Why children can't read

I recommend the book, Why children can't read by Diane McGuiness.

The above book is a mine of information for helping teachers and parents alike to understand the task of learning to read and write. In particular, it unpicks the task of learning to read and write in English.

Although I don't share the author's position on the existence of dyslexia (I believe such a condition does exist), I am fully in agreement with her approach to remediating difficulties with reading and writing.  In the book she sets out to describe and explain the complexities of our spelling system from a historical perspective and then to separate the process of learning to read into 2 phases: learning the 'basic' code, followed by learning the 'advanced' code.

This separation into 2 different codes is key to McGuiness's attempt to unravel the peculiarities & difficulties of the English spelling system. The basic' code refers to an initial code for representing the 43 English phonemes which children can be introduced to first.  Further down the line they will need to find out that some sounds can be represented by more than one letter or sequence of letters and that the same letter or letters can represent more than one sound. But McGuiness believes strongly that children should not be exposed to the full complexities of the English spelling system until they have learnt to manipulate the basic code.  Far from making out that learning to read and write in English should be easy, McGuiness recognises that it is fraught with difficulties: it is not a natural process like speaking, and therefore we need to ensure that we are choosing the most helpful approach we can.

A further principle which McGuiness considers key in helping children with the reading process is to start with the sounds and look at how they are spelt, rather than considering individual letters & strings of letters and finding out their sounds. The book provides a wealth of information on how both vowels and consonants are formed in the mouth and I share McGuiness's view that helping children find out more about the formation of the sounds that make up words is very helpful for them.

Despite its length and detail I found this a very readable book, in part I am sure because it lifted the lid on aspects of English that had always puzzled me and at the same time it offered a way forward through the maze of alternative approaches to teaching reading which seemed logical and made a lot of intuitive sense.