Hal’s Reading Diary: March 2009

For Hal progress in reading is gradual while for some children things just seem to click into place. Why is this? Hal’s father, psychodynamic counsellor Roger Mills, speculates.

Over the last few years several people have said to me that reading will just suddenly ‘click’ with Hal at some point. They describe this happening with their child or the child of someone they know. How the child seemed to be struggling with reading one moment and then, quite abruptly, something falls into place and they are busily reading to themselves.

We know a few kids for whom this has been the process, but it clearly isn’t like that for everyone and, much as I would love it if Hal got the hang of reading in one great overnight whoosh, I am beginning to think that this is now very unlikely.

Thinking about this difference got me pondering what happens in the minds of the children for whom reading does suddenly fall into place. I am pretty sure that the secret with these kids is not that they get good at reading by plugging away at their sound blending. When blending is dominant you have to piece words together (sometimes getting it wrong thanks to the vagaries of English pronunciation). When you read like that progress is slow and laborious, it is difficult to hang on to the sense of a paragraph and narrative thrust and your appetite for reading tends to vanish.

No, my guess at what happens for the sudden transformation kids is that their ability to remember words suddenly expands for some reason. Kids who suddenly read fluently aren’t blending other than when they encounter a completely new word. But what has improved massively, I reckon, is their word recognition. Why should this happen? Perhaps neuro-science has, or will have, something to tell us about the brain processes involved in word recognition but it is a fascinating process and it certainly doesn’t seem to correspond to how good other aspects of a child’s memory are.

As I’ve said, Hal is by no means a quantum leap kind of child. His progress is steady, but definitely gradual. When I read with him these days I can see that he is recognising words that he couldn’t recognise six months ago. He also reads things aloud now from the TV or the computer – both new developments. But there are still plenty of words that he has to sound out (including, sometimes, quite common ones) and this makes reading, inevitably, both plodding and unpopular with Hal.

My guess is that one day this will change. Hal loves stories as I have often mentioned. He pleads with us for an extra chapter when we read to him at night and it is time for him to go to sleep. I think that at some stage, when his word recognition finally gets him to a point where reading has become easy, his thirst for the entertainment in stories may well make him an avid reader. I can imagine clandestine, torch under the duvet, reading sessions and Jo and I fretting about whether he is going to get myopic like his dad. But his progress to that point is going to be gradual and this is, I suppose, because his kind of brain development is not the kind where there is a sudden expansion in his capacity to recognise words. It will be interesting to see where we are in March 2010.