Literacy

Teaching Annie to Read
Dr. John A. Smith , Utah State University
reprinted from Reading Today, 5(6), 1988

 

I met Annie for the first time last June in an empty room in the basement of the First Baptist Church. She is sixty years old, widowed, has no children, and lives alone in government housing. Her husband had also not been able to read. When I asked Annie why she wanted to learn to read, she replied that she wanted to be able to "get along better," but mostly she wanted to read her Bible.

Being a reading educator, my interest in literacy led me to volunteer with the local literacy council, where I was assigned to teach Annie. She and I agreed to meet twice a week.

My goal for our first reading lesson was to find out how much, if anything, Annie could already read. I had brought with me an informal reading inventory, and opened it to the first word list (pre-primer level) and asked her to begin reading. Out of the twenty words on that preprimer list, Annie recognized only three. I thought perhaps she could do a little better if the words were in the context of a story, so I gave her the first pre-primer level passage to read. She hesitated and fumbled so badly, that after the first line I had her stop, and I put my materials away. It was plain to me that Annie simply could not read, period.

When the volunteers at the Literacy Council gave me Annie's name and phone number, they also gave me a set of workbooks designed for teaching adults to read. These workbooks did not work for Annie and me. There were two reasons for this. First, the writing in the workbooks was extremely artificial and stilted. Sentences like "Cal Hill gave Jill Hill a bill" were confusing and insulting to Annie.

The second reason the workbooks proved unusable was that they encouraged Annie to figure out words by only using the sounds of the letters. This was particularly frustrating to Annie because she and I frequently don't pronounce our words and letters the same way. For example, one day while reading together, we came to a sentence which read, The squirrel likes to climb trees.  Annie couldn't figure out the word 'climb.' After providing a few clues, I finally told her that the word was 'climb.' She looked at me strangely as if I were speaking a foreign language. I repeated the word 'climb,' then the entire sentence, The squirrel likes to climb trees.  Suddenly, she lit up and said, Oh, you mean 'clam,' the squirrel likes to 'clam' trees.  Because of this and other differences in pronunciation, it was apparent that emphasizing initial reading by letter sounds only would be too tedious, confusing, and discouraging for Annie.

So, we decided to try another approach. What has worked very well for us is emphasizing meaning rather than sound. In practice, this approach involves finding meaningful passages that Annie wants to read, tape recording them on her cassette recorder, working together on the stories during our lessons, and having her practice reading the stories along with the tape recordings at home.

My rationale for doing this was that by tape-recording these stories and Bible passages for her, she would become very familiar with them (almost to the point of memorizing them). Then my task would simply be to teach her to match what was on the page to what was in her head. Then, after she had learned to "read" a short story, I could more effectively teach her about letter-sound relationships, word parts, and contextual word identification strategies.

To provide some variety, I decided to give her two stories at a time to work on. The first set of stories was from the book Mouse Tales by award winning author, Arnold Lobel. This book contains six very clever short stories for beginning readers. The second set of stories we used was actual passages from her own Bible.

As she reads from her chosen story or passage, I will either tell her the words she doesn't know or else give her clues so that she can figure them out for herself. We review the harder parts of the stories repeatedly until I'm sure that she can remember them when she studies them again at home. After having gone through the first story or passage, we'll repeat the procedure with the second one. Not unlike a piano lesson, we work on each story until I feel she has mastered it, then we move on to the next one. After our 60-75 minutes together, I give Annie her assignments for the next lesson.

After several months of these lessons, Annie came to me one day with the world's biggest smile on her face. She proudly told me that last Sunday she had read aloud from her Bible in her Sunday School class. She excitedly described to me how her friends' mouths had dropped open in wonder as "Annie" began to read. She told me how a friend of hers got all upset because she had been taking reading lessons longer than Annie and still couldn't read a thing." This is not to imply that Annie can now read the Bible, but she can read some portions of it, and that's a start.

I then asked Annie if she'd like to read a story to a kindergarten class. This idea appealed to her, so I made arrangements with a teacher at a nearby school. One week later, Annie went to the kindergarten and had the time of her life reading The Journey from the Arnold Lobel book, Mouse Tales. After she read to the kids, she helped them with their book reports (drawing pictures of their favorite parts of the story). The kids gave her a tremendous amount of adoration and positive reinforcement. The teacher enjoyed Annie's reading so much that she invited Annie to come back the next week. Annie has been learning a story a week and going back to read to the kindergarten kids ever since. They have adopted her as their Grandmother.

As I write this, Annie and I have been "reading together" for about a year and a half. She has become a favorite among the people in my office (the secretaries even gave her a birthday party). Our reading lessons, though still focused around children's stories and her Bible, also include activities such as writing stories about her niece and nephew, reading through newspaper ads, examining bus schedules, driving around town reading signs and billboards, taking reading trips to the grocery store, and doing math problems on the calculator she bought.

Most of the credit for Annie's success is her own. Her tenacious indomitable spirit seldom gets discouraged. She knows that learning to read is difficult, but she puts forth the necessary effort. Annie is learning a lot through these lessons, but I wonder if perhaps I'm not learning a lot more.


Early Literacy Instruction: Teaching Reading and Writing in Today's Primary Grades,
John A. Smith and Sylvia Read