Flaxmere
Primary School teacher Rhonda Godwin sums up the results: "We've had tutors who came
into the program reading about a year to a year and a half below their chronological age,
and they made up to two years' gain after working on the program for about ten
weeks."20
Over six months the average gain for tutors has
been four years - and for the slower learners just over two years.21
The "Look, Listen" method
Another New Zealand innovation has made similar
dramatic improvements in teaching reading to whole classes at once. Teacher Forbes
Robinson has shown its effectiveness for years, and has proven it in practice
around America, Britain and Canada. He calls it the "Look, Listen" method.
Robinson is a fan of the Doman theory which proposes that youngsters can easily learn to
read when they're exposed to big print.
For a classroom setting, Robinson recommends a piece of
technology that predates television: the opaque projector. "Unlike the overhead
projector, the opaque projector requires no transparencies. Its operation involves no
preparation at all."22 To use it to teach reading, you
simply select a suitable book, preferably with attractive illustrations, slip it into
position in the projector, turn on the power, and it projects the pages, in full color,
either one or two at a time, on to a jumbo-sized screen: preferably around 250 x 250 cm.
The opaque projector also comes with a "magic pointer" - and the teacher can
move this quickly to follow the words as they are projected on to the screen and he reads
them.
Where Robinson's techniques have been researched, the
results have been excellent:
At Putaruru Intermediate School in New Zealand,
the "Look, Listen" method was used with 140 grade 7 and 8 students, aged 11, 12
and 13. All had "reading ages" two to six years below their chronological ages.
All 140 were taken in groups of about 30 in half-hour sessions four times a week for 12
weeks. The 63 students in grade 7 were tested before and after the trial, and 40 of them
made between two and three years' progress in the 12 weeks, 17 gained between one and one
and a half years and five gained half a year. The school was so impressed with the results
it introduced the program for adults as well.23
At the Language Development Center at Chelmsford
Hall School, Eastbourne, England, the same method was used to teach reading to 106
children with severe reading difficulties - aged between four and 14. All
