“No one told him it could not be done, so he went ahead and did it”.
Many people have expressed interest in teaching adults and children to read fluently. They want to ensure that all the children in their school or all the people in their church learn to read fluently. They think the job is impossible because all of the students are at different stages of readiness. The solution to this problem is so simple you may complain that it is too easy.
My experiences in the classroom have taught me that Jamaican teachers move at the pace of the “brightest” children in their classes. The “slower” children are left behind as little attention is paid to them. The “brighter” children are usually the ones who have somebody at home either helping them, or encouraging them to do their homework.
Teachers in basic schools, as well as those who teach at Grade 1 in primary schools, should teach the entire class as if nobody is helping them at home. They should make reading the most important subject.
I am going to tell you about my experiences in the last school where I taught. I chose this school because I found it the most challenging place to teach – challenging in every way.
The principal had to leave suddenly without much notice. He recommended that I should head the school because he said I would do a good job.
Whenever I did “class teaching”, where it was my responsibility to teach my class every subject, I always emphasized reading. Every year only two or three children could read the first page of the new reading book. Many had difficulty even identifying a few words on the page. By the end of the term every child would be reading fluently at the A – level. I accomplished this with every class I taught.
Now I was responsible for an entire school, Grades One to Nine, and I could not bear the thought of any child being unable to read.
Each class obviously used different reading books. The one book they all had in common was a book called “The School Bible”, all using the same version.
I chose three passages of the Bible. They were Psalm 27, Psalm 84 and I Corinthians 13: 1 – 13. We would read these three passages of the Bible every morning at devotion. We did little else at devotion apart from a short prayer each morning.
At first only a few children in the school could read. Each week more and more voices were added to those reading or reciting as some were doing. At the end of the month even the slowest children began to know the passages by heart as a result of just listening to the ones who could read and trying to follow the words in the Bible.
The thrill of knowing so many passages by heart made them all feel that they were bright. This motivated them to follow my instructions. They would go home every evening and recite these passages to anyone who would listen, or just to the trees, while carefully following the words in the Bible. By the end of the term, they could read not only these passages but their class reading books fluently.
From past experiences in class teaching, I always knew the children who obeyed my instruction to read aloud at home every day. There were always marked improvements at the end of each week.
After making mistakes in my method of teaching, I started to spend more time at school, during recess and lunch time with the few not practicing at home. They too became self motivated in time.
These experiences taught me how amazing the human mind is, that God gave us all. They would naturally learn the sounds of the various blends of letters by reading. They had already been taught all of the phonetic sounds of all the letters of the alphabet by their basic school teachers and class teachers.
I used a similar method in regular class teaching. The whole class would read the first page of their class reader aloud, at school and home until every child mastered the first page. This was achieved by constant repetition. We would not read the next page until every child could read the previous page. To move along faster, I would sometimes put the slower children in groups to give them more practice. They would be tested individually by the ones who could read the page. After a few weeks they would all be at the same standard, and the whole class could move together at a much faster pace. Using this method, children with all types of learning difficulties would learn to read. The size of the class would not matter. Repetition is truly the key to learning.
