I spent my early years in regional Queensland. It was a world of hot summer Christmases marked with greeting cards and stories of snowflakes and reindeer. And the characters in the books I read lived in a different climate and landscape, with different-styled houses and schools, and they used a different version of English.
And even at an early age, I was painfully aware of the gulf between what I was reading and the world around me.
Looking back, I guess I was bound to be a writer. I was a listener and an observer, one who was aware of the rhythms and nuances and tactics of language. And even at an early age, I was painfully aware of the gulf between what I was reading and the world around me.
When I went to school, the other children seemed much more comfortable than me in their physical world, and far less comfortable with their early reading books. I remember some of them sounding out their letters and stumbling over words in the classroom. Even with the carefully composed Dick-Dora-Fluff-and-Nip there’d be a word where the letters didn’t follow the rules and the sounds weren’t consistent, just to trip them up.
And the teachers with all their talk about sounding out couldn’t tell me why “the” sometimes sounded like “thu” and sometimes like “thee” or why “a” was sometimes a short “uh” and sometimes a long “a”. I suspect that there were a lot of us in those classrooms who weren’t learning very much at all.
I was reminded of this by two recent events.
First, I met the author of Honeyant Readers honeyant.com.au, early readers and literacy aids which reflect the language and culture of Aboriginal children. It made sense to me, especially when compared to some of the books that I’ve seen given to struggling readers in schools.
The idea is that, if they learn the basics in their primary language building on familiar vocabulary, rhythms and stories so that reading becomes an integral part of their lives, it can give them the pathways to acquire the skills and understanding of more mainstream language. Not so much providing extra, just taking away an extra hurdle that these children have to cross.
Second, an article appeared in theconversation website, Lost for words: why the best literacy approaches are not reaching the classroom which argued the case for the children from various backgrounds whose home English varies from School English. The comments are quite telling.
The challenge then is to find reading books that connect with our children rather than blaming any given child for not connecting to whatever book we offer.
