In this YouTube monologue, Lois Letchford recounts her 25‑year path from a parent of a child diagnosed with severe speech‑language impairment to a specialist in teaching low‑percentile readers. She describes how her son’s struggle sparked a personal quest, leading her to study literacy research and reject deficit‑based explanations of reading failure. Letchford highlights two pivotal academic papers – one on whole‑to‑part instruction and Brian Camborne’s “Beyond the Deficit Theory” – and explains how they reshaped her pedagogy. She outlines her instructional model that moves from whole (poetry, contextual meaning) to part (explicit decoding), using concrete, multi‑meaning words like “saw” to build oral language, semantic awareness, and reading confidence. Throughout, she critiques schools that blame child deficits, emphasizes the need for rich, meaningful demonstrations, and advocates for systemic change so no child must rely on privilege to become a successful reader. The talk concludes with a promotion of her memoir, a call to subscribe, and a plea for broader adoption of her approach.
Chapters
Hello, I am Lois Letchford, author of the book Reversed: A Memoir and literacy problem solver. This week talking about ruffling feathers. I did not choose the journey that I have been on for the last 25 years. It chose me, and I'm now using it to show others what I have done. I have specialised in teaching children who fit on the lowest percentiles. Children learn with ease between the 50th and the 100th percentile of language skills, not IQ, language skills. I have specialised in teaching children who sit down here on the 1st and the 2nd percentile. In fact, my son was diagnosed age 11 as 2nd percentile speech-language impaired. I talk about my son because it's through him that I came into this journey. I came with no skills as a reading teacher, but because I worked with him and I saw not only the learning improvement, I saw the emotional improvement. in him. I saw he had an excitement for learning that I could not believe. And that was astonishing. When I went to school and I told the person who tested him, I said, look, he's asking these amazing questions. She stood in front of me, put her hands on her hips and said, well, he is the worst child I've seen in 20 years of teaching. Her words have never left me. I went on to teach him in conjunction with the school. He went to school, he came home with work. I made sure that he understood it dramatically and kept changing the teaching at home so that he could be successful in school. So that worked. Teaching him and watching what was happening, particularly from the reading teacher, Pushed me to become a reading specialist. So that's what I did. And in 1997, 1998, and 1999, I studied part-time. I will never forget the first academic paper that I read. I can't tell you the title, but it talked about teaching the part and the whole. Now, what happens when you read any paper, when you read anything, it doesn't matter what you're reading, you bring your backpack. Your mind, your experiences to interpret that academic paper. Here's me who has just worked with this boy who is— they told me he couldn't do anything. And I'm reading about exactly what I did. I'm making connections with this first academic paper from the whole poetry, I wrote poems for my son. I read poems now on YouTube. Poetry gives you the whole. We create pictures. You're dealing with the whole. The moment then you deal with the rhyming words, you're dealing with the part. And then on top of that, I taught him to decode independently of the poetry. All of those 3 things work together, going from the whole to the part. And for a child who is who was as far behind as my son, it was critical to do every single step, the whole and the part, and teach decoding. So I'm separating all of them. That was the first paper that impacted me. The second paper I still have here, and it's called Beyond the Deficit Theory, written by Brian Camborne and published in the Australian Journal of Reading In, I'd say, 1990, I read this academic paper and was floored. I was depressed. Why? Why would someone take such a reaction to an academic paper? Because Brian Camborne says in here. Essentially, it is an explanation which seeks to locate the cause of literacy failure in the context in which literacy acquisition is supposed to take place within the school setting. Rather than asserting that some children will be inherently at risk, this explanation takes place in quite a different setting. It's this. They broke down the processes. So what basically Camborne was saying is that learning problems happen in the school setting and they happen— why do they fail? The school will tell you, oh, the child's got a low IQ. Oh, look at their home background. Oh, look at what they're doing. Look at what the child is doing. That's why they're not succeeding. The weakness— here it is. This means the weakness— they seek to locate a cause of failure. Some flaw, weakness, or deficit within the learner or the learner's culture. Deficit explanations are usually accompanied by a very strong expectation that a great deal of teacher-directed, teacher-controlled, carefully fragmented, and sequenced— sequented medial teaching is necessary for successful learning to occur. Unfortunately, the special education field in this country seems to have been dominated by this view of learning failure. 1990, Brian Camborne. That was critical component. Next bit that comes up. Why do some students fail to acquire literacy? An alternative explanation. Maybe I should give you the scenario first, but this is what Brian Campbell says in his paper. A large number of students fail to learn to read because 1, they get a faulty demonstration on how reading and writing are are done and how they work. They get appropriate demonstrations, but they don't engage with them. And number 3, they don't expect to be able to learn to read and write because the expectations which are communicated to them convey the message that learning to read or write is too difficult. Difficult and complex for them. Now, this is the scenario that pushed me to be depressed over— my son, as I said, failed first grade. He did well, then he came back to school and he's with the reading teacher and the reading teacher gave him sentences to learn sight words and for the word saw she gave 2 sentences. The same two sentences she gave every other child in the school. The first sentence was, "I saw a cat climb up a tree," and the second sentence was, "I saw a man rob a bank." My son read those two sentences. No, he didn't. He read the first sentence, and he read. This is what he read: "I saw a cat." No, he shook his head. No, no. No. He went back. I was a cat. No. He went back again. I s at a cat. No. And I as at a cat. And then he stopped and just handed me the paper. Then I'm reading, you get faulty demonstrations of how reading and writing are done and how they work. I ask teachers, what is wrong with those sentences? What's happening with the child when he's saying, I saw a cat, no, I was a cat? What's happening with the sentences, I saw a cat climb up a tree, and I saw a man rob a bank? What's happening? Very few teachers can articulate what is happening with that child. And very quickly they are back into the paper of blaming the child. Oh, he's just doing this, that, and the other. Someone actually said to me, he is— now I'll forget the word, of course— he has learned helplessness. That made me see red. He's not trying hard enough. You have to look at what the child's doing and you have to look at the child's background. Why this is such a critical component of getting this right. The first thing is children who struggle with learning to read often see the world very concretely. That means they are looking at an object. So the first thing you're seeing with the word saw is a physical object. He knew about saws. His father worked with one. They built things together. So a saw was a common object in our house. That's the first component that's happening. What's the component from the teacher point of view? The teacher— and watch the sentence that she has given— I saw a cat. Climb up a tree, gives the abstract meaning of the word only. She has failed to give a demonstration of how reading and writing are done. When I work with students who struggle as much as my son do, I teach this word in a particular day. I teach it over 2 days. The first day I'm on the internet and I put in the word saw. If you put in the word saw into a Google search, what comes up? The tool. The tool comes up. So I say to my students, pick out a tool, pick out one and we'll download it and we'll take a picture of it. So we've dealt with the word saw and we write underneath, this is a saw. This is a chainsaw, a hacksaw or whatever it is because there now are a gazillion types of saws for children to see. Choose from. That's the first thing I do. The second is I say, let's have a look at this word again and put in saw a log. And what do you get? Go to the images. You get the picture of sawing a log, cutting it up. Now the verb, the meaning of the word saw has changed from an object, the noun, to a verb, saw the log, to cut the log. That's number 2. What's the third meaning for saw? It is the past tense of the word to see. Understanding language, understanding how readers think and how the developmental steps involved in developmental approach is really important because children see, the concrete, they don't see the abstract. Past tense, present tense, future tense are much more difficult for children with language difficulties to understand than the average kid. And now we've come up with the word saw, meaning to see in the past. When I teach this word with my students, I take a book with me, I take my students with me and we go for a walk. And I often stop at the library and I say to the librarian, we talk to them, we watch them, we look and then we have a chat and then we say, bye-bye, we're going to talk about you. We walk away, I shut the door and I say to my students, what did we do? We talked to the librarian. We saw the librarian stamping books. We saw the librarian reading to the children. We saw that. Why? Because— and I say to them, when is it happening? Now or in the past? It's in the past. We looked at them. My students never muddle those words up again. And so I go back to my son. What was he doing? When he said, I saw a cat, he was cutting the cat in half because that's what he did. It could have been a tool or it could have been a cut. So he read, I saw a cat, and it didn't make any sense. And he doesn't read on because you make sense of it. And he stopped and he went back and he tried again. I was a cat. No, I was never a cat, he said in his mind. So that doesn't make sense. He then tried again. I asked— No. And I No, and he just gave up. The problem here is we've got to— we're dealing with so many things with this word saw. Is the word saw as a past tense of the word to see within a child's oral language? What do they say? Do they say, I saw something, or do they say, I seed it, or we did see it, or we have seen it? That's the first thing to check. Is that word saw there? Because that's the foundation of reading and writing, the oral language. And if the oral language is weak and past tense are much more difficult than present tense. So that's the first thing I check on with my students. And I go again and again and again back to here. That was a faulty demonstration that he was given. Students don't engage with it when you're walking and and talking and reading and writing, students are engaging. They're remembering exactly what you did. You're taking your time. They know what you were doing as a teacher and working it out what to do. And they then expect to read and write. I work a huge amount on oral language. So this has gone on much longer than I expected. But this was a critical component in what I do with my work. I read the academic literature and then I go and look at what happened to me that made me so passionate. So it's the academic literature combined with my experiences that has turned me into ruffling feathers and making sure that my students, any child who comes to me, will learn to read, And become a confident reader because every single word has meaning. Thank you. I'm Lois Letchford. Buy my book, Reverse to Memoir, and follow my journey because my son was extremely privileged to learn to read. And no child, no child should ever have to depend on privilege to become a successful Thank you. Lois Letchford. Hit like and hit subscribe because the algorithm for YouTube uses those measures. Thank you.
