| Surprisingly, even though reading is such an important skill, most children get very little formal training in reading techniques beyond about grade 2. Consequently, many children's reading skills do not develop to the sophisticated level needed for senior high school. This can seriously limit their choices at tertiary level.
Reading is a very complex mental activity, so a good reader requires expertise in a wide range of different skills. Reading is also a process, and, like all processes, it is only as good as its weakest part. The reading process can be compared to a production line at a car factory. The factory can only produce cars at the speed of the slowest production team. For example, if the group of workers putting on the doors take too long to do their task they will create a bottleneck
which will slow down everyone else. Similarly with quality - if the team who tunes up the engines don't do a good job, then the cars won't run well even though all the other teams did high quality work.
We teach people how to master every stage of the reading process. Not only do we help struggling readers overcome dyslexia, we also teach secondary and tertiary students a wide range of advanced reading and comprehension skills.
To help you get a clear understanding of the different skills we teach, here is an outline of the major stages in the reading process:
- Firstly, the reader looks at the page to get an image of the letters down the optic nerves, into
the brain, then into the short term memory so that the images can be decoded into recognisable words.
- The next step is to put the words together into sentences so that the ideas can be understood.
- These ideas then need to be understood in relation to the paragraph, section, chapter and book in which they occur.
- It doesn't stop there, once the information has been fully understood, the reader must process that information, by analysing it, so that it becomes knowledge.
The further up the education ladder you go, the further you must take the process. To be able to study properly and so reach his/her full potential at senior high school, your child needs to master all these steps in the reading process. The more basic parts of the reading process should have been mastered by grade 5. Not reading for pleasure, and poor spelling are both good indicators that there are major weaknesses in the basic parts of the reading process.
We use powerful techniques to teach people how to master each stage in the reading process quickly so, contact us as soon as you notice your child is having difficulties.
Ensuring your child is a good reader is one of the most valuable gifts you could ever give.
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