Training Wheels for Literacy - A New Way of Thinking About Learning to ReadOur Story

Training Wheels for Literacy is the work of David Boulton and the Training Wheels for Literacy Advisory Team.

David Boulton is a learning theorist and educational philosopher-technologist whose articles on learning and technology have been published internationally. As a theorist and philosopher, he has given keynote addresses to a wide variety of audiences in the US, Canada, Mexico and China. His work has been featured at both the National and California Educational Summits. He serves on the advisory team to the Chair of the California Senate Education Committee, is a member of the 21st Century Learning Initiative and was formerly a member of the Dialogue Research Project at M.I.T.'s Organizational Learning Center. As a technologist, Mr. Boulton has been awarded four patents. One patent, "A Method and Apparatus for Implementing User Feedback", has broad implications for how the ‘webs’ of the future will perform and evolve. “Virtuality”, the virtual university and electronic campus he designed for Apple Computer, won the Optimas Award. Mr. Boulton has founded five companies, one, which became the 2way Corporation, won the Smithsonian Award for Innovation and appeared on Upside Magazine’s Top 100 private companies list.

see http://www.implicity.com for more on his work

A comprehensive advisory team description is under development and will be available soon.

Dr. David Bohm, the late physicist, philosopher and pioneer of dialogue; colleague of Einstein, Krishnamurti and the Dali Lama's science teacher, was a mentor to David and, in particular, influenced his thinking about the implicate-ordered nature of reality and thought and the necessity of understanding and practicing dialogue.

California Senator John Vasconcellos, Chair of the Senate Education Committee, a pioneering legislator, champion of 'person-centric-politics', the originator of the public debate on self-esteem and a leader in developing education policies that address the development of whole human beings. In his words: "society's primary commitment must be to encourage the development of healthy, self-realizing, responsible human beings". (and) "I believe that we human beings are innately inclined toward becoming constructive, life-affirming, responsible, and trustworthy and that self esteem is at the heart of our capacity to lead lives of community, responsibility, productivity and satisfaction." John's 15 year friendship with and mentoring of David has been inspiring, enabling and encouraging.

Dr. Gary David, Musician, Philosopher, Epistemologist and Affect system theoretician. His creative bridging of epistemology, affect theory, thought and 'poetics' is both brilliant and inspiring. His heartened guidance into how humans recreate themselves in each moment of presence has been fundamental to David's life and work since 1997. Dr. David has challenged and guided David to the work of more fully and intimately inhabiting his own life.

Over the past year partial financial, editorial and other support for this project has been provided by a number of friends of the project and educational organizations. A complete list is forthcoming. Thanks to all of you.

In 1989-90, my son, Daaron who had, since his birth, been my learning guide, began to want to read. Daaron grew up in an environment of rich dialogue and quickly developed a remarkable proficiency with language. By the time he was three he could engage in complex conversations about his own thought process and he and I were able to travel together throughout our thoughts and feelings.

Daaron’s kindergarten teacher described him has having ‘the vocabulary of a 20 year old’. He was masterfully, verbally, dexterous. From the time he was a month old I read to him. I never read him baby books; I read him whatever I was reading. He picked up the alphabet sounds when he was 2 and, because he loved playing games, he had a good sight vocabulary by the time he was 3. He was never pressured to read before Kindergarten. It was his starting school that precipitated our journey into learning to read and it was then that, for the first time since I learned to read myself, I was drawn into the problems of reading.

His game playing had taught him to trust the game he was playing – that if only he learned what he needed to learn he could win. This had enabled him to stay with his frustrations because he knew it was possible to learn through them. Daaron became an exceptional learner because he had developed a refined sense of his own meaning needs and he trusted them to direct him, like a compass, through any learning challenges he encountered.

When he began to read he couldn’t believe it. He was incredibly frustrated by the lack of coherence in the process and the seemingly arbitrary ways in which reading was so different than the ABCs had prepared him for. He had no problem with the alphabet letter sounds; he had no problem with understanding the meaning of words. It was the ambiguity in-between that broke the flow in his mind. With his ability to articulate his confusion and our combined ability to track the flow of meaning in his mind, we bumped right into the sound-letter correspondence problem. Why was it so confusing? So many rules and exceptions, he asked me ‘why dad?” “Why does it work this way? It just doesn’t make sense!” “How could it be such a mess?” He was sure there must be something simple that once he understood it would enable him to read.

At the time I couldn’t answer the question very well. I explained to him that his struggle wasn’t his fault. The problem was in the mess, not in him. It really annoyed us that something so fundamental and basic as reading could be so unsystematic, illogical and so inconsiderate of the way our mind's functioned most naturally. I explained that there was a very complex set of rules that made the mess make sense to adults that studied it but that there wasn’t any explanation I could give him that would make sense of it to him. Though I couldn't help him understand it, paying careful attention to what he was going through made it obvious how I could help him.

I began using a pencil in much the same way an orchestra conductor uses his wand - moving it up and down, in circles and left and right. We developed a cueing system. When I sensed his flow stumble, I would move the pencil tip just above the letters he was reading and tap the letter when it was supposed to sound like its letter name. I would move the pencil tip in a circle when it's one of the letter's other sounds and down when it was silent. I would move it left when it's blended with the letters before it and right when it's blended with the letters after it. He quickly understood these simple signals, and, as my cueing reduced the ambiguity he experienced, we both felt an ease and acceleration in the flow of his reading. It worked so well that soon Daaron was off and reading. I never did explain the complex rules and exceptions I just reduced the ambiguity overhead to the process and he learned his way through.

As my work was about learning and my concern was how our insidious curricula did damage to our core capacities for learning, this reading issue really troubled me. Realizing that the key to real change lie in the direction of providing paper and screen based disambiguation cues to the developing readers, I wrote the first article: Training Wheels For Literacy in 1991.

For many reasons I never actively pursued or pushed the project – Daaron was no longer struggling and my work went back to its earlier focus. But in 1999 my daughter Deanna, began to learn to read and once again I was drawn into the frustrating reality of a child's struggle with this process. Deanna's strengths are different than Daaron's. Like him, she is emotionally and somatically smart and conceptually dexterous. However, unlike him, she had a slight but noticeable auditory-memory-processing problem. In reading this manifested itself as an inability to remember a word she had just decoded. She had to re-decode the same word she had just decoded only a sentence or two previously. Once again the spotlight was on decoding and, I think more accurately stated, overcoming the ambiguity. I began to use the ‘wand’ again and also to write the words she was struggling with on the whiteboard, varying the way the letters looked, to act like cues.

This time, because the process lasted so much longer, I experienced a side-affect of the process that I hadn’t encountered with Daaron. Even though I helped her understand that the problem wasn’t her fault – that the messy code made it hard on her, she couldn’t help but ask “why can’t I read as well as everyone else”? She began to doubt her own mind – her struggle with reading made her feel bad about herself, feel shame about her own mind. To avoid these negative feelings she began to comfort herself by saying ‘I am just not a good reader’.

This time as I felt such compassion for her struggle, I vowed to give the Training Wheels concept a full exploration.... and that led to the work of this site.

We are proposing that you come together and develop a new method of publishing (on paper and computer screens) in which the way letters are visually presented cues the developing reader to a significantly more intuitive and immediate mode of apprehending the word's sound and therefore meaning. Particularly for young children, but also for adults struggling to read, this approach to interfacing their natural language capacities to the written word could represent a breakthrough in their education and capacity to learn.

The publishing revolution which led to the educational revolution of the Renaissance wasn't the result of the printing press. Though serving only the elite, the printing press had been around long before the Renaissance. It was “moveable type” that made it possible to easily set up or “program” the press and that brought the cost of publishing down to a level that eventually enabled the masses to experience the diversity, richness and learning opportunities previously reserved only for the few.

However, since the revolution, nearly everything about the publishing process has improved, except the publication. In fact, one of the most important aspects of some publications -- their role as the learning environments through which children learn to read -- hasn't changed since Gutenberg, despite "desktop publishing."

For many millions of children and adults, learning to read is the same old, difficult process it has been for hundreds of years. It is a process of acquiring an "inner interface," an inner translational system that can allow their minds to "hear" the sounds of words by looking at the string of letters that comprise them. That acquiring this translation capacity is difficult is evidenced by listening to any five-year-old conversing with friends and then listening to him or her read. The difference in range and fluency is striking -- it is obvious that children's oral language dexterities far outpace their reading dexterities. Humans are born capable of acquiring oral language capabilities simply by being around other talking humans, but when it comes to learning to read, our natural and instinctual language capacities have to be "conditioned" into service through a long and tedious process of visual associations and (at the time they have to learn them) totally arbitrary rote rules.

While children have difficulty learning to read words, most three-year-olds know their "A-B-C's" cold. They can recognize letters and, treating them like any other "thing" in their world, associate them with a particular sound. Given this capacity and the natural language dexterities just spoken of, what is it, then, that is so difficult about learning to read?

The core problem is obvious: In pronouncing the alphabet, there is a sharply defined, one-to-one correspondence between the visual appearance of a letter and its sound. But when letters combine in words, the way the letter needs to participate in the sound of its host word no longer has such a correspondence. Twenty-six letters can give rise to 40 sounds in ways non-obvious or intuitive. Because the mental overhead required with reading is so un-intuitive and inefficient, an inner "stutter" occurs during the translation which breaks the natural flow and rhythm the reader would otherwise rely on in oral language processing.

Given the difficulty (and the comparative ease of relating to other media, such as television), it is no wonder so many children have difficulty sustaining motivation when reading. Whereas the child's oral language world is rich with range and power, the clumsiness and inefficiency of the reading process forces authors and publishers of children's materials to "dumb down" to a level children find boring as well as frustrating. Again, not because they can't understand the meanings -- the TV programs they watch and the conversations they have are radically more complex -- but because the (tacitly acquired) "interface" is so poor. Reading is not exciting until you really learn to read -- why work to learn to read when what is being read is so boring?

In today's age of desktop publishing, why can't we make reading words nearly as effortless as hearing them? And, what if we could?

We are challenging you to provide developing readers a way to more fully utilize their natural language capacities by making the appearance of words visually cue the word's sound in significantly more obvious and intuitive ways. More specifically, rather than having only uppercase and lowercase variations in visual appearance, we are proposing that letters be capable of being visually represented in ways intuitively suggestive of how they participate in the sound of their host word. Essentially, we are proposing you add a new level of modular flexibility to the idea of a character.

By developing "character families," each letter can be presented in a variety of ways reflective of its various sounds when participating in words. There can be both alphabet-general and letter-specific visual variations, such as sharp, flats, drags, louds, softs, silents, and blendings, both forwards and backward. By modulating the boldness, size, slant and shape of letters (analogous to a visually intuitive, musical notation system), we think it possible to significantly help developing readers learn to read. Unlike phonics or ideographic props, this approach would work without the secondary confusion of multiple spellings.

Whereas, in the days of Gutenberg, adding another dimension of presentation options to each character in a typeface would have proved impossibly cumbersome, today, adding such capabilities so that word processors can modify the appearance of letters in a font family shouldn't represent any technical problems at all.

For educators, the challenge involved is in learning to tune the visual presentation modalities of each character to maximize its general intuitability across the full range of its possible modes of participation. We recommend that a team of linguists and reading teachers collaborate to develop a starter set of character presentations which would be subsequently modifiable by them based on their actual experiences in using the system with struggling readers. Members of this team would be joined by alpha, and subsequently beta, testers of the first team's work. Concurrent to the development activities, a clearing house would be formed that would receive the character families and presentation dictionaries, perform evaluations on overlaps, and distribute the growing system to all interested parties.

Conceptually, the technology involved is relatively straightforward. The first component is the "carrier" or shell that extends the font family to have the added capacity to store the alternate presentations of each font. The second component is the additional user interface extensions that enable the manipulation of alternate fonts. The third component is an on-line, font generator with tools to augment the user's ability to manually adjust a character's appearance and create the alternate fonts. The fourth component is the "presentation dictionary" which, like a spell checker in a standard word processor, scans the words in documents and looks them up on its database. Having found a word match, the dictionary reads the character presentation modalities for the letters in that word and adjusts the letters of the word in the publication to match.

Taking up this challenge could create a breakthrough in literacy and, even beyond that, change the ecology and efficiency of the "inner interface" that regulates learning. Take it up!

Download a copy of this (the original essay) in PDF form