BOOK

LOOKING FOR ANSWERS: It has always been my concern that, despite a deluge of resources, teaching methods, and innovations over the years, many students still fail to acquire functional literacy. They stubbornly remain in the school system, and emerge with low self-esteem and unfortunately, often at a huge cost to society. I searched exhaustively to discover what had been missed. Then Fate stepped in.

WHERE I BEGAN: In the last ten years of my teaching, I was fortunate to be relief teaching in many multi-level classrooms that covered five to thirteen years of age. This required me to teach children individually. I was the context that would allow me to focus my own informal research and test teaching methods with multiple age levels.

I used a student’s written language as a place to start, not their reading. Surely their efforts in writing, however humble, represented what their current understanding of literacy was, whether it is only a scribble, a picture, a story, a poem, the news, etc. It also laid it this out in front of me for close analysis. I regularly analyzed hundreds of pieces of writing from all the children I taught, including preschoolers, slow learners, dyslexics, gifted children, and students for whom English is a second language.

This initiated goal-based learning around their writing efforts I practiced this at all levels. It became a very effective way to “listen” to children and engage them in their own evaluation of their efforts. Exciting discoveries emerged. My interest in the empowering effects of ‘listening’ to the student in both oral and written language, uncovered much that had eluded me before. It revealed a structure of learning that is common to all students in acquiring literacy.

It was not the structure imposed from outside by the present five-strand curriculum, (in New Zealand), but an organic structure that was embedded in every student. The structure was not in the writing content but was in mastering the symbols and conventions that allowed one to make sense of what they read and, more importantly, create meaning in what they wrote for others.

I observed that, as they progressively mastered literacy symbols and conventions, comprehension in their reading rose and so did their word knowledge, which allowed them to express themselves more confidently. The problems were embedded in alphabet knowledge, sentence structures, paragraphing, capitalization, direct and indirect speech, apostrophes, and spelling patterns.

In my long teaching career, I had not come across a usable and assessment-based structure that was easily tailored to the literacy and emotional needs of each student. Sure, there were many forms of literacy assessment that met the needs for accountability of schools and teachers, (and these were proliferating, propelled by governments increasingly alarmed at dropping literacy rates). This new way of looking at student achievement was the breakthrough I was looking for.

It not only allowed me a door into each child’s thinking, but it also gave me a place to set up true dialogue between myself and the student. It also revealed a clear path forward within this structure as to what the next appropriate learning step should be. Analyzing student writing attempts had paid huge dividends.

The literacy themes identified in school literacy curriculums are Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, and Presenting. They are poorly integrated, and reading takes center stage. Assessment methods and standards for identifying the reading age of a student and their place in relation to other children of similar age are freely available. Unfortunately, they give little or no guidance as to a realistic place for the teacher to do something about their problems. The structure I worked with did.

Listening and Speaking had pride of place in my methods. It also allowed me to look more closely at the empowering or disempowering effects on people that are linked to language in the school setting. But Listening and Speaking are not easy to teach. They are entwined with emotion, self-confidence, concentration, prior knowledge, cultural background, and access to words, etc. (all difficult to assess and access). I began to think of them as related to the other strands of the curriculum, but in a different way that suddenly made it easier.

I linked reading to listening to the author’s voice by deciphering a code. I linked writing to speaking applying the same code. Everything suddenly became clearer. By analyzing the student’s writing attempts at expressing personal meanings, I could find a way into their heads to identify what their current mastery of literacy was. Using the structure that I had discovered I could feed in what was needed, (which, in the early stages, was largely mastery of the alphabet).

But, as the code began to be mastered, one also needed to nurture quality in the message. This is, after all, the end goal that gives the student’s writing its value. Both are inter-connected. If one is overly focused on deciphering the code, often the message is missed. If one is only concerned with communicating the message, it may well miss its mark if it is indecipherable, or the student does not have access to the precise words they need.

I further researched what was known about listening and speaking. Going back as far as the fetus in the womb, I discovered that the sense of hearing is fully developed in the womb and the language centers of the brain are fully developed at birth. Also, the brain is uniquely programmed for learning multiple languages up to about three to four years of age. Furthermore, most loving adults instinctively nurture language development by feeding in words and meaningful sounds.

One cannot think without words, and the child without sufficient words finds learning difficult; not just learning to speak, but to think about their own.