Reading and writing are not ABC for everyone

Press, 19 October 1976, Page 21

Reading and writing are not ABC for everyone

We have all met people who read with difficulty. Many of them have even greater trouble putting a sentence together on paper. But they are not dull, as is supposed. Some of them are very bright, languishing in jobs far below their real capabilities. There are about 75.000 of them in New Zealand. In a society that puts great store on reading, they have suffered. Until now there has been no real relief. BRIAR CAMBOURN tells what it feels like to be one of these people, and outlines developments that spell new hope for them.

Tn this country there ■re a lot of intensely frustrated people who have IQs as high as yours but can’t read this paragraph. If you talked casually to one you might never pick it. He might be articulate. He might even own his own business. But secretly he would have a debilitating lack of self-esteem and a very elaborate way of hiding his problem from you Underneath t' ? bluff — if he had enough self-re-spect left to have any bluff — he would be withdrawn and defeatist. If he had fight, it would be bitter, and probably antisocial.

He would have the know-how to have a job far better than he has, but when the other students with his intelligence quotient flew throu.,h School Certificate, he would have lacked the reading ability to master the three-hour paper in time to rite anything. His spelling would have been atrocious anyway.

Definitions have been studiously avoided, but these people have come to be called those with specific learning diff : ' ies.

Their handicap — to over-simplify it — is of a kind that confuses sounds and letters in a word, preventing reading, writing and spelling at their real level of intelligence. And frequently they are bright. At the age of 18 and 19 they are casualties. They have failed twice over, first at primary school, then at secondary school. They may have been cast into a lower stream because they seemed slow.

Because they are. so often intelligent the humiliation of illiteracy is felt keenly — sometimes so keenly that before son.' of these people finally appear in adult remedial classes they have sought psychiatric help.

The person with a specific learning difficulty has probably been forced to take a job that bores

him tb tears. If he has fought his way into a better job it will be -by sheer grit, and probably not without the help of private tutors.

But the way round the mountain is difficult and full of angry discouragement. How else would you feel when you cannot read, but have to to survive, when you know you're intelligent but keep getting put down by people who think you aren’t. ’

There must be about 75.000 of these people in New Zealand — all with different levels of difficulty — about 19,000 in our primary and secondary schools.

These slow readers in our primary and secondary schools today can count themselves lucky, but by the skin of their teeth. They are not as lucky as those who will succeed them, but they are incomparably better off than those who preceded

them and slipped through the system unnoticed. Some today could still slip through unnoticed. It depends how highly developed their subterfuges, how alert and dedicated the teacher, how welltrained the teacher and referral staff and how much time can be spent on them.

When all these factors combine against the child more often than they combine to help him he becomes of a mind to leave school as fast as he can.

Because he has such difficulty matching letters with sounds, and even differentiating between sounds, he has no hope of keeping up with classmates in either Writing, reading or spelling.

Because he cannot read to expand his knowledge and his vocabulary he cannot understand the words his teacher uses. The teacher cannot take time off to explain what every second word means,

so the pupil loses interest in the subject. At this stage he begins to switch off, developing on the way the subterfuges that hide the true nature of his problem. More damaging though are the jibes from his peers that he is “dumb” for these take away even the incentive to respond to special help. “I went through school convinced I was dumb," said a mother of aboveaverage intelligence at an adult class in Christchurch for people vyith specific learning difficulties. Most of the others in the class of 28 agreed with her.

“They” —- presumably the teachers and probably the parents — "thought I was just trying to get away from work,” said one young man. “But I wasn’t. I wanted to do the work but f couldn’t. I wanted to leave school as soon as I could, so I started bunking.”

There was wide agree-

ment from the class that it had been easy to avoid detection at school; less easy if the teacher was concerned, but still easy. Now they were returning at different ages and stages, to attempt mastery of the skills that defied them at school. Why? Most of them had new motivation. They were now earning, and out on their own. Some were beginning in business.

One at the course is a builder who wants to be able to write contract estimates. Another is a knitter operator who knows he has the ability to be a mechanic. He is determined to raise his reading age to the level that will give him a pass in a three-month apprenticeship course in the North Island.

One young man at the back of the class returned jubilant the day he was able to read a column in the daily newspaper. A housewife — ab-

viousiy bright but very frustrated — wanted originally to be a hairdresser, but she could not read well enough to study for her apprenticeship. She tried private nursing training but was forced to give it up. Her vocational history since has consisted of bits and pieces.

On the blackboard the silent consonants at the beginning of words made no sense to her. It was her second lesson.

One man has a labouring job. He wanted to be a carpenter and had his sights set on an apprenticeship. But he knew his reading and writing ability was nowhere near the School Certificate standard, so he attempted neither School Certificate nor the carpentry apprenticeship for which School Certificate was a prerequisite.

None at the course have School Certificate; most did not even attempt it because they knew their

English would fail them in whatever subject they sat. External examinations are the stile beyond which lies most of what these students want to do. But is is hard to get over. “My old man dictates everthing to his secretary because he can’t spell,’* said one student, “but my old man didn’t have to have University Entrance to get where he’s got.” “When you look at it,” said another student, “what employer is going to muddle round with a person who can’t read, when he can have someone with School Certificate.”

Some in the class blamed the education system, some blamed their environment and upbringing, some blamed biology. Only one blamed himself; he said he played sport all the time.

No-one really knows what the cause is.

"If you could divide the brain into an input half

and an output half.” said one remedial teacher, you might say there is a flutter valve somewhere in the middle which is just not fluttering — but that’s all that’s wrong.” There is hope for all these people. The statistics of success, where they are available, point to surprising improvements in the performances of at least two thirds getting remedial attention.

Part of the problam has been one of nomenclature. The Department of Education has avoided grouping the myriad symptoms under one heading for fear of evoking a set of stock responses that will go no way towards helping the individual through his particular learning difficulty, for each one is peculiar in the individual.

This has certainly avoided the dangers of stereotyped response to widely different needs, but it has also taken the edge off the departmenet’s initiative.

Each person with a learning difficulty has what the expert calls an “inroad.” As a blind person’s tactile senses are more acute, so a person with a visual block might have a compensatingly highly developed auditory inroad.

In other words to oversimplify again — if the child cannot see that “now” reads “now” and not "won,” he can probably hear the difference. The way round the specific learning difficulty thus becomes auditory. There is no reason, if the right inroad is discovered, why the child cannot become as proficient as the average reader who has no difficulty.

Every person has an inroad, but the problem today is to find people with the time to find it.

Mercifully more do have the time. They also have more understanding. And there are more of them.