It is a common myth that English is the hardest language in the world. While I would challenge this claim as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, French and German, I believe that English does present particular problems to those learning to read it – especially young and dyslexic children. The purpose of this short article is to explore why this is so and suggest some approaches to teaching reading.

English attempts to represent the sounds of language phonetically, meaning that the learner has to recognise individual symbols and the sounds which correspond to them. Since English has 44 sounds but only 26 letters to represent them, there is no one to one correspondence and this leads to a number of problems for the learner:
1. Individual letters may represent more than one sound:
· cave/cot/cut ~ city/celebration
· gave, give, got ~ gin, generation
2. Letters may be combined to represent sounds in ways which are not intuitive:
· th (the), wh (where), ph (phone), ch (church), kn (know), wr (write)
3. Combined letters may represent more than one sound:
· church/chemist/chef
· head/beach
4. Individual sounds may be written in different ways:
· (initial) alien (middle) made, rain, sleigh, reins (final) day, grey
· (initial) evening (middle) sweet, dream, field, theme, receipt (final) lady, monkey
· (initial) ivy (middle) hike, might, kind (final) cry, pie
· (initial) open (middle) bone, road, (final) how, doe
· (initial) unique (middle) (final) rescue, dew
5. Identically sounding words written differently:
· there/their/they’re
· practice/practise
· no/know
· seem/seam
· new, knew
6. Sounds represented by the ‘wrong’ letter:
wand, wasp, waddle, was, what, women
7. Words where there is a big difference they way they are spelled and the way they sound:
· said, yacht, laugh, people
8. The prevalence of neutral ‘e’ (schwa) and ‘i’ (‘it’}
A C Gimson in his book, “An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English”, (1969, p.143) pointed out, after an investigation by D B Fry, that neutral ‘e’ (schwa) and ‘i’ (as in ‘it’) represent 10.74% and 8.33% respectively of the sounds commonly occurring in Received Pronunciation. Knutson further remarks that “[the data] mean that more than one out of every 10 phonemes in English is schwa, the one sound we have no way of showing in spelling. – Note too that speakers who use ‘i’ for ‘e’ in words like ‘started’ and ‘believe’ will have an even higher schwa-frequency.”

These conclusions are highly significant for the teaching of vowel digraphs. As much as we might like to prioritise the order in which they are taught, such an approach is likely to be unhelpful, because all vowels – except ‘e’/'i’ – occur relatively infrequently (relative to one another), and the spellings of the two vowels which do occur most frequently, namely ‘e’/'i’, are determined largely by their etymology.

This is what Bill Bryson had to say about English spelling:
Spellings in English are so treacherous, and opportunities for flummoxing so abundant, that the authorities themselves sometimes stumble. The first printing of the second edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary had millennium spelled millenium in its definition of that word, while in the first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary you can find vichysoisse instead of vichyssoise. In The English Language,’ Robert Burchfield, called by William Safire the ‘world’s most influential lexicographer’, talks about grammatical prescriptivists who regard ‘innovation as dangerous or at any rate resistable’. It should be resistible. In The Story of Language, Mario Pei writes flectional on page 114 and flexional just four pages later. And in The Treasure of Our Tongue, Lincoln Barnett laments the decline of spelling by noting: ‘An English examination at New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University disclosed that less than one quarter of the freshmen class could spell professor correctly.’ I wonder, for my part, how many of them could spell freshman class?
Just as a quick test, see if you can tell which of the following words are mispelled.
supercede
conceed
procede
idiosyncracy
concensus
accomodate
impressario
rhythym
opthalmologist
diptheria
anamoly
afficianado
caesarian
grafitti
In fact, they all are. So was misspelled at the end of the preceeding paragraph. So was preceding just there. I’m sorry, I’ll stop. But I trust you get the point that English can be a maddeningly difficult language to spell correctly.

‘Mother Tongue – The English Language’, Bill Bryson, PENGUIN, 1990

The above examples illustrate that there is no regular one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol and suggest why children may experience difficulties in learning to read and spell. Dyslexic children may be particularly disadvantaged because of the following cognitive weaknesses:

· poor sound processing (the inability to distinguish at speed or at all between sounds, e.g. between different vowels and consonants (‘father’ pronounced ‘fahver’)
· weak working memory (Working memory is responsible for holding and manipulating information, such as remembering and writing down verbally pronounced sentences, adding numbers without writing them down, and generally remembering things.)
· slow to become automatic in skills (learning to do things without having to think about them)
· slow visual processing (the inability to recognise something quickly from the way it looks)

It is easy to understand how these weaknesses might impact on a child’s ability to read. However, with regard to poor sound processing, research conducted at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Sydney, Australia, suggests “that training school-aged children with Special Reading Difficulties or Specific Language Impairment for their auditory processing skills alone will not improve their poor reading or poor spoken language.” Approaches to teaching reading, and especially dyslexic learners, must be diverse in approach and constantly take into consideration the latest research developments.

Rudolf Flesch, one of the pioneers of the phonic approach to teaching reading, suggested that there were 218 rules governing English spelling. Unfortunately, the 10% of words we use most frequently are not rule-governed, increasing the burden for the dyslexic learner. In 1948 Dr. Edward William Dolch wrote a book, Problems in Reading, in which he included 220 of the most high frequency (common) words excluding nouns in the English language (the Dolch word list). Since many of these words cannot be sounded out (as they do not follow decoding rules), they have to be learnt as sight words, using flash cards.

If a dyslexic pupil is taught specific sound/letter or word/sound correspondences, without constant and frequent revision s/he will have difficulty remembering them. This makes working with dyslexic children especially demanding, since frequent repetition (over-learning) is required. At the same time, teaching will need not only to be highly structured to cover the main rules but also selective to lighten the load as much as possible.

All dyslexic readers will share some or all of the following characteristics:
· hesitation and labouring over words
· leaving out or adding words
· maybe reading at a reasonable speed, but not understanding what they have read
· difficulty with unfamiliar words (especially the names of people)
· jumping over lines, repeating lines or phrases, losing the place
· reading words out of context as in a dictionary or phone book
· aversion to reading (At times this can be extreme.)

Since dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty, any approach to the problem will have specific core aims:
· to develop an understanding of the correspondence between written symbols and the sounds they represent
· to develop fluency through practice
· to develop understanding of text through discussion
Further information and advice about dyslexia can be found on the following sites:
· Channel4 Lost for words
· NHS help for dyslexics
· The School Bell
· Cornwall Dyslexia Association
· Dyslexia Action (Bath)

A personal approach:
It would be nice to think that dyslexia could be dispelled with the wave of a wand. It is, however, specifically connected to the way in which the brain works in certain individuals (roughly 25% of the population by my estimation) and presents as a real and stubborn learning difficulty.

In my experience one hour a week of intensive tuition is both too little and too much: too little in the sense that it does not offer the constant daily repetition needed for children with difficulties with remembering and too much in the sense that it is unrealistic to expect a child with learning difficulties to cope well with an intensive one-hour session. The return on the money invested in this way is generally poor.

It is far better to give a child 20 minutes individual attention per day with a teacher trained in phonics and who can present the material in an interesting way. If you have a child who is experiencing difficulty with reading, your first port of call should be the school, possibly via the parent-teacher liaison officer. Be open and honest about your concerns and try to arrange for your child to receive individual attention in school on a daily basis. Some schools run a scheme whereby adults from outside the school work on reading with children.

The factors which make up dyslexia cannot easily be identified or tested and are never present to the same degree or the same intensity from pupil to pupil.

Usually a pupil has a reading book from school. Listen to how well s/he reads and base your choice of reading materials on books where you know the pupil will be able to read nine out of ten words. This means that difficulty in reading will not interfere completely with the task of comprehension.

A particular difficulty arises when the pupil is older and still reads like a beginner. Fortunately there is a wide range of material to choose from. Materials can be sourced either from your local lending library or from your primary school, since the cost of buying whole reading schemes is enormous. Some useful sources are:
· Sue Cunningham’s list of books for dyslexic readers
· Oxford Reading Tree scheme
· Pearson Education
· Books for older pupils at Barrington Stoke

About 80% or more of lesson time should be taken up with reading. The pupil should be offered a range of books of a suitable level to choose from. Discuss what the story might be about by looking at pictures or chapter headings. Once a choice had been made, negotiate how much the pupil is going to read, so that there is a manageable goal to achieve. Read to the pupil in order to give a sense of accomplishing a task, to give continuity to a story and to provide a good model. Beginner readers read in a very expressionless way. You might try Roald Dahl’s autobiographical book, “Boy” to older pupils (9 or 10). It is a book which breaks into manageable sections and consists of very amusing and engaging anecdotes. The book has an extended vocabulary. Children with reading difficulties rarely get an opportunity to expand their vocabulary through their own reading. Secondly, the language structures used are complex and exposure to “quality” English challenges and trains the pupil’s ability to comprehend and use complex language. Kenneth Grahame’s “Wind in the Willows” can be used in the same way. But the vocabulary is very rich for modern children and may stand in the way of comprehension.

Pupils have/develop their own learning strategies and learn a lot from example. Formal teaching is quite often less appropriate than allowing a pupil to regain confidence through lack of formal constraint and modicum of careful guidance.

Dyslexic pupils tire quite quickly. It is not a bad idea to give a pupil a rest by reading yourself. In order to encourage attentiveness, warn the pupil that you will suddenly stop and s/he must then point to the word you have stopped on. Get the pupil to turn the page.

When the pupil reads, strike a balance between allowing wild guessing and a stiff insistence that every word is read correctly. The vast majority of English words contain only one syllable and most pupils can manage to decode these words. The difficulty arises with words of two or more syllables and it is here that you may simply tell the pupil what the word is. If it is a word that has occurred before, encourage the pupil to look at the word carefully and work it out.

Make a note of words the pupil struggles with and use them for practice later.

If the reading book is relatively short, ask the pupil to find particular words – for example, all the words on a page ending in a common suffix or new words which occur in the book.

Phonics is painful for dyslexic readers. While concentrating on the skills they need to develop, you need to find enjoyable ways of tackling this part of the lesson. At this point, focus on encouraging the pupil to learn letter/sound correspondences and breaking down and building up words.

A good source of ready-made materials is LDA Learning. A part of your kit could be a Phonics Groupwork Set, a range of 300 colour-coded cubes, containing high-frequency letters and blends. It includes 60 red vowels, 60 pink vowel phonemes, 60 blue consonants, 60 yellow initial blends and 60 green final blends.
From the Early Learning Centre a set of word tiles for practising word recognition and sentence structure can be obtained.

At the simplest level the cubes can be used to develop the pupil’s understanding that the written language consists of strings of segments which go together to make the sounds in words. The pupil can sort the mixed cubes into sets and learn the order in which the letters come in the alphabet. Each letter has its own sound and it is the association between the appearance of the letters and the sound they “make” that should be encouraged. Encourage the pupil to give me the sound of the letter rather than its name. The colour-coded cubes allow you to test the pupil’s knowledge of sound/letter correspondences. A word can be put together and the pupil can break it down sound by sound. Arrange cubes randomly and get the pupil to reconstruct words. Concentrate on specific consonant blends or vowel digraphs, getting the pupil to create new words by changing letters at the start or middle of the word.

You can invent your own materials in response to specific difficulties the pupil is experiencing. An example would be differentiating ‘what/that’ ‘were/where’ ‘was/wasn’t’. Write these words on separate piece of paper along with eight or more other words taken from the reading book. In the simplest form the task may be to read the words individually. Without recognition of the words, nothing else can be attempted. Get the pupil to place the words face-down on the table. Point to a word which s/he has to recognise. You get the card if the pupil makes a mistake and s/he keeps it if s/he gets it right, allowing some sort of record of progress to be kept. Speed of recognition also needs to be tested. Once the pupil is well acquainted with the words, place them face-up and point to the words in turn, increasing your speed.

Cards made in this way are given to the pupil’s parent for practice until the next lesson.

A variation on the above game is to write out and cut up a sentence, which the pupil then has to re-arrange.
Either of the two games can be used to practise spelling.

With dyslexic pupils keep lessons short – about 30 minutes max.

Given the cognitive difficulties which dyslexic pupils have, progress is very slow, because pupils forget what they have been taught unless it is practised daily. Phonics has to be dosed very carefully. Discouragement can sometimes be so great that work has to be postponed until the pupil regains confidence.

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