Lois Letchford, author and reading specialist, shares her experience as an adult dyslexic and explains why many children can decode words but cannot understand them. She argues reading instruction must pair decoding with meaning-making through interactive strategies like turning stories into plays and building background knowledge.
Chapters
Hello, I am Lois Letchford, author of the book Reverse to Memoir and Literacy Problem Solver, talking to you today about dyslexia and a reflection on dyslexia as an adult dyslexic learning to read and the struggle that it brings not only to me today, but to many children around the world. We are still leaving children behind in our classrooms. And that for the 21st century to me is totally unacceptable. So what do I reflect upon? I reflect upon it because I became a reading specialist after my son learned to read. And looking at him, looking at the research, and looking at my own personal learning journey really allows me to reflect upon what went wrong. What do I have to do to teach children to read? Teaching reading is fascinating because most children learn to read with minimal instruction. Yet, the more a child struggles, the more we as parents, adults, and teachers have to know to help those children. And it's not simply a repetition of what the skilled readers do best. I survived school because I could read words. I could not comprehend. I survived, and survival is the word, because to me school was painful, it was effortful, and often in the reading sphere it was alienating. Very few teachers ever read to us. There were very few books in my house, and so very few books in the teachers' classrooms, so my access to literature was really, really limited. The only books that were available to me early on were the Dick and Jane series, and they were alienating. I have pictures of them here for you, and I also have a picture of what my world looked like. I have actually no pictures from my childhood from the 1960s. I've moved too many times, And I've lost them, or they're with my parents or family. But I have very few with me. So there's this one picture taken in the 1990s that shows you how different our world was to the world of Dick and Jane. And you can see nothing is— there's very little ordered. The fence posts are crooked, broken. The fences in our place were vastly majority of barbed wire fences. That's what we knew. Cheap, easy to put up, and that's what you had access to. So that world was alienating for me. However, what else have we got on? Teaching reading involves more than just teaching children to decode words. The emphasis is often on, on the decoding, Teaching decoding is a critical component. It's not the only component of reading. And because I struggled so much with comprehension, I'm aware that I survived because I could comprehend. Sorry, because I couldn't comprehend. I survived because I could decode. But no one Ever looked and said, hmm, there's something not quite right here with this little girl. And that causes a problem. So through reflecting and looking at what, what makes reading difficult, and there's a page here of Dick and— Words from Dick and Jane, a page of Dick and Jane. And I look at it and you read it, and as you read it as a skilled reader, You cannot go back to being an unskilled reader and say, what does the child find challenging about this? So what's the goal of reading instruction? It has to be, yes, to teach children to decode, but it's also to negotiate meaning. Now, meaning is fascinating because meaning— there is no inherent meaning in the words on the page, and that's where we have to teach children to negotiate the meaning. This is what you have to do to understand these words. I do a lot of reading in the reading research world and I look at Vygotsky and he says that social interactions are critical for cognitive development and that a child's learning occurs through social interaction with someone more skilful. So it becomes critical then for teachers not only to read but to read and discuss or read and act out so that children can decode the words and make sense of the print. That's the goal. Professor Jane O'Keeffe is the professor who has researched children's Children Like Me: Those Who Read and Don't Comprehend. Her work looks at what else goes wrong. Why can these children decode and not comprehend? What else are they looking at? And her work has been quite fascinating for me. Children are on a spectrum. They do not fit neatly into categories. So when we're looking at children reading, you've got those who are who you know read and comprehend with ease. But we also go down to the end to people like me and then people like my son Nicholas who absolutely struggle with all components of language. So what am I aiming to get across to you today? It's when we teach children to decode, teach how comprehension works as well. The two work together, and teaching decoding and comprehend together aids reading for everyone. It helps them make sense of the word. It helps them search for meaning. The second thing is that children learn what we teach. That's a critical component. I've read another academic paper that said when we teach children to decode, and that's all we do. That's what they learn to do. They learn to decode. When we teach children to decode and comprehend, that's what they learn to do. So we— I'm always looking at what's the goal of reading instruction? What's the goal? What do you want children to do tomorrow? We want them to decode words and to comprehend and to recall it. So everything must work together. How can we do this? Talk with your children about what they're reading. Do a lot of reading too. I actually spend a lot of time turning short stories, poems into plays because it makes Real. It makes reading and learning come alive. It turns it from words on the page to action, to a child being interactive with the text. And to me, that's the critical component because we've got interactive learning and that reading is thinking. Reading is thinking. And when we've got children thinking, we've got them being curious, we've got them Understanding the text and they are decoding. So we have this complex role of what we're doing. Do you have any questions? Please connect with me. Share your ideas and your thoughts with me because I have specialised in teaching children who have failed all reading programs. My last student came to me in August 2020. As a 16-year-old and totally non-reading. When I say totally non-reading, he had no ability to read a sentence and make sense of it. I recall asking him, I wrote, I had this interaction with him, I wrote down our conversation and I said, now you're ready to read it. We printed it out, ready to read it. And I saw him just literally panic at the thought of even reading it. And I said, don't do that. Don't worry about it. I just want you to circle every word you know. Oh, there was a total change of attitude. It's not a panic. It's circling the words I know. So you're building on the strengths. And because now he has the background knowledge, this is the conversation we had. He circled every word and not long he has read that whole conversation and any word he struggled with he then has more prior knowledge to connect with to go and then the decoding of the words, you can connect it all before you read the sentence or as you read the sentence again and it was delightful To see him succeed at such a level that he had never succeeded at before. So that's what I do. I'm here because I promote we simply must teach children to read. Find my book, Reversed: A Memoir, and please write a review for me because it helps promote that we must teach children to read and that we can teach children to read. Thank you. But it's up to us, the adults, the skilled readers, to work with our children to have them become successful. Thank you. Lois Letchford. Hit like, hit subscribe, because the algorithm from YouTube depends on more likes, more subscribes, and more comments. The more we have, the more it is promoted amongst YouTuber channels. See you next time. So thank you. Share with me. Contact me. Thank you.
