW they have been told that some letters in
English have more than one sound and when a new sound is introduced they are
informed. They do not shut-down. When kids do not shut down they will learn to
read like students who learn Malay and Italian. Illiteracy will be reduced.
1 comment:
Start by reading the article from start to end. Do not summarize 'on-the-fly' by reading and writing the summary at the same time.
Post a Comment