James's Book About Fighting by Paul May

There was a time when it was my job to help small groups of children learn to read. These were children who found reading difficult. Because we wanted to know if what we were doing with them was working, we assessed their reading very carefully before we began and then checked afterwards to see if their reading had improved. In most cases the improvement was huge. As you may know, reading is often assessed in terms of years, as in 'she has a reading age of 12'. By this measure many of those children progressed years in a few months.

A lot of the work I did involved reading picture books. We didn't just read them once. We read them many, many times. We read Each Peach Pear Plum, Peepo!, Mr Gumpy's Outing, The Cat in the Hat, Frog and Toad, Little Bear . . . This was essential because many of the children knew almost nothing about books. Perhaps the most striking instance of this came from a boy called Andrew when we were reading Each Peach Pear Plum. I realised at some point that he had no idea that the picture on one page had anything to do with the picture on the next page. He saw each one as a completely separate thing. They knew these books extremely well by the time we were done. One 8-year-old came up to me in the corridor one day and said: 'You know that book we've been reading? (It was Each Peach Pear Plum) I can read it with my eyes closed. Listen.' And he recited the whole text there in the corridor, perfectly. (I've told that story before, but it's worth repeating.)

I used a lot of different techniques and resources. Elements that were fundamental were the close reading of picture books, a variety of fun, interactive phonics games, and other activities based on the  books. And then there was book-making. It was book-making that really brought home to me just how little many of these children knew about books. 

One of my favourite activities was making mini-books of 8 pages. These were made with an A5 sheet cut in half horizontally and then folded into a book. Stapling came later in the process. What we would do was this: I would ask each child (mostly there would be in a group of four or five) what they would like to write a book about. They were usually a bit puzzled by this idea, but I'd explain to them that they could write about anything they liked, and, importantly, that I would write the words down for them. So, for example, I said to James, 'What do you like doing?' and James said 'Fighting.' So I said 'OK, you can make a book about fighting. What do you want to say?' James said 'I like fighting.' 

You get the idea. I wrote 'Fighting by James' on the cover in my nice, clear teacher's writing and 'I like fighting' on the first page, and James got on with the pictures. It was true, by the way, James did like fighting and he didn't mind getting hurt and he often got told off for it, and we put that in the book too. But writing the book was only the beginning. Luckily for them the children didn't need to search for an agent or a publisher. When the books were written we marched downstairs to the office. There I would disassemble the books, lay the pages on the photocopier, print one side then the other while the children looked on with absolutely no idea what I was doing!

This is another reason I remember James's book so well. We got back upstairs, I cut the sheets and I stapled together five copies of his book, then handed all the children a copy so that we could all read James's book together. They were completely baffled. I remember them saying things like, 'Why is his book like mine?' 'Why are they all the same?' It wasn't as if they hadn't seen multiple copies of books before. Group reading was a thing, and they never said things like that about all the copies of Mr Gumpy's Outing, and they'd actually watched these books being duplicated on the photocopier and cut up and stapled together.

The point of all this was that reading was, for most of these children, an alien culture. Why were they learning to read? What was reading for? What were they going to get out of it? If they didn't know the answer to those questions the process would be about a million times harder, and that's why the first steps in the process need to be about reading and enjoying as many books as possible before anyone ever starts trying to get you to spell out words using the alphabet and the sounds those letters represent. Some children, like Andrew, have no idea that a book can tell a story.  Most children, having learned to speak their native language and understand it when they hear it spoken, have never thought about it in terms of words or letters or sentences. They've never had to analyse it, but the moment you start to see it written down you have to start to think about those things. Margaret Donaldson said in her 1984 book Children's Minds: 'Perhaps the idea that words mean anything - in isolation - is a highly sophisticated adult notion, and a Western adult notion at that.'

It was in order to address that disconnect that I had a kind of ritual when I taught in Reception (4/5 year olds). I'd sit down at the computer with a new child and ask them to tell me about their house or family, just anything, really, and I'd type it as they spoke. Then I'd print it and say: 'This is what you just told me.'

Sometimes they'd read it back, word for word, especially if it was short and simple, but that wasn't the point. The point was to show them that these black squiggles  represented the words they had said, and that they were words, and that later, when they'd drawn a picture to go with the words, they'd still be able to read them. They'd still be there tomorrow, next week, next year, and, magically, other people could read them too.

***

I once said without thinking properly, in a meeting about children learning to read, that children learn to talk without any teaching, and the person leading the course said: 'That's not true. Their parents teach them. Their mothers mostly.'

I came across a Spanish teacher on the internet somewhere recently who said: 'People talk about learning a language by immersion, but the kind of immersion you can manage as an adult, maybe by going and living with a family in a foreign country, is nothing like what happened when you were a child. Just imagine if you could find someone now to do the job your parents did back then.  They'd be with you every hour of the day, repeating words and sentences back to you, chatting to you while you played, encouraging you, getting excited as you learned each new phrase. From the moment you spoke your first word in the language they'd be with you, and it would go on for years. Even before you spoke that first word they'd have been telling you stories and singing you songs, maybe even before you were born. Just think what you'd have to pay someone to do that for you now, as an adult learning a language!'

The quality of the teaching and learning at home may vary, but most children reach school age able to communicate pretty well in their native language. They can almost certainly understand spoken English better than I can yet understand spoken street Spanish. I've been comparing my experience with that of my son, who spent several years living in Finland and can speak Finnish well enough to fool a native into thinking that he's Finnish himself. It was a kind of immersion, as all his friends were Finnish. And yet he said to me once, 'I don't know proper Finnish. I can just talk to my friends.' Unlike him I started learning Spanish from a school textbook and learned lists of verbs and puzzled over grammar. Unlike him I'm probably still a long way from fooling anyone into thinking I'm Spanish. Speaking and understanding a language, and reading and writing it are very different things, and crossing the boundary between them can be difficult. Constance Garnett, translator of 71 works from Russian to English, was never comfortable holding a conversation in Russian.

As adult language learners we tend to start with the written language and move across the boundary to the spoken. Children learning to read are crossing the boundary in the opposite direction, exactly the same boundary my son was talking about when he said he didn't speak proper Finnish. 

You know that feeling, when you're learning a foreign language and you haven't really attempted to have a conversation yet and you're anxious about making mistakes or not pronouncing words properly? That almost never happens to a child learning their own language at home, and I don't think it happened with my son in Finland. But if you're not very careful, that's the feeling a child is going to have when they start learning to read, when they start crossing that boundary. Because, for some of them, there is so much they don't know, and so much they can get wrong. That feeling can paralyse adults into not opening their mouths, even to order a croissant and a coffee in a French cafe, and it can have the same effect on a child learning to read.

Luckily, there's a remedy. When you're trying as a teacher to fill that huge gap that exists in some children's experience of written language there's nothing better than the hundreds of brilliant picture books that have been produced by so many brilliant children authors and illustrators over the last fifty years or so. 

Except, just maybe, the books that children write for themselves.

Reading the Carnegie, an illustrated compilation of my blog posts about 84 Carnegie medal winners is available from me at https://maypaul.blogspot.com/ The PDF is free. All you have to do is leave a message.