The need for creating links

The four learners in my target group reflected the case study done by Buly and Valencia (2002), which determined that policies which mandate the use of phonics instruction for learners who do not achieve at the literacy proficiency levels of their grade, miss the needs of the majority of these learners. Initially, the learners in my study were able to identify only a limited number of letters in the Letter identification assessments. In some cases they could

not capture the consistency of the letter-sound correspondence when they awarded the same sound to a variety of written letters (See Addendum D3). Some learners, therefore, made no link between the visual information of each alphabet letter and the oral

representation of the same letter. Two learners also used picture symbols to represent letters or words, or named letters in numeric terms (See Addendum D4; D5). It is possible that learners who react in this way may have had a mistaken experience of letters, symbols and words in their patterning. “Patterning” refers to the categories that each person

perceives and generates, in this case, during reading and writing that I planned for them from the first lesson of intervention (Caine, 2008:130).

The implication for my lesson instruction was thus to assist learners in their patterning. By patterning what they read and wrote, the learners could create a frame within which they could comprehend literacy. The learners in Buly and Valencia’s (2002) study, concurrent with the learners in my study, relied on a phonics approach, but they struggled with comprehension They were over-committed to the idea that reading was word recognition and sounding out (Clay, 1991:310). However, meanings lie in stretches of text, not in isolated words (Clay, 1991:313). Buly and Valencia also found that some learners who had good decoding skills did not comprehend what they read. The initial patterning was thus very important for the learners in my study, to link new knowledge to existing knowledge in order to comprehend a text. The learners in my study had an over-simplified view of what they really needed to learn and to activate in their brains, in order to read and write (Clay, 2002:15).

Next, I observed that the learners in my target group made unsuccessful use of picture cues. Rather than refer briefly to picture cues, the learners were “picture-reading” without attending to the print in the text (See 4.4.5). Pictures serve as an important cueing system that helps beginner readers (Fountas & Pinnell, 2007) However, when learners become dependent on the pictures, they start to ignore the text. If the struggling learners continued their ineffective deployment of picture-cued strategies, it could later result in persistent use of this behaviour whether appropriate or inappropriate for a specific task (Dermitzki et al., 2008:486).

Therefore the implication for my study was to turn the learners’ attention to the text as the main source of information, but demonstrate that pictures could assist, rather than direct, their reading of a text.

It was thus apparent from my research results that the learners needed assistance from me, (and, by implication, of their classroom teacher) to “unlearn” incorrect links and behaviours and “relearn” correct knowledge and behaviours before these incorrect behaviours

accomplish and form better links between letters, sounds and words, the target group was exposed to a number of texts during the research lessons. Through reading and writing activities and a deliberate reference to sounds in words, I was able to expose learners to the links between letters on a page, the sound each letter made, and how letter sequences represented words. The recognition of individual sounds in words was practised by the learners during writing lessons since learners had to attend to each letter more specifically while writing. The learners had to say each word out loud, and record every sound they heard in that word (Clay, 1991:84; 87). This exercise took place daily in the research intervention, with the main focus still on comprehension and writing sentences that made sense and carried a message.

The lessons were conducted in a “co-working” manner, which involves a collaboration between teacher and learner. As the teacher, I did not identify items of knowledge to “teach” the learners, but rather guided them with the relevant questions from what they knew to new language knowledge. I had to take the implications into account on a daily basis, to assist the linking process of each learner’s cognitive actions. A good example was the use of word discovery. The learners enjoyed discovering and deriving new words within and from a known word; for example there contains here; and make led to the discovery of words such as shake, bake, cake, take and more (See Addendum D6). It is important to exercise known and new-found knowledge repeatedly, therefore making provision for repetition throughout lessons (Clay, 1993:15). The repetition and practice elements in the intervention lessons represent Behaviourism (See 2.3.2). Although I support the opposite of Behaviourism, namely a Psycholinguistic view, the idea was to help learners form ”good” habits through repetition and practice, and to prevent them practising “bad” habits by avoiding incorrect content. Therefore I incorporated these principles within a constructivist framework i.e. one in which learners constructed their own knowledge by drawing on multiple sources of information in continuous texts.

In order for me to build repetition into my lessons with the intention of assisting learners’ linking system, I had to do planning that integrated letters, words and whole texts in reading and writing (Buckenmeyer, 2005:22). Caine (2008) describes what this entails, and includes examples such as physical interaction between the teacher and learner that allows learners to ask questions (Caine, 2008:139).

The links that the learners in the target group created, formed the foundation of their process of comprehension (Hornsby, 2000:24). These links helped the learners understand the reciprocity of reading and writing in order to use what they learned in reading or writing to apply in new reading and writing situations.