In this video, author and literacy specialist Lois Letchford recounts how a distressed mother of a 16‑year‑old non‑reading son prompted her to reflect on her own experiences with dyslexia and the trauma of learning failure. She describes her work with the teen, Matthew, using poetry as a central instructional tool. Letchford explains how poetry engages students, provides repetitive, meaningful language exposure, supports phonemic awareness, builds visual imagery, and creates a safe emotional space that mitigates learning‑related trauma. She connects these practices to established theories—Vygotsky’s social interaction, Baer’s language‑comprehension rope from Words Their Way, and Tolkien’s philology analogy—to argue for a shift in teaching approaches for the most vulnerable learners. The video concludes with a call for educators and parents to adopt poetry‑based strategies, continuously adapt instruction, and share the message to help struggling readers regain confidence and fluency.
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Hello, I am Lois Letchford, author of the book Reversed: A Memoir and The Literacy Problem Solver, talking to you after quite a tumultuous week. I'm breathing again, so I hope you are too. This week I wanted to talk about dyslexia and the power of poetry, and I've got a particular reason for doing it. In August this year, I was contacted by a mother whose 16-year-old son was non-reading and she was distraught. As I listened to her story, all I could imagine was how different my story could have been and how her position and my position so easily would We could have exchanged places. And that was quite scary for me to hear and to feel her pain and to worry about her son. Because her son has been diagnosed with what— very similar things to what Nicholas— could have happened to Nicholas. That he is low with language. And when you're low with language at 16, you then don't get sufficient language exposure. And the IQ looks low irrespective of what it could be. And when we do do an IQ test, we're testing in the area of the child's weakness, of language weakness. So I've worked with Matthew since August and this week he read or he is reading poetry On YouTube with me, and he is so excited to be reading and sharing the poetry with you. And I'm excited to bring it to you. So today I wanted to talk about why poetry is so important for the most vulnerable students to, you know, in teaching them to read. First up, critically, the first thing it does is engages the student in reading and writing and meaning-making and decoding. It sounds like an unusual thing to say, but because I have specialised in teaching the most vulnerable students and they come to me with failure, for years of failure, I can't do it, is what is in their backpack. I can't do it. No one's been able to teach me. What's this woman going to do that's going to be different? She won't be able to do anything different. And one of the first things that strikes me is their lack of active engagement in reading. They have usually been sitting doing decoding exercises with no ability of recall, no ability to connect, no ability to work out what's going on. So the first thing we need is Active engagement in reading. That's the first. Poetry, because I am doing the reading too, it makes it easy. It's doable. The child hears it. They're making connections. They're saying, this is okay. I can do it. It's repetitive. Being able to repeat the poem again and again and again. Builds the brain and lines the brain with language. It builds the brain for language and lines the brain with language. And if you struggle to come up with the word, then you go back to that repetition and we start to work out what makes this word difficult. And because it's in a context, it makes it easier to recall. And then you can look at the decoding, the syllables, The vowel sounds and all of the decoding strategies that are needed. Fourthly, it creates a picture in the mind of the reader. And what I noticed with Matthew— Matthew chose the poems to read— was the poems he reads are visually incredible. The language makes the reader go, wow, this is funny. And that creating the picture makes it easier to comprehend. Poetry provides phonemic awareness. What sounds are rhyming? What's the beginning sound? What's the end sound? Find the rhyming words. When I teach children who've struggled and I say to them, I read the poem and I say to them, find the rhyming words. They struggle to do it. Generally, they struggle to do it. They struggle to connect the word that's in their mind and find it on paper and recognise that there's a pattern. The words are in the same place. The rhyming words are in the same place in the poem. Often they're at the end. Sometimes there's a couple of words in the poem itself that are rhyming. Can the children hear it? Can they see it? Can they recognise it? All of those things are critical in the teaching of reading. Using poetry creates a safe emotional space. It allows children to relax. And we have talked about this in When Learning Is Trauma series. When children are stressed out, their brain shuts down. There's no memory. So building a space where they say, it's okay, she can do— I can do this. I'm not going to be in trouble because I can't do this. I can do it, is a phenomenal approach in teaching of reading. It builds— so it builds confidence, then it builds fluency, it builds vocabulary. And you listen to the poems that Matthew reads this week, Court Jester's Last Report to the King. The words that are being used are not within the normal range, not within the daily vocabulary range. So he can say, ah, I'm reading these fantastic words and creating an incredible picture. So that's the story of Matthew, and it's why we're doing it today. You can hear him read, Homework, oh homework, I hate you, you stink. And I can see how Matthew has lived this poem for 8 years of schooling, hating homework. And now he can read about it. The Court Jester's Last Report to the King. To understand that poem, you need to understand the role of the court jester in the day of a jester before a king. His role was to deliver bad news. Who do we have today doing this, this very thing, delivering the bad news and the consequences of it? And the last one is a certain lady kangaroo who has a problem with her pouch. And again, it's another very visual poem, a poem that's creating these images. And when Matthew and I We're learning this poem, we actually collected the makeup kit, the grooming needs. What do you need to groom? The worry beads and the tissues. All of these things are supposedly within the kangaroo's pouch. Why is this so important? Because when we fail to teach children to read, the first thing they do is actually— the first thing the child does is blame themselves. Why can't I do this? What is wrong with me? And that's where we as teachers have to step up and say, there's nothing wrong with you, but we have to change the teaching so that you can get it. And if there's anything I do, it's continuously changing the teaching until these children can get it, recall it, and regurgitate it easily. We don't want them to walk away with the message, there's something wrong with me. And again, we go to the language comprehension rope from Baer and his Words Their Way book of what is language comprehension, what does it involve? And it involves background knowledge, facts and concepts, vocabulary, a breadth, precision, and length. If you want to do anything, watch the movie Tolkien. It's a recent movie. In the end of the movie, he's talking to a professor, Professor Joseph Wright, who wrote a book on philology, which is the study of words. And it gives a critical analogy of what learning is about and learning of words about, because he said words have meaning. Layer upon layer upon layer. And I connected with that because when we give a word and teach a child to decode a word, that's one step. But then it's over time that they learn the subtleties of words, that words carry meaning, and each has quite a different nuance or can have a different nuance depending on the circumstances it's used in. And that's when people who are very clever with words show their control over the language by using these words in such a way that we go, ah, now I know what they are saying. So that's language comprehension and verbal reasoning and the literacy knowledge. And then we have word recognition, which is phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition. All of these things come together when we work with poetry. And we go to the, you know, I'm always going to come up with the same things again and again and again. Vygotsky. The social interactions are critical for cognitive development. And a child's learning occurs in a social context with someone more skillful. And that's what we're doing with Matthew. Language is the foundation of thought. So, as we go on, I want you to enjoy the poems this week. I'm going to be reading some, but Matthew will be reading some. Please hit like, please hit subscribe and share it with others as we promote, as I promote continuously, that we can and we must teach our most vulnerable students to read. Thank you. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for being part of my journey and sharing this with others.
