Response to Gabriel Wyner: Give Language Life |Remastered

26 May 2022 · 2 min

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2:22

In this video, Lois Letchford, author of Reversed: A Memoir and The Literacy Problem Solver, reflects on Gabriel Wyner’s Fluent Forever method for learning oral languages. She outlines Wyner’s three core principles—giving language life, linking each word to sensory and emotional cues, and teaching grammar through stories—and explains how these same strategies mirror her own work with students who struggle to read, especially dyslexic, vulnerable, and “hopeless” learners. Letchford questions why articulate students often fail in traditional classroom settings, attributing it to a lack of multimodal, meaningful language exposure. She announces an upcoming video that will detail how she adapts Wyner’s approach for struggling readers, and ends with a call to subscribe, like, and share the channel.

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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 to talk to you today about a video clip I saw this week by Gabriel Wyner on— and he talks about learning an oral language. He was an opera singer who had to learn languages to sing, you know, German, French, and Italian. And what he did is he created a program called Fluent Forever. And I listened to him and I thought, what he says is what we have to do for children who struggle with reading. And in fact, what he did was exactly what I did, not only with my son but with other students as well. So what does he say to do? He said the first thing you have to do is give language life. Give language life. And then he said the second is that every word needs to be connected to images, to sounds, to tastes, to emotions. And the more we do that, the better. And the third thing he says, every bit of grammar can't be learned in an abstract sort of way, grammatical code. Give it a story. Give it a story, he said. And he shows how he learned languages doing this particular way, using this. And this is what I do with all of my students. Now, my students are the ones who have been in school for many years and have failed. And I look at them and I say, why? Why? Why? Because they are often articulate. My students, students can do all sorts of things and yet they've sat in the classroom and not succeeded in their home language and we have to ask why. What else do we have to do? So next video I'm going to take a look at how I transferred these exact same strategies to teaching students, dyslexic students, vulnerable students and students who were given no hope of learning to read. So that's me, Lois Letchford. Hit subscribe, hit like, and enjoy my videos, and please share them. Thank you.