Language barrier

There is a widely held belief that one of the ways of testing your understanding of something is to try and teach it to somebody else. On the whole I think it’s a very sound theory. It is very difficult to teach about anything that you haven’t really got to grips with. Except ……

I have always enjoyed reading. I can’t remember a time when I couldn't read and have very fond childhood memories of ploughing through any number of stories, especially at holiday times. I think I read almost all of Enid Blyton’s adventure story output and then graduated to westerns by JT Edson and Alistair Maclean novels. One of my favourite indulgences currently is finding time to take on a big political thriller.

Given my lifelong experience of reading I thought it would be quite easy to help some of our youngsters to improve their reading and give them a better foundation for making progress in their studies. I started in a small way last week by spending some time in the evening reading through a Walt Disney story book of Bambi with one of our weaker readers. It’s only when you start trying to explain the idiosyncrasies of English spelling and grammar that you realise what a truly awful language it is. There are always exceptions to any rule that you care to define. It’s really difficult, for example, to see any reason why the word gentle  isn't spelt jentel. Why does the g become j when it’s next to an e? Who decided this should be the case? Why? I've found it really challenging leading my student to approach reading as a series of logical building blocks that can be put together and made increasingly complex. Beyond the simplest words the English language (langwij?) is simply bonkers.

Over the week-end I’m going to see if I can find some crash course materials in teaching reading. I’m sure that there is a whole raft of such pedagogic gold out there on the Internet. Without at least a basic core of language building blocks learning to read the English language simply becomes an exercises in memorising vocabulary that somebody else leads you to. As a tool for lifelong learning this approach to mastering reading English seems highly deficient (difishunt?) to me.

All in all this latest challenge makes me in awe of those special primary school teachers who can successfully lead children to fluency in reading and at the same time inculcate a love of reading for pleasure. I was lucky, I know, to have teachers who led me in this dyreckshun.

If you’re stuck for something to do you might want to try remembering how you learned to read. I know I can read but I can’t for the life of me remember how I got the hang of it.