Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program
Third Edition
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What lessons plans are included in the Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program?
The Teacher Guides contain not only kindergarten lesson plans, but also lesson plans for all beginning readers and special education students, all wrapped up together in one comprehensive set of lesson plans. One of the major features of the Bannatyne Reading Program is that students need have no knowledge at all of how to read, write and spell the English language when they begin the Program. Beginning reading students of all kinds can safely begin in the Pearl Workbook and progress through the other 12 Workbooks until they finish up reading, spelling and writing very well at high grade achievement levels--often as high as sixth grade or higher. This may take three or more years depending on the verbal intelligence of the students involved. Some verbally gifted students may reach sixth grade achievement levels in less than three years. (See: TESTIMONIALS AND STUDIES)
The individual Workbook lessons in the Step-by-Step Teacher Guides are so detailed that the teacher/tutor/parent is not only left in no doubt about how to teach each lesson, but is also informed about what to actually say to students. As well as the Step-by-Step detailed lesson plans, the Bannatyne Program Teacher Guides contain illustrations of each Workbook page as it would be completed by a student, so there is no doubt about what the student is expected to accomplish. The Teacher Guides also contain all the answers to all the lessons, activities, games and puzzles that make the Bannatyne Program such an enjoyable learning experience for the students and a delight for the teacher to use.
What are the major specific ideas, skills and techniques that have been incorporated in the Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program?
NOTE: The features below that are asterisked* are unique to the Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program. They were developed by me before 1975.
For definitions of linking, splitting, blending, sequencing, association, and other unknown words please see: GLOSSARY.
88 Built-in Techniques: There are over 88 valuable techniques built into the Bannatyne Program, some of which are listed below. (For a more detailed statement of these 88-plus techniques please refer to EIGHTY-EIGHT TECHNIQUES.)
*Sequential Task-Analysis of Reading, Writing, Spelling and Spoken English: After I had done a full sequential task-analysis of reading, writing, spelling and spoken English (because it is a phonetic language), I realized that all the following aspects of the language described below also had to be built into the Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program to make it thoroughly effective as a learning system. These many and varied aspects of the Bannatyne Program are all almost *seamlessly integrated and interlaced into a smooth flowing sequence so that even five-year olds pick it up quite quickly. (Note that some of these aspects of the Bannatyne Program have already been mentioned in some of the above Sections of this Website.)
*The Fully-Controlled Introduction of Every Component "Linguistic Bit" or Aspect of English: In the Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program students are not exposed to any single component of the English language until it has been thoroughly taught--just as is the case (by analogy) with a fine mathematics program. Thus students first factually learn each phoneme (sound), grapheme (letter-shape), blend, digraph (two letters make one sound), prefix, suffix, word, meaning, or article of grammar before they are exposed to these components in other contexts such as stories, word games, and writing.
Listening Skills including *Auditory Closure: The identification, discrimination, sequencing and auditory closure on the phonemes (heard sounds) in words.
Articulation Skills: The identification, discrimination, sequencing, splitting-up and blending of the articulemes (spoken sounds) in words.
Visual/Spatial Skills: The identification, discrimination, and the association of the optemes (the seen letters/visual symbols in print) in English with their matching (heard) phonemes and (spoken) articulemes in words.
Motor/Kinesthetic Skills: The identification, discrimination, sequencing and the association (memory links) of the graphemes (the hand-written letters) in English with their matching (heard) phonemes, (spoken) articulemes and optemes (seen printed letters) in words. Throughout the Program the size of the print used is systematically adjusted to allow for these essential procedures.
Three Types of Eye-movement Training: Left-to-right eye-tracking, spot-to-spot eye fixation (saccadic movements) and line-by-line visual progression down the page are all carefully trained. The size of the print used is systematically adjusted to these essential procedures.
Vocabulary, Word Meanings, Sentence and Story Comprehension: Word meanings are taught both verbally and often with pictures (as in a picture dictionary), and both sentence and story comprehension are taught through specific activities throughout the Bannatyne Program. (See: COMPREHENSION Section and Comprehension below)
Interactive Student and Teacher Discussions: Almost all the Activities in the Bannatyne Program involve students and teacher in stimulating conversational discussions involving our spoken language. The natural language of humans is auditory-vocal, but this unalterable fact is often neglected in traditional reading, spelling and language programs. The Bannatyne Program involves full teacher-student participation and two-way conversational interaction. (See: COMPREHENSION Section and Comprehension below)
Punctuation, Grammar and *Syntax from Day One: Punctuation, grammar and syntax (the organization of words in a sentence) are taught continuously.
Creative Writing: This valuable skill is specifically taught in the last two Workbooks of the Planet Series, but it is implicitly taught through the Stories which occur throughout the Bannatyne Program. Even the sequential arrangement of topic paragraphs in quite a few of the Stories is specifically taught demonstrating to students how stories are built.
Blends and Digraphs: The introduction and teaching of all the blends (e.g., cl-, br-) and digraphs (two letter-shapes make one sound, e.g., -ck, th-) in English is fully controlled in the Bannatyne Program in that none of them are used until they have been thoroughly taught.
Prefixes, Suffixes, Syllables, and *Chunking-in-Memory Controls: All these components are introduced systematically at the appropriate point so as to ensure students are very familiar with them before they are exposed to them in Stories or subsequent activities and games. *Chunking is the process of overlearning certain very frequent words or word parts by heart (for instant recognition) after their component phonemes and graphemes have been thoroughly taught. Note that the "syllables" used in the Bannatyne Program are intended to help students articulate words correctly, and so they do not always correspond with the grammatical syllables in many dictionaries.
Syllable and Core (Root) Word Control: This means that polysyllabic words are split into discrete syllables (often core words such as "-port-") so students can learn to recognize those syllables and their syllable "families" quickly and accurately wherever they see them. This meticulous progressive grapheme, syllable, and core word control, which occurs throughout the Bannatyne Program, facilitates the rapid learning of reading, writing and spelling.
Fluency and Speed Reading: Fluent speed reading is taught throughout the Program. In the Ships and Planets Workbooks there are specific activities devoted to timed Speed Reading, but most of the Workbook Activities make provision for practicing this important skill. Speed Reading is taught as the final step in a student's "word processing" skills after all the above listed skills (for any given word) have been carefully taught. All students enjoy these various timed Speed Reading activities. (See: Speed Reading below)
Competent Spelling Skills: Every Workbook Activity involves the student in learning to spell words correctly. However there are five Activities designed to teach spelling directly and actively, each from a different "angle." These Activities are Crossword Puzzles, Name it Game, Spellwell Memory Game and Word Game. All students enjoy these games.
Continuous Built-in Review Process: Review and automatic "invisible testing" for acquired knowledge of the content and components of the learned material is continuous throughout the Bannatyne Program.
*A Wide Variety of Continuous Motivations: As mentioned earlier the Bannatyne Program contains many motivators, some of which are constant praise, high interest materials, a wide variety of activities which regularly switches each student's focus of interest through changes of direction, humor, constant built-in success, illustrations everywhere, picture coloring, the use of color by the students to code vowel graphemes, frequent page layout changes, continuous multi-sensory-motor activities that constantly involve the "whole" student, speed timing during Speed Reading activities, game formats for many Activities (including spelling), a strong positive reinforcement system of points. (See: MOTIVATION for much more information on this topic.)
Specific Game Activities: The Activities in the form of high-interest games are:
Specific Key Word Activities: Several Key Words of each and every spelling in English (excluding some foreign and technical words) are specifically and systematically taught in their correct sequential linguistic position, and they are constantly reviewed. These key words are meaningfully defined, articulated, split, blended, traced, syllabified, written and read. They are also used in succeeding Activities and Stories. The most common words in the English language (from the Frances-Kucera List) are built into the Bannatyne Program and most of them are used frequently. Also note there are over 5500 printed words in the Bannatyne Program and this figure does not include many spoken vocabulary words that are used to aid students in identifying the position of specific phonemes within those words, or in other teacher-student conversations.
Story Words: The Story Word Activities are comprised of the words to be prepared for use in the forthcoming Story within any one "Vowel Color Section" of the Bannatyne Program (for example, the Copper Section in Galleon Workbook 6). Each Story Word is defined with its own illustration and by interactive discussion. The Story Words are also defined, articulated, split, blended, traced, syllabified, written and read by students before being used in the Stories and other Activities.
The English language sound-to-symbol orthography is quite irregular. How does the Bannatyne Program handle that?
The multi-pronged handling of the irregular sound-to-symbol (phoneme-to-grapheme orthography) of English is one of the great strengths of the Bannatyne Program. The following seven paragraphs describe each of the techniques used in the Bannatyne Program to regularize the irregular orthography of English.
*Vowel Color-Coding using Vowel Names as Cues: The 17 vowel sounds and their various spellings in English are named for the 17 colors which contain those vowels. Some of the names are Green /ee/, Brown /ow/, Purple /ur/, Rose /o/, Lime /i/, and Yellow /e/. It is the written and spoken vowel system in English which has the most irregular orthography because there are 76 discrete phoneme-to-grapheme vowel spelling combinations. Consider the one printed spelling of grapheme ou with the vowel sound (phoneme) in each of these seven words--double, you, journey, four, shout, could, boulder--in which each one has a different phoneme (sound). On the other hand there is just one phoneme (Green /ee/) for each of the following 8 graphemic spellings--bee, funny, chief, taxi, me, leaf, ceiling, key. In the Bannatyne Program students quickly learn to associate each of these words with its own vowel color because each one of the 17 Vowel Color Sections is taught separately. This may sound complicated to the uninitiated, but five-year-olds quickly learn them, and the method has worked very effectively for all kinds of students (of all ages) for over two decades. Students themselves have fun color-coding the vowels in newly introduced words using color pencils. This color pencil usage by students is an optional (but highly recommended) technique, in that lead pencils may be used instead. Lead pencils are always used for tracing and writing all consonants. In the Bannatyne Program all read and spelled words are overlearned and often reviewed by students in a variety of ways after they have been previously processed. However, the vowel color-coding method is only one of more than 88 techniques built into the Bannatyne Program and therefore please do not label the Program a color-coding system. I repeat that the color-coding by students using color pencils is optional (but highly recommended) even though the Color Names for the 17 vowel sections are not optional because they are "identifiers" for the specific phoneme being learned in that particular section. (For a list of the 88+ techniques see: EIGHTY-EIGHT TECHNIQUES.)
*Syllabication of words using lines or hand-set spaces even in Stories: Throughout the Bannatyne Program many words are syllabified either with tiny vertical dotted lines, or with tiny gaps (hand-set) between the syllables. This technique enables students to identify and articulate the parts of words (units of pronunciation with one vowel phoneme) much more easily so that their reading is more fluent.
*Unique Type Face (font): The Bannatyne Program Workbooks have a unique type-face (font) invented by the author, a type-face that regularizes the phoneme-to-grapheme orthography of the English consonants. All the Workbooks words and other text were drawn by hand or pasted by hand to facilitate ease of reading by students of all ages. This font has only a few minor deviations from other fonts to facilitate instant recognition of ambiguous graphemes such as hard and soft c (cat and cent) or hard and soft g (get and gem). (See: Consonant Letter-Shape Modification below)
*Consonant Letter-Shape Modification: This is a unique feature of the Bannatyne Program. A few ambiguous consonants are modified in minute ways so that students recognize each of them has its own sound. These slightly modified consonants include the soft c (cent), the soft g (gem), the t articulated as /sh/ (action), and the s articulated as /sh/ (mission). The printed d is also modified with a very short 45o angled upstroke in order to prevent mirror-imaging it with the b. Many people ask if students become dependent on these miniscule modifications, and the answer is a definite "no." Other people ask if students can easily transfer from these slightly modified graphemes to regular print, and the answer is a resounding "yes." After all, no one (not even a dyslexic student) has a problem recognizing capital letters as a major modification of the alphabet, nor do any students have difficulty with italics, or cursive letter-shapes. Please refer to the Grapheme Book (DISC 1) to see the actual modified consonant graphemes or Page 62 in the Handbook. Note that the English language contains 33 consonant phonemes and 48 consonant graphemes. For example, phoneme /f/ alone has three grapheme spellings: f as in fun, ph as in photograph, and gh as in cough. All 48 consonant grapheme spellings are individually taught in the appropriate sequential place in the Bannatyne Program.
*Silent Graphemes with asterisks: English has at least 15 silent graphemes in a wide variety of words. Silent graphemes are systematically introduced at the appropriate time in the Program and are initially characterized by an asterisk placed vertically right above the grapheme. Examples of silent graphemes are to be found in the words: close (e), guard (u), ghost (h), would (l), knee (k), climb (b), gnat (g), people (o). All words containing silent graphemes have their spelling regularized by using the asterisk over the letter to indicate to the student it is not articulated. After the family of words (e.g., climb, lamb, thumb, tomb, limb, bomb, plumb, crumb, numb) is overlearned, the asterisk is no longer needed. The 15 silent graphemes taught in the Bannatyne Program are listed with sample words in the Grapheme Book on DISC 1.
*Discrimination of confusing digraph single-phoneme consonants and digraph blends: English uses many digraphs as single consonant phonemes and all of these when introduced to students have a straight underline under the digraph. Examples are to be found in the words: back, that, brush, church, photograph, cough. On the other hand, when digraph blends are introduced they have a tiny (hand-set) saucer curve under them (not reproducible here) as, for example, in the words: swan, want, sink, wing, land, spot. This technique prevents students from trying to blend single-phoneme consonant digraphs.
*Speed Reading for Fluency against Stop-watch and Overlearning: Once students have processed new words in a variety of crucial ways, they overlearn them in memory by Speed Reading them fluently in an enjoyable way (one of which is a game) against a stopwatch or second hand. Students happily speed read the same set of words (or passage of prose) repeatedly against a stopwatch to see if they can get a faster time. In addition to the Speed Reading technique, the overlearning of words, standard syllables, chunks and blends also takes place because common words are used over and over again (as review) in reading, writing, spelling and language activities throughout the Bannatyne Program. Overlearning, which is essential to rapid automatic reading, writing, spelling and comprehension, is usually lacking in regular reading and spelling school programs.
Does the Bannatyne Program appeal to students of all ages and backgrounds?
*Versatility for Students of All Ages: This feature is extremely important. The Bannatyne Program can be used by all types of students of all ages. As a teacher and psychologist I realized that while young children can identify with teenagers, the opposite is not true. This led me to the decision to create the content and themes of the Bannatyne Program so it would appeal equally to young children, older children, teenagers, young adults and even be acceptable to illiterate adults. In two decades of use, this policy has paid off because the acceptability to all age groups has been proven over and over again. I do recommend a specific set of motivating and factual statements when first introducing the Bannatyne Program to any prospective student or students, especially teenagers, and these can be found in the section on MOTIVATION OF STUDENTS.
The versatility of the Bannatyne Program is not confined to age factors. The content is very interesting to students of many different cultures, educational and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Do students read actual stories?
Certainly. There are 34 lengthy Stories in the Ships and Planets Workbooks and numerous shorter ones in the Jewels Series. There are also many other opportunities for students to read meaningful entertaining sentences and paragraphs in the other Activities besides the Stories.
The carefully selected themes of the Stories are based on tales from history, legend, science, humor and interesting everyday events. Much research went into the selection of the themes of the stories. I call these themes age-neutral because they appeal equally to all students of any age from 4 to 75. One ten-year-old who had nearly completed the Program went to see a giant screen movie at an I-MAX Theater. The next day, full of excitement, he said to his teacher, "It was all about Howard Carter and his discovery of King Tutankhamen's Tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt--just like the story we read in the Jupiter Book of the Bannatyne Program."
The stories are abundantly illustrated which, in itself, assists with comprehension and motivation. Students who are learning to read at any age do not like pages of unbroken print--any more than most people would like reading magazines or newspapers without any pictures. The Stories contain only those words that students have already learned.
*Comprehension is actively taught including logical inference, deduction and induction: At the request of many teachers who have used the Bannatyne Program, a more detailed account of the many ways in which Comprehension is taught in the Bannatyne Program is presented in the section on COMPREHENSION.
What features in some traditional programs are NOT in the Bannatyne Program?
There are common traditional practices often used when teaching reading that have been shown to hold students back from fluent competence in reading, writing, spelling and comprehension. Of course the verbally competent students taught by these methods do learn to read, but usually it is in spite of the methods their teachers use, and these verbal students learn much more slowly because they often have to sort out the phonetic code by themselves. Therefore, based on a variety of research findings, I have set out below methods and procedures that are NOT used in the Bannatyne Program because they are deleterious to learning English reading, writing, spelling and language in the early grades.
Do NOT use or teach the alphabet names of letters while using the Bannatyne Program: Never teach the alphabet in its traditional form: "Ay, Bee, Cee, Dee, Ee, eF, Gee, aitcH, etc." Never teach any of these names of the letters. This policy is based on research findings. In the Bannatyne Program only the phonetic sounds or phonemes are taught. Teaching or using letter names as used in the alphabet cause psycho- neurological interference and confusion, a phenomenon that results from having two equal auditory-vocal responses (a letter-name and a phoneme) to a single visual stimulus (a grapheme). In fact there are often several responses to one stimulus letter-name; for example, when a student hears the teacher say the letter name /ay/ for a in the following words, there are six separate phonemes associated with that one letter name--Copper /o/ as in swan, Azure /a/ as in man, Pumpkin /u/ as in above, Yellow /e/ as in share, Gray /ay/ as in name, Fawn /aw/ as in all. Which of these sounds (phonemes) is the student to pick when all have an equal chance of "being right"? The reverse situation in spelling, which depends on recall memory, is even worse. The Bannatyne Program regularizes this situation so any confusion is minimized.
It does not matter if a student already knows the alphabet and the names of the letters--and almost all students do know some or all of them. Just cease teaching the alphabet recitation A-Z and cease using letter names for any reading and spelling situations. In the Bannatyne Program please use only the appropriate phoneme, never the letter name. (The Grapheme Book contains all correct phoneme articulations including Audio.) You will be surprised how quickly both teachers and students become used to this precise and unambiguous method of phoneme-to-grapheme (sound to printed-letter-shape) linkage. Five-year-olds pick it up very quickly. In addition the comprehensive Teacher Guides (one for each of the 13 Workbooks) will explain how to articulate any phoneme-to-grapheme combination appropriately.
Word frequency lists, other than those already built into the Bannatyne Program, should NOT be used: The first thousand or so frequently used words in the English language (from the Frances-Kucera list) are built into the Bannatyne Program in their correct sequential task-analyzed locations. Any use of other word-frequency lists will be very confusing because the phonemes and graphemes that have not yet been taught will be introduced without any proper preparation or correct sequential placement. The orthography and grapheme content of many common words (such as what, cough and one) is very complex and they have to be introduced in the right way, in the right order, in the right place, at the right time to be learned logically, effortlessly and meaningfully. Of course any useful words may be used in any normal teacher-student auditory-vocal conversation, but students are not taught to read, spell and write them until the appropriate sequential moment in the Bannatyne Program. Note that students are taught to read, print, spell and comprehend over 5500 words by the time they have completed the Bannatyne Program Workbooks.
The separation of Language Arts subjects does NOT occur in the Bannatyne Program: The formal separation of reading, writing and spelling (and the auditory-vocal language associated with them) which occurs in traditional school curricula does not occur in the Bannatyne Program. In regular school programs, the above subjects are taught at different times of the day or week as disconnected parts of the curriculum. However, in the Bannatyne Program, the above subjects are taught in a fully integrated, mutually supporting, beneficial, natural way so that students become highly competent in spelling, reading, writing and language simultaneously. The words they read are the same words they spell, write, associate with meanings, and use in conversation--in the same lessons.
Sight words are NOT used in the Bannatyne Program: Because the orthography (sound-to-symbol linkage) is completely regularized in the Bannatyne Program there is never any need to teach "sight words." This regularization of the orthographic content of the English language allows every word to be taught phonetically, even the most so-called irregular ones.
Single track methods of teaching reading are OUT: Every so often in the traditional teaching-of-reading world a single new technique is introduced, which we are optimistically told, will make all our children literate. One year we are instructed to use a selected list of sight words and then (we are optimistically told) everyone will learn to read rapidly. The next year we are given a new alphabet which will quickly resolve the nation's reading problems. Yet another year simple jumbled phonics are brought back as an old "well-founded" basis for universal literacy. The following year syllables are stressed by the experts as the basic unit of language and we are optimistically told that if we teach our students syllables by sight they will all rapidly learn to read. Yet another year the emphasis is placed on reading-for-meaning because it is said the context feedback from the meanings of words will facilitate the decoding of language in "slow-to-read" students. More recently so-called "top-down" methods are creating phonetic and linguistic sort-it-all-out-yourself chaos for our young students. No single panacea ever seems to work anywhere near as effectively as its proponents say, and illiteracy rates stay as high as they ever were.
It is worth repeating here that the Bannatyne Program has more than 88 proven techniques and ideas built into it and that they have been fully synthesized for maximum effect and mutual support to help the student learn to rapidly and effectively read, spell, write and converse. (See: EIGHTY-EIGHT TECHNIQUES)
The Bannatyne Reading Program is a comprehensive, integrated reading program, writing program, spelling program, language program, and comprehension training program. The Bannatyne Reading Program is unlike any other reading programs currently available. This means you will find many features which are only in the Bannatyne Reading Program. In some Commonwealth countries the program may be referred to as: Bannatyne Programme, or Bannatyne Reading Programme.
Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program -- Copyright © 2003 Alexander Bannatyne, PhD
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