seemed to be poor learners? Well, thanks to enlightened research and teaching methods, we now know better.

Why? Because people like Dr. Marie Clay have done their homework. The president and Caribbean area co-ordinator of the International Reading Association shared her philosophy on early intervention in reading skills with Taste during a recent visit to Bermuda as a guest of the Bermuda Reading Council.

Dr. Clay is an experienced primary and special education teacher who spent 25 years training child psychologists. Her twin interests of child development and clinical problems led to focusing on issues of primary prevention, from which she developed the Reading Recovery early intervention programme.

Dr. Clay is the author of several books on reading and writing, one of which, The Early Detection of Reading Difficulties, provides guidance for teachers in monitoring children's progress in literacy instruction.

Dr. Clay is a professor emeritus of the University of Auckland, New Zealand and a visiting professor at the University of London's Institute of Education.

The idea is straightforward: "Pick them out early, give them intensive help, pick a programme to suit a particular child's needs, and within a short time you will have them back to the average standard of their class, where the teacher can take care of their needs.'' So says Dr. Marie Clay, who has devoted years of her academic career to developing a solution to problems generated by childhood illiteracy.

Today, the New Zealander travels throughout the US and Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia delivering her message to Reading Councils, educators and other interested parties.

"The idea is that if you intervene early then you can prevent some of the problems people associate with reading difficulties including dyslexia,'' Dr.

Clay said.

No pie-in-the-sky concept, Dr. Clay's supplementary literacy programme is based on solid research and proven results in the field.

"The story is best told by what happened in New Zealand,'' she explained.

"As in Bermuda, children enter school at age five and have a full year of classroom instruction. We then identify the children who have the lowest achievement in literacy -- which means reading and writing -- and deliver to the 20 percent of children in the age group the supplementary programme which is taught on a one-on-one basis. Each programme is designed to suit a particular child, it is definitely not a package deal.'' "We find that it only takes something between 12 and 20 weeks to bring six -year-olds back to the average of their class, and it is only a very tiny percentage which need further support and help.'' At first hesitant to be more specific, Dr. Clay ultimately admitted that her programme had "an extraordinarily high success rate. Only one percent need continuing help.'' But she hastened to add: "That doesn't mean the children have not been learning; rather that they need continuing help on a one-to-one basis''.

Noting that her programme was now being "widely used'' in Australia and the United States, and on a smaller scale in the UK and Canada'', Dr. Clay stressed that part of its success rate was due to skilled teaching staff.

"The programme involves a highly specialised training process for experienced teachers. It takes a whole year for teachers to train, and the reason for it being a slow process is because teachers must drop a lot of old habits and be retrained.

"The programme is not the latest fashion but an alternate way of handling reading problems, and flexibility in teacher training is the key to achieving.'' Dr. Clay said her interest in correcting reading and writing difficulties grew out of an original research project whereby the progress of a large group of New Zealand school entrants was followed from their first through their sixth birthdays, with particular note being made of what the successful children had learned during their first year of school.

"This gave a good idea of what it was that had to be learned by less successful children. It involved becoming a good writer, becoming a reader of their own simple story books, and doing this, first with the help of the teacher, and then being able to do it on their own.

"That is where we have to get to: children being able to write and read on their own.'' She explained that part of the reason why children experienced literacy problems at school was because, traditionally, they had been left for "two or three years hoping things would come right'', which only exacerbated the existing problem.

She said that such children, while learning, had also been building in "more and more tangles'' in their learning so that the more they were left the more severe the problem became.

"In addition, the longer that you leave them the bigger the gap between their achievement and that of their classmates, so you wind up with an enormous gap to breech.'' Dr. Clay emphasised that her Reading Recovery early intervention programme was neither a gimmick nor a quick-fix solution.

"People have been looking for `the' solution, `the' programme, but there is no one solution,'' she said. "The programme must be individually designed and individually delivered. The path is clear -- you just have to ensure that the child does whatever it takes to be a good reader.

Asked what made her Reading Recovery programme different, Dr. Clay responded: "Early intervention is what is different. That is what I am trying to introduce.'' Dr. Marie Clay.