Lois Letchford: Growing as a Reader

Hello, I'm Lois Letchford, author of the book Reversed: A Memoir and literacy problem solver, sharing with you my journey to become a confident, competent reader. It took a long time. As I said, I am dyslexic. I grew up in elementary school in Australia, reading words. I had Dick and Jane as a series of books which left me confused, but I did learn to decode words, but I could not comprehend. So it took a long time for me to be part of a reading community, a very long time. How did it happen? And, you know, no one read to me Throughout school. No teacher. It wasn't the norm. So you have no input coming from the outside world. The place I did get my input for books and literature was actually through a radio program called the ABC Children's Hour. They had a story at night and we listened. My sister and I would listen religiously. to that program. And that became, you know, a critical part of my growth. Otherwise, where do you get the reading from? So that was the first bit. I changed schools in grade 9, and content became so important. And we did history, and I can still remember today doing history and reading about nationalism. And my thinking, nationalism and imperialism. They were words to me, and I had to question, what is imperialism? And that, once you start questioning things as a reader, that helps you gain comprehension. So the content areas and the amount of reading you have to do in the subjects like the history and the social studies and the geography and even the sciences, you build up a language that allowed me to read those books. And then you also have teachers who are doing more talk around it. So although they're not actually teaching you to read, they are. They are teaching you to read. And you're doing a lot of work reading, Writing, connecting, comprehending. So that was the good start. Books that I remember. I remember in elementary school attempting to read Enid Blyton. She was famous at the time, and I remember reading as being like wading through mud. And again, I remember the effort it took for me to read something like the Secret Seven series, and I would read one book and then think, yeah, it's okay. Put it down and never do it again. My godmother gave me Little Women when I was 10. I read my way through that, and I read it purely because she gave it to me. I could have told you the main characters. I could have given you an idea of what went on. I got enough of the story, but my enjoyment was close on zero. It was really hard work for me to read and comprehend that book. So, what else did I read? In high school, there were set texts, and I remember in about 10th grade, we had to read Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. This was a huge effort for me. I have no background knowledge of Dickens. No one's read anything to you to say, this is how it starts, or these are the characters. We did talk about it, obviously, in school, which would have helped, but I explicitly remember reading every word and again gaining the, the main characters and what was happening, but the enjoyment of reading was not there. And did it encourage me to pick up another book? No. Once I'd read that and done everything I could, put the book down, never open it again. With Dickens, I remember the first, the first 3 quarters being just reading words and getting through it, getting through it. But the last 100 pages, I read and read and read. Obviously, then by that time, I had enough knowledge. Mm-hmm. And then I'm comprehending what's going on and the speed of the action picked up as well. So that became critical. All of that helps, but it still does not help me pick up another book. I had great difficulty choosing books. I don't know what I did in set texts for grade 10, 11, and 12 other than Dickens. Obviously we did a lot of work and a lot of reading. We had the poetry— poem— a poet come to our school and whose name just escapes me at the moment. But his poem, and he read to us, and that was fantastic. The next thing that happened was we did Macbeth. We always had to do a Shakespeare's play. We did Macbeth and the Queensland Theatre Company came to our school or our district. And the whole school watched. They brought Macbeth alive. And I can still see part of them, you know, taking off the flesh minus the blood in my mind now. So drama and the dramatisation of books and plays was phenomenal. Bruce Dawe. Bruce Dawe was the author who visited us. And, you know, he was— I read his poems. I still have his poetry book and read a lot of them as well. Then I read my way through college. I had enough comprehension to read the text. But again, I would not pick up a book to read it for pleasure. I couldn't do it. And then when I was in my early 20s, Thorn Birds came out. I read it over 3 days. Couldn't put it down. And I ask myself now, why? Why? What about that book? Made it so easy for me to read. I was connected to the Australia that, that Colleen McCulloch wrote about. I understood that world. But also, she got me into reading on that very first page. What I found with a lot of books is that introduction, when you come to a book with a blank slate, if that introduction doesn't get me, I find it very hard to go on. The next book I remember that I absolutely fell in love with was Joy Luck Club. I was quite a lot older, and again, she got me in page one. I could feel with those mothers. I could be at the mahjong table, the mothers and the daughters, and be part of it from page one. But by then I had had my children. What I did with my sons was read to them nonstop. The moment you are reading and comprehending to everyone, life is much easier. So my comprehension increased. Then I went and joined more book clubs. Then you read a wider range of material. So that was all fantastic. And all of those things helped me become the competent reader I am today. What else made me grow as a reader? I fell in love with Anne of Green Gables, not by first reading the book, but by watching the movie. When I watched the movie, I had a complete overview of it. You know, this book takes a long time to read and it's very wordy at the beginning, but when you're watching a movie that's been cut down to 2 hours, you're getting the bones of it with pictures. I watched that movie and thought, I've got to read this book. I had tried to read it prior to that and I got lost in the language of Anne. Just overwhelmed me. So I put it down and didn't read it again. But once I saw the movie, you get the threat. It became my favorite. You pick up the language. You pick up the story structure. You pick up the vocabulary. Exactly the same thing happened, believe it or not, from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Twenty years ago, it came out this week in England, and I watched it. And of course, you despise Mr. Darcy in the beginning of that. show, which is what you're meant to do, build up that relationship of dislike so that we can turn that around. I got halfway through the series, bought the book, and couldn't put the book down. I use all of these reading strategies with— to help children who struggle with reading. Have they seen the movie? Have they listened to the book on CD? Have they listened to the book on audio? Is there a movie version that they can watch? All of those things add the character, the plot, and the story structure that gives you more knowledge to make reading easier and helps children go from the bottom to the top. Our family, when we lived in Lubbock, Texas, listened to audiobooks every time we travelled. Hours upon hour upon hour. We fell in love with Hank the Cowdog. As Nicholas built with K'Nex, he has an audiobook going in the background. He's listening, listening, listening, and that listening is actually a critical component to helping children go from the lowest position to the top because they're gaining the language, the story structure, and the knowledge of the skilled readers who are their peers. And that is a critical component of helping children go from the bottom to the top. That's how I went. I read everything now. Writing is a different story, but reading, reading's your starting point because it's input. And without input, you're lost. Input is critical. So that's my journey of reading through books. I hope you've enjoyed this, and please hit like, hit subscribe, share it, because of the YouTube algorithm is the more comments we have, the more likes we have, the more people are sharing it, the higher you rank. So I appreciate it. Thank you. Join me, connect with me, send me a message. I'd love to hear from you. Lois Letchford, an author of the book Reversed: A Memoir.