Five years ago, when my daughter started school, I had anticipated that she would be taught to read phonetically.
The A for apple, B for ball method that worked for a hundred years was deemed not good enough for the new economy and so I’d braced myself to stumble incomprehensibly through spelling words out while overworking my throat.
APPLE, for instance, would be taught as Ah, pa, le, eh. And so it was with rising panic that I received the news from school that they had even cast the phonetic method behind and evolved into a technique known as whole language learning (WLL).
WLL is a completely hippie approach to teaching kids to read. Its simple premise is that children learn to read by, simply, reading. Sort of like breathing, but not quite. In the 1970s, two professors of education, Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman, conceived this method.
Illiterate students, they said, can learn to read in the most pleasant way, in the shortest time possible, simply “by reading.” So all that the teachers need to do is immerse the kids in books, and then wait for each of them to infer what they need to know in order to learn to read words.
Teachers read aloud while the kids follow along in the text. If you read a book repeatedly, then at some point, the kids will be able to read the book themselves.
Pleasure of the experience In the early years, exhausted after reading the same bedtime stories a dozen times every night, all I could think of was painful ways to strangle the professors.
Now, five years later and significantly liberated from reading anything involving talking animals, I can see the wisdom of whole language learning.
Its revolutionary premise is not that when kids see the same word repeatedly they know what it is. On the contrary, its pitch is entirely on the power of the story. If you manage to hook a child into caring for the character and the plot, WLL shows us, she will just teach herself to read.
The words themselves are incidental, what fuels the reader is the pleasure of the experience.
A five-year old who hears the story of Chicken Licken, a neurotic chick, which misreads a falling acorn as a sign that it is indeed the sky that is falling down and rushes to tell the king about it, is sweating with worry about what would happen to the chicken. The fact that she sees “the sky is falling down” on every page and eventually is able to understand the spelling of those words, is both incidental and unconscious. The only challenge then, is literary. Literacy will follow.
The literary route to literacy is especially poignant in India where the number of readers is a small percentage of the population and shrinking alarmingly. If kids are hooked in early to the power of the narrative, chances are they will stay with it for lives.
While the A for Apple, B for Ball method worked to make us literate, it is a method that is weighed down by drudgery and entirely sanitised from a narrative arc of any kind. But if reading is an activity that entirely consists of the idea that words conjure up, every sentence becomes an adventure.
It’s your world The counter argument that is often presented is that, if it’s stories we want, then watching a film or a show on television achieves the same objective. This argument is only partly valid. Everyone watches the same movie, you are shown what you should see, you hear what needs to be heard, you have to do nothing but sit there and shovel popcorn into your mouth. A stream in a book though, is your stream. You picture it in your head, based on the stream behind your grandparents’ home. Or the one you rowed a boat on last year when you went on a holiday somewhere. You shape it in the way you want, you colour it the perfect shade of aquamarine, you detail the edges with mangroves or coconut palms.
Only you know exactly how the stream in the book is because it is only in your head. A movie can never set the neurons in your head alight with quite the energy as a book.
But more than that, the power of the literary is in its sustainability. When you read a book a second time, it is a whole other experience, a story much different from the first. For you have seen other streams in the meanwhile and painted a different pattern. The singular importance of the literary is the chill you feel when you put away a good book and look around you. The world seems the same and yet, you are somehow different.
Today is World Literacy Day