Reading means little without developing comprehension too

The P1s are about to wash their hands, have their snack, go to the loo and wash their hands again. After this, the learning begins in earnest.

These days, literacy is pretty much top of the food chain in the primary curriculum, closely followed by Maths and Science.

The official line is that there is no hierarchy of subjects – but in my view, that’s PR codswallop.

Hear me out. Potentially, you can be the best scientist or mathematician in the world, but if you can’t read, you can’t access the curriculum.

At the sharp end, post-doctoral level, understanding and interpreting finely-tuned theses and hypotheses brings to light the same problem.

If you don’t understand what’s written, what you do after that could be off the mark, however big or small.

This is clearly understood by teachers and, because of this, primary schools try their best to ensure their charges leave school with enough literacy skills to survive the next phase.

Back to the classroom. So how does the magic all begin?

There’s shelf-loads of books written about it, but essentially pupils go from letter recognition, letter creation to starting to read simple words.

It begins with single letters, two- and three-letter words grouped phonetically, and slowly and relentlessly, children start to get the hang of it and for the teacher, it’s one of the most satisfying things that can ever happen.

This is the critical time, of course, where children need to read and be read to.

It can be a frustrating business; some days, a child will know a word, but not three hours later.

The same goes for pronunciation, but parents and grandparents need to make time at this stage to read to their children. It’s not ‘vital’ – it’s much more important than that.

Now that we’re on the topic, children need time to understand words. Sometimes, I’ve seen parents give their poor youngsters a nanosecond to get the word or sound, and then they read it aloud for them, in a benevolent form of correction.

Reading takes time and effort but the satisfaction level is the same for us as for those of tender years; we all know how good it is to work something out for ourselves.

By the same token, as any parent will tell you, many children will quite happily read the same story over and over again.

This doesn’t mean anything ridiculous like they’re unimaginative. They’re just decoding it on many levels, and getting deeper enjoyment.

On the third or fourth, or even tenth or eleventh reading, many children really start to enjoy the colours and illustrations that are part and parcel of children’s stories, now that the difficulty of getting the words is in the rear view mirror.

Beginning to read is a remarkable journey, of course, with a great deal of children really excited about being able to hold that book in their hands and understand it.

Take Mrs. Rachel Clarke from Tullyhommon, for example. For her and her husband, Errol, parents of Sofia, a five-year-old who has just started at a Fermanagh school: “Reading is [seen] not only as a vital skill to support wider learning, but [something]) that should be encouraged, nurtured and enjoyed.”

She’s completely right, of course, and the proof of that is to talk to any P5, P6 or P7 teacher and they’ll quickly tell you the children who have had reading and writing support at home.

This is a point also clarified by Mrs. Clarke. As a law graduate, she is especially aware of the power of language, but it’s exactly the same for anybody in today’s world of work.

Reading instructions and training manuals are no different in their outcomes; get the instructions wrong and the consequences could lead to disastrous, if not catastrophic physical, financial or human costs.

Of course, there’s data to back all this up, The Reading Agency, The National Literacy Trust and The UK Literacy Trust being three of the main runners and riders in this area.

According to one of them – The Literacy Trust – Northern Ireland is lucky in that only one in five children can read ‘well’ when they leave school, compared to one in six in England, or one in eight in Wales.

Before throwing our hands up in despair, ‘the devil is in the detail’. Reading ‘well’ is the first alarm flag, a bit like the proverbial, ‘how long is a piece of string?’.

The reality is that reading depends on so many factors, from font face and type size through to the environment and the relationship between words and meaning.

As for writing, it’s another minefield.

I know of many children who could fluently read you The Sunday Times, but ask them the meaning of what they just read?

Not a clue – they could have been reading a shopping list.

The same goes for writing, with so many learners just told to “copy this”, and it becomes a forger’s idyl.

“What did you just write?”, you ask them ... and a blank shrug emanates from their confused little faces.

The second problem facing ‘suits’ who try to create rules and patterns from the comfort of the fourth floor in an office block, is that, by and large, getting young people to read – especially boys – can be closely akin to herding cats.

Sure, they’ll do it, but with the growing dependence on screen, meme and reels culture, attention spans in young people are now close to the butterfly stage.

Even something like BBC Bitesize goes for the quick fix, the clue being in the word, ‘bitesize’.

Let’s not give children the impression we have to actually read something too engaging – heaven forbid they would hit a pain barrier.

To go back to Mrs. Clarke, her observation as a parent of a child starting out on that journey is that “it is so evident that what fundamentals are covered in P1 and P2 is a true cornerstone on which all else is built”. How right she is.

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