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Dyslexia, Learning Disabilities, and Assorted Miseries.
Copyright © Renée Fuller, 1999 |
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"You failed the test! That means you're not ready to learn to read."
Such was the astonishing verdict of the Reading Readiness Test which I took several years after having received a doctorate in psychology and after spending a decade in libraries reading medical journals in several languages. The Reading Readiness Test that I had failed so dismally is used in many schools to determine whether a child is ready to enter first grade. I had taken it in order to find out whether it would be useful to our research project. I was looking for tests that would define the cognitive level of the special needs children we were treating. Needless to say, after my experience with the Reading Readiness Test, we did not use it in our research project. According to the test, I did not have the fundamental skills necessary to be taught to read, and therefore was not ready to enter first grade. Fortunately for me, my elementary education predated reading readiness tests and tests of like ilk. I was spared the label learning disabled, neurologically impaired, dyslexic, attention deficit disordered, or hyperactive, etc. Even when, at age 12 a standard reading test showed that I could barely read on the second grade level, no one thought of me as disabled. Instead the homeroom teacher, while showing me the results whispered (so that the other students wouldn't hear) "You must do something about this." And I did something about it. That summer I borrowed one by one all 30 of the OZ books from our public library. The first book took me three weeks, at a minimum of eight hours a day, to decipher. I was still having trouble telling the letters apart, and word building was an onerous task. But those marvelous OZ adventures made me eager to find the meaning behind the hieroglyphs that composed the words that told the exciting stories. By the end of the summer, and by the time I entered seventh grade, it took me only two days to read an OZ book. I had learned to read! The Reading Readiness Test had been correct inasmuch as learning to read had been difficult for me. What it had not picked up was that I had done something about it. And that something was very different from the skills the test assumed were necessary in order to achieve literacy. The assumptions of the test were truly astonishing. They showed that the field of education still did not understand what I had figured out as 12-year old. Instead of the hands-on knowledge of a 12-year old, the field of education has produced a mushrooming industry "serving" a growing percentage of students labeled learning disabled, dyslexic, attention deficit disordered, neurologically impaired, having language processing problems, etc. The list of disorders keeps expanding as more "experts" attach their names to what is supposedly wrong with more and more children. Now we have testing experts, teaching experts, special classes, and a ballooning educational budget producing poorer and poorer results, and many, many unhappy children! I could so easily have been one of these unhappy children. Would I ever have gotten my doctorate after having been labeled learning disabled, and after years of special classes which implied that I was not up to par? Like so many of today's presumed learning disabled, would I even have graduated from high school? Might I not have ended up as a semi-literate, or if a boy, drifted into a life of crime, responding with rage at my inability to participate in our information-dependent society? After failing the Reading Readiness Test and after seeing many unhappy children, I decided it was time to intervene. Why not apply what perceptual and developmental psychology had discovered about how humans learn, add to that my own clinical understandings gleaned from a decade of research with children, and finally use the knowledge acquired through teaching myself to read at age 12? That's how the Ball-Stick-Bird reading system came to be. It all began with the alphabet. Remembering how hard it had been for me to tell the letters apart, how the configurations kept changing with variations in the type, I decided that letter recognition was the first thing that had to be dealt with. There was an obvious way to do that. To make alphabet recognition easy, I showed students how all the letters can be made with the three basic shapes of human perception. These are a circle, a line and an angle. I gave them the fun names of balls, sticks, and birds. The shapes are so fundamental to human perception that even a newborn can differentiate them. A modern six-year old, after having seen the letters made with the three forms, is highly entertained when told: "Now your brain will know which parts of a letter to pay attention to, and which parts to ignore 'cause they're just the doohickeys." |
BALL |
STICK |
BIRD |
Big Stick With Big Stick Stuck On Top tuh as in trick or treat |
Bird Flying Down vuh as in vanishing vampire |
Bird Flying Up With Little Stick Through Him a as in ascending astronaut |
Big Stick With Big Ball Stuck To It duh as in dirty dog |
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We found that building the letters once or twice with the three forms was sufficient for even very slow learners. Testing showed that adults with decades of supposed learning disability easily learned letter recognition and letter-sound associations with the ball-stick-bird method. As for our severely retarded students - we chose ones who had been exposed to at least 10 years of academic intervention with specially trained Masters and Doctoral-level teachers and who still had not learned most of the alphabet - these also suddenly learned with ease.
Regarding real reading, I knew that required phonics. But it also meant, as I had found out at age 12 during my excursions into the OZ books, that there had to be immediate immersion into story reading along with the phonics. Knowing that drill had not worked for me, and knowing how poor human memory is for out-of-context material, word building begins after the presentation of the first two letters. With the presentation of the fourth letter the stories commence. Phonic drills, instead of being separate routines, are inherent to the system. This is done by showing a phonic pattern and then immediately imbedding it in a hilarious adventure. Such immediate utilization of a reading principle allows a student's knowledge of language to jump-start the reading process. The phonic patterns are repeated in several books so that if a student hasn't learned a concept the first time round, he/she will on the second or the third round. That way failure experiences are avoided. With respect to word building - that important skill of combining the letter sounds to make words - I remembered the simple technique I had taught myself while deciphering the OZ books. Instead of complicated approaches that teach whole words, or take words apart and then try to teach word components, or rapidly sound out every letter of a word in rapid succession, you actually build the word from the beginning to the end. To build a word you start with the first letter-sound to which is added the second letter-sound. Then to the combined sounds of one and two, the third letter-sound is added producing the three-letter combo - to which the fourth-letter-sound is attached, etc. Using this approach, the student has to remember only two things at a time. Frequently by the third-letter sound, the learner, who is eagerly reading a story, can figure out what the word must be. Actually that is what you, who are reading this, do all the time. We now have eye movement research with tachistoscopes showing this to be the case. This word-building technique is such a simple and fast way to learn that it is hard to understand why confusing and complicated "word attack" skills are standard practice. I added many more innovations, especially ones having to do with language (developmental linguistics) and making story reading easier (layout in story-engram form). Initially I had considered these innovations as merely ancillary - not terribly important. That was incorrect, as became evident almost immediately. The teaching system worked! All the "dyslexic" and "learning disabled" students learned to read with surprising speed. Their "learning disability" and/or "dyslexia" vanished. It ceased to exist. When the system was placed in kindergarten or first grade, all the children learned to read and moved rapidly to advanced levels. And they had such a good time learning. Again there wasn't a single case of dyslexia. We expanded the type of student exposed to the system and it did things that I, a supposed expert in intelligence theory, never thought possible. It taught reading to students with IQs as low as 20. Everyone knows that should have been impossible. How could people who have almost no language, who speak no more that half a dozen words, learn to read with comprehension? But they did, and in the process their communication skills and vocabulary exploded. However, despite their expanding ability to relate verbally and socially, their IQs, although rising dramatically, remained in the severely retarded range. We reported our results with their profound implications for IQ and intelligence testing at several symposia at Annual Meetings of the American Psychological Association. The discussion and results appeared in book form under the title IN SEARCH OF THE IQ CORRELATION. In addition the American Psychological Association has sponsored several Continuing Education Workshops on the teaching of Ball-Stick-Bird and the story-as-the-engram theory that evolved as a result of the system's successes. I was thoroughly confused by our results. They shouldn't have happened. Intelligence experts, like myself, knew that such successes are an impossible reality. Our Ball-Stick-Bird students explained the new reality. They described what the language innovations of the system had taught them. Pointing to the utilization of developmental linguistics, and what I eventually called layout in story-engram form, they repeatedly explained, "This helps you think." But being an expert, I was resistant. Only very reluctantly did I come to terms with our extraordinary results. Finally I pieced together what had happened. In my effort to make story reading easier, I had mimicked the language development of the child, building up stories in the same way. By doing so, I had inadvertently shown how the language game is played. And our students suddenly found the language game easy and fun. With it they could do exciting things, from writing stories of their own to verbalizing and thereby understanding their own experiences. And that's how those ancillary innovations, the ones I had thought were so unimportant, merely fun, were largely responsible for our unexpected results. These innovations show how to play the game of combining nouns and verbs to build story essentials. These story essentials, which I eventually called story engrams, are the building blocks for ever bigger stories. As the Ball-Stick-Bird books progress the more difficult parts of speech are gradually introduced, demonstrating how to build ever more complicated ideas. The ease and pleasure the reading innovations have brought to so many children and adults, regardless of supposed disability or IQ, proves that learning to read can be a wonderfully happy experience for everyone. All of us, regardless of labels, can participate in mankind's greatest invention - written language. |
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