Parents fill vital role in helping children with reading problems

Press, 5 December 1985, Page 21

Parents fill vital role in helping children with reading problems

Children with reading difficulties need regular, one-to-one help, but teachers do not always have the necessary time. A Christchurch Teachers’ College lecturer, Mrs Jeanne Biddulph, has developed a programme which helps parents work with their children to complement the school. “The Press” education reporter SUE LANCASTER spoke to Mrs Biddulph, as well as a mother who attended the programme and to her son who has reading difficulties. A pseudonym" has been used for the pair who preferred not to be named.

Reading is one of the most important skills a child learns at school but, if pupils slip behind, where can they turn for help? When Mark Smith (that is not his real name) was younger he thought he might marry someone “brainy” so she could fill out the tax forms. Mark, now aged 16, is trying hard to improve his reading, mainly, he says, because his girlfriend is a better reader and that shows him

up. Mark’s mother attributes his progress to a special programme she attended which assists parents to help children with reading at home. The programme was developed by a senior lecturer in reading at the Christchurch Teachers’ College, Mrs Jeanne Biddulph. Although it is not State funded, and the teachers who run the evening classes for parents do so voluntarily, its successes have snowballed throughout New Zealand. Mark’s parents were told he was several years behind his age group in reading when he was at intermediate school. “I felt sick,” recalls his mother, who had always assumed his reading was normal. Neither Mark nor his parents know why, or when, he developed a reading problem, but Mark says teachers never sat down and explained things to him. “It was as if I had a bad smell or something."

He says they always rushed away to help the next person without answering his questions. “I was pretty hacked off and gave some of them a hard time.”

Although Mrs Smith took part in the special programme for parents in Mark’s first year at high school, the programme is also available in numerous primary schools. Mrs Biddulph devised the parent

programme in 1982 as the research paper for her Master of Arts in education. She had been involved in education for 15 years, including nine years as a primary school teacher and two years as a reading advisor.

Her research found that parents could give children with reading difficulties the regular one-to-one help and encouragement which teachers did not always have time to provide. If parents were helped to provide support at home, it was one way the school and the home could work together to do the best for the child.

She reviewed parent programmes used throughout the world, analysed their achievements and shortfalls, and decided her programme should aim to be simple, low-cost, supportive of the school, and enable parents to work independently as reading tutors of their own children. The result is a series of four evening workshops taking seven weeks at which parents are shown, and take part in, reading demonstrations. They are taught how to establish the difficulty level of reading materials for their child, how to help their child’s reading problems, and how to maintain the programme at home. Children’s reading ages have improved by as much as two years within three months because of the programme. Children fail to learn to read for

a number of reasons, but the most disturbing fact in Mark’s case was that either his problem was not diagnosed in primary school, or his mother was not told about it.

Mrs Smith says she would have wanted to help if she had known, but admits that without the programme — she would not have been as well equipped to do so. Many parents who attended the workshops at the high school were angry that they had not been told earlier how to help their children. They were also upset that their children had slipped through the system without it being brought to their notice, says Mrs Smith. The programme helped her to understand what had happened to Mark and to understand how he was feeling about being left behind. “It helped me not to put so much pressure on him to achieve, and it helped me to back off a bit.” Mrs Biddulph says parents of low-progress children are worried and anxious. They sometimes put pressure on a child to do better than they can. “This often makes the children very anxious, which compounds the whole reading difficulty.” It is not a programme solely for parents of children having difficulties. Mrs Biddulph feels that it is of value to all parents. At the invitation and expense of the New Zealand Reading Association, she has spoken to teachers in Westland, Nelson, Wellington, Wanganui, Gisborne, and Hamilton about the programme.

Although modest about her achievements, the results of the workshops are already evident. She praises the efforts of the dozens of teachers who are voluntarily estab-

lishing the programme in their schools. The success of some of those programmes is filtering back. An Invercargill teacher, who Mrs Biddulph has never met, wrote: “Recently I have completed running one of your courses in reading with five parents and their five children. We have undertaken the evening courses and parents have endeavoured to follow the programme at home. I have also taken these five children each day in my classroom programme. Upon testing for progress today (direct result of parental requests) we find that the first two tests completed show two years progress in about eight weeks.

“We are truly delighted with the results, not only in the children’s ability to read and understand what they are reading, but also the obvious development of self-es-teem, handwriting progress, mathematical progress, and oral ability in the classroom ...”

As well as feedback from teachers, parents have completed questionnaires. Many insist that the breakthrough in their child’s reading progress has come because they have been told the best way to help at home. Almost every parents questioned ,said the programme should be in all schools and that it must start in the junior school. Some of the responses are: • A I have learnt to be more

Low-cost and simple

‘Compulsory for all parents’