Reading problems can be picked up and dealt with as early as primary one, Timothy Shanahan, the head of the International Reading Association told The Bookworm Beat.

Mr. Shanahan, professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago will be the keynote speaker at the upcoming Bermuda Reading Association?s 23rd annual conference. He will be speaking on the topic ?How to Improve Reading Achievement? at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess on February 3.

The Bookworm Beat spoke with Mr. Shanahan in Chicago via telephone, shortly before he came to the Island.

?The history of this is that schools and parents have traditionally held back and not dealt children the help they need early on, thinking the kids would mature or would just learn over time. Research now says as soon as we see a problem we should be addressing it.?

Mr. Shanahan said one way to identify children in need of reading help was to look at how they responded to instruction.

?Kids who don?t have much of a problem tend to improve quickly and don?t need a lot of additional assistance,? he said. ?Other kids don?t tend to improve quite as easily and the early support isn?t sufficient.?

He said kids who are reading well, need to be continually challenged.

?Generally, as students are succeeding and moving into the top half they need opportunities to use their literacy in academic areas. It is not just about how to read, but how do you read mathematics and science. Writing skills need to be developed to a greater extent. You are never done learning to read; you just move on to greater skills and abilities.?

Mr. Shanahan was executive director of the Chicago Reading Initiative, a public school improvement project serving 437,000 children from 2001 to 2002. He was also on the White House Assembly on Reading and the National Reading Panel, a group convened by the National Institute of Child Health and Development at the request of Congress to evaluate research on successful methods of teaching reading.

?Seven or eight years ago our Congress got very involved in this and very concerned about what was the best way to teach kids reading,? he said. ?They commissioned a panel to see what the research told us. I was a member of that panel and got to review an extensive body of research.?

One of the things Mr. Shanahan?s group researched was an early intervention programme that looked at identifying problems in the classroom. They found that when reading difficulties were noted early, educators were often successful in addressing them.

Mr. Shanahan?s team found that the most successful reading approaches focused on teaching kids how to decode a word, rather than to sight read or memorise a word. This is essentially the phonics approach to learning.

?First of all there is phonemic awareness,? said Mr. Shanahan. ?This comes almost before the child starts learning to read. It is about teaching kids to hear the sounds within words. Little kids hear words as one big chunk of sounds. It is hard to learn to match the sounds.?

The next stage is to teach kids to decode words. The letters ?Sl? have a certain sound. The letters ?Br? have a different sound, for example.

?It is almost important to extend their vocabulary,? he said. ?The more words they know the meanings of the better. We also have to teach kids how to effectively think when they are reading. We have to teach them to comprehend and ask questions about the text.?

Mr. Shanahan said that the United States fell away from explicitly teaching phonics in the late 1980s.

?That has been reversing itself as we have not been happy with the result of that,? he said. ?Since the mid-1990s there has been a strong movement to increase the amount of phonics instruction. I know there are similar movements going on in New Zealand and other English-speaking countries.?

Mr. Shanahan said that with other reading methods, such as getting children to memorise a word, children may not learn as quickly.

?It isn?t quite as effective,? he said. ?However, if you teach those kids and they succeed at learning, by second grade (primary three), you can?t tell them apart from kids with phonics. They eventually figure out the phonics for themselves. But it appears you make better progress if phonics is taught.?

At the Bermuda Reading Association conference, Mr. Shanahan will be talking about the teaching of fluency. He will be looking at the role of oral reading in the classroom.

Another speaker at the conference will be Wendy McDonnell, senior education officer for primary schools at the Bermuda Ministry of Education. She has published various articles and co-authored books on literacy, second language and mathematics instruction, among other things. Two officers from the American group, ?Future Teachers of America? will also speak.

There will be workshops for pre-school, primary, middle and high school teachers, parents and caregivers. Tickets are $35 and available from Marla Smith at the Youth Library. She can be contacted at 295-0487. For more information about learning to read, go to www.reading.org, the website of the International Reading Association. The website, www.nifl.gov also has information for parents and a certain amount of information on how dads can coach their kids to read.