Literacy specialist Lois Letchford adapted a language-learning system to teach reading by treating it like learning a foreign language. She pairs words with vivid images, sounds, tastes, and emotions to help struggling readers retain material, arguing that sensory-rich connections matter as much as phonemic awareness.
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Hello, I'm Lois Letchford. I'm the author of the book Reversed: A Memoir and The Literacy Problem Solver, and I'm here this week talking about Gabriel Wayner and his reading program or writing program about learning language, Forever Fluent. He gave a series of strategies that he has used to learn languages. I used those exact same strategies in teaching children who struggle with reading. They're teaching them their native language and connecting it to the written language. Because if you've ever seen some videos of my son talking, my son Nicholas was my first student. One of the first things he says is that learning to read was like learning a foreign language. So that's when we start seeing things from the child's point of view. It helps us reevaluate what we're doing. Phonemic awareness is critically important, but if they don't get what we are doing, Why do we continue doing it? We have to find a way around the problems that these children have so that they can remember it and talk about it and come back tomorrow knowing they can do it. What do we have to do? What did he say? Bring language life. Bring language to life or give language life. So instead of just dealing with words, let's give that word an image. Let's give it a sound if we can. Can we taste it? What other experiences are involved— can we involve in doing those particular words? And once we get there, then we can deal with the emotions, the child's emotions. The happier they are in learning to read, the more they remember, because they never forget how we made them feel. Think about it, enjoy it, and let's just keep thinking about what else do we have to do in order to teach children to read. Thank you. Lois Letchford. Don't forget to hit like and subscribe and share this video with others. Thank you.
