Find out why your child cannot read
The first step is to have your child’s vision and hearing tested. Lots of “educational” problems are actually vision or hearing problems in disguise.
The next step is to hand your child a piece of paper and a pencil. Ask the child to write the alphabet from A to Z, capital and lower-case letters. Many parents of children who supposedly have “dyslexia” are stunned to find that the children have not even been taught the alphabet. If the child knows the alphabet, use this test to evaluate whether the child understands how those letters are used to represent sounds (phonics).
For an older child or an adult, you can use the Adolescent Assessment of LIteracy. This is a computerized tool provided by the National Center on Improving Literacy (NCIL). This tool is free because the NCIL is a project of the US Department of Education.
Teach phonics
English is written with an alphabet whose letters stand for sounds. Thus, the first step in teaching reading is to teach the children the alphabet (upper- and lower-case letters). Next, you teach children how to sound words out from left to right. This approach, called phonics, enables children to read tens of thousands of words. Here’s a free resource for teaching phonics. (If you want a printed version, go to Don Potter’s Blend Phonics website. Don Potter is an elementary school teacher from Midland, Texas.
If a child or adult is having trouble with phonics or has a diagnosis of dyslexia. use Don Potter’s A Sound Track to Reading. It includes this guide to how the 44 sounds of the English language are made:
If you are working with Spanish-speaking children or adults, it makes sense to teach them to read in Spanish first. Spanish has a much simpler phonetic system. After they can read fluently in Spanish (which takes only a few months), you can begin with English phonics.
Here are some useful, inexpensive resources for teaching Spanish speakers to read:
Teach spelling
Of course, phonics will get you only so far. English has many irregularly spelled words. Thus, to teach reading, you must also teach spelling. Here’s Noah Webster’s famous spelling book, newly formatted by Don Potter. For more resources on teaching spelling, see www.donpotter.net.
Build Vocabulary
To read, you need to do more than sound words out. You must understand what the words mean. Thus, you need to help readers build their vocabulary.
Teach grammar
Grammar is the study of how words are altered and combined to make meaningful sentences in a given language. The ability to turn words into sentences is what sets human beings apart from all other living species. The study of grammar helps you figure out the meaning of complicated sentences. People who have never learned how to analyze sentence structure will find it hard to read texts written at anything higher than a fifth-grade level. Fortunately, Capital Community College in Hartford, Connecticut have produced an excellent Guide to Grammar and Writing. In particular, it teaches you the art of diagramming sentences!
To understand the importance of grammar, read the first chapter from David Mulroy’s book The War Against Grammar:
In The War Against Grammar, David Mulroy explains that the “experts” in education have been suppressing the teaching of grammar for years. He shows how ignorance of grammar leads to many serious problems:
- Poor reading comprehension
- Trouble with logical thinking
- Difficulty in learning foreign languages
Professor Mulroy found that most college students could not understand the literal meaning of the following quotation. Some thought it was about a romantic breakup, or about religion or the environment. (It’s the first sentence from the Declaration of Independence.)
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Most students could write flowery passages about what they thought the sentence meant. Typically, they free-associated on one of the more colorful words from the sentence. But they couldn’t understand the real meaning of the sentence because they did not know how to identify the main clause, which is a skill you learn from studying grammar.
Teach logic
Once you have mastered the basics of grammar, you can begin to study logic. Logic is study of how to combine sentences into arguments. The College of DuPage Digital Press has kindly produced this introductory logic textbook by John Santiago.
Teach rhetoric
Once you have mastered the fundamentals of grammar and logic, you can begin to study rhetoric, which is the art of persuasion. (The art of persuasive speech, in particular, is called oratory). But studying rhetoric, you can become more persuasive, but you also become harder to fool. Purdue University has provided some useful resources for teaching rhetoric.
Build core knowledge
Early in his career as a professor of English, E.D. Hirsch realized that a student’s ability to comprehend a piece of text depended partly on the readability of the text but even more on the student’s background knowledge. He then wrote the bestseller Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. He also founded the Core Knowledge Foundation, whose mission is to promote excellence and equity in education for all children. The foundation published content-rich materials for students and teachers, and many of these publications are available at no cost.