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Who Is Talking?
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Before you start
Phonics vs Whole Language
Why a Patent?
Is RTR an invention?
Just an experiment?
Plans and Hopes
Shareware Agreement
Final Words
References
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Is RTR novel? Is it an invention at all?
Yes, I think so.
If not, the United States Patent Patent and Trademark Office will surely tell me so, having accepted my money to make that determination.
It is true that this method includes elements of methods that are familiar to us all. However,
it goes beyond what can be found in the literature (or in common practice) in at least two ways:
RTR explicitly engages the LAD to teach reading at an age that is generally regarded as impossibly young. This is a discovery of a method not previously recognized by experts in the field.
If you doubt this, please plow through
this
survey I did of the literature on early reading.
RTR uses technology to isolate the word being presented from any distracting influence such as a pointing finger, or even a pointing cursor on a computer screen, so that the LAD recognises exactly what the essential element of the communication is. RTR does this in conjunction with the active participation of a parent or other person who can nonverbally show the infant that the patterns on the screen represent the same sort of communication that is otherwise offered by voice alone. Without the personal element, these abstract patterns might otherwise lack sufficient motivation for the emotional involvement and attention that foster optimum learning . Without the technology, the person would have difficulty isolating the key features of the written word for the infant's attention.
Thus we need not wait until the infant has discovered the meaning of a pointing finger.
RTR also eliminates the confusion that results when a finger blocks the infant's view of a word, or points to the wrong word. It also eliminates the tendency of most readers to hurry past the less interesting words to get on with the story. The 'less interesting' words are also useful and important additions to the infant's mental database. They are often important both for their functionality, such as prepositions (in, on, over, under), and for their simple phonetic pronunciation. In short, it optimizes the presentation of the written language for the use of the LAD.
When the idea first struck me, I thought it was so obvious that anyone would see it. I was surprised that nobody was already using such a technique. At first I thought the idea was surely unpatentable due to its obviousness. So I discussed this method with professionals - lecturers in the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland. The very PhDs who teach such courses as "Reading Acquisition" and "Child Psychology" displayed no interest, and seemed to regard it as one more of those crazy ideas that beginners come up with and specialists debunk. Clearly, the idea passed the key test of not being "obvious to one skilled in the art".
Only after presenting the reasoning that you have seen here, and documenting it with reference to the published psychological literature, did I begin to get a more respectful hearing. Still, despite finally having some productive discussions, I have not found a lecturer who is interested enough to function as my research director for my own PhD studies of the method. This is also a clear indication of non-obviousness to the professional.
Interestingly, the developmental psychologists are those who were easiest to convince of the utility of the method. After some discussion, they tended to agree that it would probably work. However, it does not match their current research programs, and working with infants is so difficult that nobody at my local universities wants to get involved with it.
It was the reading experts who seemed to resist the idea most strongly. After some discussion, when they could not offer cogent reasons why the method should not work, they would begin to question whether the whole idea of early reading was not a mistake. Perhaps early reading might be harmful to the child's normal development? Hardly. Many famous people began to read long before what society now considers to be the "normal" age. But since one of the less-enthusiastic individuals was on the university's Human Subjects Ethics Committee, I began to suspect that I had better just apply for a patent and proceed down a non-academic path.
Finally (dummy!), I realized what I should have seen from the start.
The reading specialists are threatened by this method. Their careers have centered on the difficulties of learning and teaching reading. [See "Reading, an Unnatural Act" (Gough and Hillinger 1980)] They have filled whole shelves with research on the difficulties inherent in the irregularities of English spelling and grammar. They have devised clever methods to catalog and diagnose the many ways that learners stumble and fail while trying to master their own language in its written form. They have built professional networks devoted to producing expensive school curricula to deliver reading instruction according to their schools of thought.
The
Reading Wars between Phonics and Whole Language still rage
across the US. Even in New Zealand, as recently as the second week in November, the Minister of Education was in the news for dismissively rejecting a committee report that recommended adding phonics to the curriculum here. The MP who had chaired the committee was livid. But what a false dichotomy that is: both methods have a valuable role to play, and neither is complete without the other. But that does not stop the gang warfare between the schools of thought. What will they do if most three year olds can read, and their specialists' knowledge goes into the same bin as that of the buggy-whip maker?
The Reading Wars will go on:
phonics versus whole language versus whatever other technique some guru or corporation pushes. Meanwhile, your children can be noncombatants.
Again and again it has been shown that reading skill in school is related to the early experience of the student:
the number of books that are in the home, whether the child was read to by parents as an infant, whether the child sees parents reading. Even very early preschool intervention by doctors and social workers has improved children's reading in ways that are still detectable when the children reach high school. Yet these correlations have not been followed up to determine their exact mechanistic cause.(Grant and Brown 1986; Cronan, Cruz et al. 1996; Fisch, Smith et al. 1997) I believe that you are learning about that mechanism right here.
Aren't there other programs like this?
Not really. The most similar program I know of is called Baby Read, and claims to be able to teach babies to read, yet it lacks some key features of Right Time Reader.
Baby Read, from Dr. Robert Titzer, uses videotapes, which you purchase and use like you might use a TV program as a babysitter. This approach misses a key feature of Right Time Reader, which is direct parental involvement in an act of communication. Without this, the LAD is only minimally activated. The most we expect to see is what is called logographic reading: the infant learns to recognize a few special words.
In fact, the claims made by Dr Titzer indicate that this speculation is likely to be true. The best that is achieved is the recognition of a very few highly emotive words like "tiger". That is, the infant learns to recognize one isolated word because of the stimulus of seeing striking images on the TV at the same time as the word. This is fine as far as it goes. It is similar to a friend's experience that her baby learned to say "fries" when the car passed McDonalds golden arches. However, this kind of whole-symbol learning is just the first step in learning to read. The infant must learn that long, complex messages are delivered by printed words strung out in a left-to-right array, acquire a large database of words, and learn to examine the internal structures of words. Right Time Reader can do this, and as far as I can tell, Baby Read cannot.
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The current URL is http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~parsonst/isnovel.html
This file was last modified 18-Nov-2001
To get in touch, email me:
 parsonst@ihug.co.nz
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