Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program

Third Edition

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS WITH ANSWERS

Q & A ABOUT THE BANNATYNE PROGRAM STRUCTURE AND CONTENT

Why is the Bannatyne Program not structured and organized like other reading programs, or other kinds of regular school programs, especially in terms of age or grade levels?

Simply because these regular school programs have NOT succeeded with many students, and even those verbally competent students with whom these programs appear to have succeeded, could almost certainly be at least twice as far along in their achievement levels if they used the Bannatyne Program. For example, the Bannatyne Program has had regular third grade students reading, spelling and comprehending English at the fifth and sixth grade levels. Even most handicapped students move along faster in the Bannatyne Program than do regular students in regular classrooms using regular reading programs. Most parents and teachers do not seem to realize that regular students progress only one grade level a year and that, on average, it takes six years to reach the sixth grade level of reading or to achieve a reading age of 12. Yet, often, most parents and many teachers often expect handicapped readers to progress (catch up) several grade levels a year even with fewer hours of weekly tuition than that provided in regular classes. Just because the tutoring may be individual or in small groups, usually does little to reduce the time of remediation beyond that of regular students in regular classes, i.e., one grade level per year. Even so, studies indicate that the Bannatyne Program moves along all kinds of students (who can at the least speak simple sentences) much more rapidly than that. (See: TESTIMONIALS AND STUDIES)

What do you mean when you say the Bannatyne Program is a fully integrated, interlaced reading, writing, spelling and language program?

In traditional classroom teaching, traditional curricula, and even remedial situations, the English language is fragmented into separate subjects so that reading, spelling, writing and language skills are not only taught at different times during the day or week, but also taught with a curriculum content for each (especially the words used) that is quite different and unrelated to the others. Such a chaotic approach confuses students and leaves them with unrelated, rote-memorized sets of mixed words which are rarely used thereafter--except by chance.

In the Bannatyne Program the actual words students are learning to read are the identical words they are (at the same time) learning to spell, write, comprehend, close on, speed read and use in a variety of learning activities and stories. Also, each facet of language learning immediately reinforces the others; for example, a specific word and its structure are simultaneously learned through the multiple channels of listening with the ears, speaking with the voice, seeing with the eyes, writing with the hands, comprehending meaning with the mind, and using it syntactically in complete spoken sentences. And that is what is meant by a fully integrated, interlaced Program. Moreover, do not think this is overly complex for you to teach because even 5-year-olds learn it fairly rapidly!

How then does the structure and organization of the Bannatyne Program differ from regular school reading programs?

The Bannatyne Program is literally based and structured on how all the facets of the English language actually work in human beings--in terms of linguistics, orthography, syntax, grammar, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, memory, phonetics, syllabication, many usage frequencies, multiple motivations, symbol graphics, comprehension, readability and legibility. It is very rare for regular reading programs to be based on more than one of these facets, and even that one is usually a confused and garbled version of it. For example, all the many phonics reading programs I have researched use lots of phonemes and graphemes in their readers that have not yet been taught by those programs or teachers. Of course, the teacher or parent using the Bannatyne Program does not have to understand the complexities of the above mentioned subjects and disciplines because their essential content has been seamlessly embedded in the Program. However, some elementary aspects of the above factors must be understood by teachers and parents, and even five-year-old children can quickly learn and understand them! You do not have to be an engineer to drive a car, but you do have to have know the basic essentials of how to drive.

To further understand (in summary) how the above structure is incorporated in the Bannatyne Program please read the following questions and answers.

Why is there such a huge emphasis on comprehension and the meanings of words in the Bannatyne Program?

All human language (even when printed) has the purpose of conveying meaning so that one person can understand what another is saying, and this language-transmitted information must be comprehensible to both participants in the conversation (or writer and reader). The richer the participants' inner language is, and the more extensive their vocabulary, the better will be their resulting comprehension and communication. Comprehension is an aspect of the auditory-vocal language, not the written (printed) one, and therefore the Bannatyne Program places a strong emphasis on teacher/student conversational English stimulation and usage in the classroom. Such a beneficial conversation policy maximizes students' understanding and comprehension when they actually get to read, write and spell the words immediately afterwards. Unfortunately most of our conventional language programs in schools emphasize silence and the study of the (twice removed from word-meanings by symbols) printed word--without its key auditory-vocal conversational component. This is like trying to learn music only from printed sheet music.

Why is the alphabet not used in the Bannatyne Program?

The alphabet serves no other purpose than to look up words in dictionaries and names in phone books. And for that purpose only the basic phonemes (see below) need be taught. Never teach letter names while the Bannatyne Program is being used. But unfortunately, students who are taught the alphabet around the time they are learning to read and spell suffer from auditory-vocal confusion because each visual grapheme (letter-shape) has two sets of sounds associated with it--the name of the letter (e.g., /aitch/) and its phonemic articulation (e.g., /h/). This is known in memory psychology as dual equal "pair" associations to one stimulus in which either association has an equal chance of being recalled into consciousness. Thus when a student has learned both the alphabet word-names for letters (e.g., aitch) and the true phonetic sound (e.g., /h/ as in /hip/) either one can pop out of his mind when he sees the symbol h in print. If he learned "aitch" first, it usually "pops out" first and this inhibits the phonetic language association of English (in this example the phoneme /h/) from operating smoothly and unambiguously. This alphabetic auditory-vocal memory confusion is one of the main reasons why one third of our students are poor readers and why the other two thirds cannot read at the sixth grade achievement level while in third grade.

Anyway the sequential order of the letters in the alphabet is quite arbitrary and at random. It makes no logical or phonemic sense. All European alphabets, including English, evolved from the Greek one, which itself developed from the Phoenician around 1000 BC. The Greeks modified the latter to read from left to right and added several extra vowel phonemes symbols. The Romans further modified the Greek, and this Latin alphabet was, after the Roman invasion of Britain, later adopted for English. Even the Greeks had names (alpha, beta, gamma, etc.,) which did not represent the phoneme that the symbol stood for. Likewise, the English alphabetic names for the symbols are simply words. Thus we have the words:

ay, bee, cee, dee, ee, eff, gee, aitch, eye, jay, kay, ell, em, en, oh, pea, queue, are, ess, tee, you, vee, double-you, ex, why, zee (or zed in British English).

Even the word alphabet comes from the Greek "alpha-beta."

However, if you feel compelled to teach a "sequential alphabet" to students, then teach it as a series of phonemes, namely:

/a/ as in /azure/, /b/ as in /bit/, /c/ as in /cat/, /d/ as in /dot/, /e/ as in /yellow/, /f/ as in /fit/, /g/ as in /get/, /h/ as in /hit/, /i/ as in /pink/, /j/ as in jet, /k/ as in /kit/, /l/ as in /lit/, /m/ as in /mum/, /n/ as in /nun/, /o/ as in /copper/, /p/ as in /pit/, /q/ as in /quit/, /r/ as in /roar/, /s/ as in /sit/, /t/ as in /tot/, /u/ as in /pumpkin/, /v/ as in /vat/, /w/ as in /wit/, /x/ as in /box/, /y/ as in /yes/, /z/ as in /zip/.*

(Of course, you do not have to say the sample words. For instructions on how to pronounce the phonemes in the English language correctly, see pages 20 -28 in the Grapheme Book on DISC 1)

Otherwise, wait until the Bannatyne Program has been completed, or until fourth grade, to teach the traditional alphabetic letter-names.

Be reassured that the Bannatyne Program reorganizes the phonemes and graphemes in a very logical order of introduction and presentation, one which is determined by their frequency of usage in words (from the Frances-Kucera list of English words and other listings) as well as school students. The sequential material in the Bannatyne Program also takes into account ease of phonetic articulation, simplicity of hand-printing and lack of visual ambiguity (e.g., b, d, p, q).

*Note that in one research study in a large Illinois school, a class of kindergarteners who were taught the above Bannatyne Program phoneme "alphabet" plus their corresponding color-coded graphemes from giant charts, were able to learn to read twice as fast in grade one as the other identical control classes who had been taught the traditional alphabet. (See more Research Study results in TESTIMONIALS AND STUDIES)

My child already knows how to recite the traditional alphabet, so can he (or she) now make successful use of the Bannatyne Program?

Certainly! No problem. Once your child starts in the Bannatyne Program just stop making any references to the alphabetic names of letters, and replace them with the phonemes in the Bannatyne Program which will be presented in the Workbooks in the correct sequence. If a student happens to use a traditional letter name do not fuss about it, but on the spot, simply ask him or her to articulate the correct phoneme for that grapheme (symbol), or teach it. Students, even older ones, will quickly become so accustomed to articulating the correct phonemes that their use of alphabetic letter names (even for spelling) will soon cease altogether.

But shouldn't many irregular common words in English be taught as sight words without using sounds?

The answer is "no" for several important reasons:

• English is a phonetic language, not a visual pictographic one (in which the pictorial designs are directly linked with the objects they represent, as in Chinese). In English the symbols (graphemes), even in an irregular word, represent sounds (phonemes) and it is impossible to get around that fact because research shows the brain is auditorially processing even the so-called "sight" words that teachers imagine are purely visual. In a perfect analogy, you might as well try to teach a child to sing a song without using any other vocalized musical notes--using nothing but their eyes and sheet music.
• Research shows that even in fast adult speed readers, the auditory-vocal areas of the cortex are firing rapidly, along with most of the other areas of the brain. It would seem from this and other research that there is no such thing as visual sequencing when reading, and therefore all sight methods of teaching reading are not doing what they purport to do. Any student who may seem to have learned to read using "sight words" has actually learned to read phonetically in spite of them. Therefore when a teacher "teaches" so-called "sight" words, the verbally competent students, who possess an efficient auditory/vocal-to-symbol brain, manage to "translate" those words into an imprecise phonetic structure in spite of the teacher's well-meaning technique. But even for those well-endowed students, "sight" words are the long way around to learning phonetic structure by extrapolation because there is a much easier, simple solution to irregular orthography. (See next question and answer.)
• However, students with less efficient auditory/vocal-to-visual (phoneme-to- grapheme) association aptitudes--who make up a third of the school population--will always experience "whole-word sight-look-and-say" methods of teaching reading and spelling as a great obstacle to learning, and not (as the teacher imagines) a panacea. These "sight" methods leave our handicapped and dyslexic students as inefficient readers and even worse spellers, and that is a fact.
• So-called "sight-methods" for teaching reading were used in the schools of many English-speaking countries for much of the twentieth century, and if they had worked well, our illiteracy and inadequate reader problem would have disappeared by now. This continuing low literacy situation calls for an in-depth re-examination of how we understand and teach reading, writing, spelling and language to our students. And that the results of that re-examination research has already been done--resulting in the construction of the Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program!

Then how is it possible for teachers to teach irregular words if "sight" words are ineffectual? How can the phoneme-to-grapheme orthography of English be regularized?

The Bannatyne Program regularizes all word orthography (grapheme/letter to phoneme/sound association), even in those so-called "irregular" words by utilizing several proven devices. These are:

• Color-coding the seventeen vowel sounds (phonemes) and their equivalent graphemes in English so that each sound (phoneme) is instantly recognizable as an equivalent grapheme and vice versa. (See: Grapheme Book when you purchase the Bannatyne Program)
• Putting a tiny asterisk vertically over the tops of the thirteen common silent letters in English.
• Putting tiny additions to the six consonant graphemes in English which have more than one phoneme associated with them, thus differentiating them visually.
• Never using any word or part of a word (including its phonemes and graphemes) until that word and its components have been thoroughly taught by the teacher in many essential formats (i.e., meanings, articulation, linking, blending, closing, tracing, hand-printing, reading lots of times, speed reading, chunking, frequent review and finally overlearning).
• Keeping absolute control, in the Bannatyne Program, over the optimal sequential step-by-step introduction of every phoneme, grapheme, word-part, word, word meanings, syntax, grammar, and comprehension process.

When the above methods are used there are no irregular words in the English language to trip students up, therefore students learn to read, write, spell, and cope with language skills smoothly and easily--even four- and five-year-olds who quickly learn the process.

But if the Bannatyne Program uses all these devices and methods, do students become dependent on them and then have problems transferring back to reading, spelling and writing traditional English?

There are several clear-cut answers to this question and all of the answers are, NO!

• First, after more than thirty years of widespread use of the Bannatyne Program with students of every type and age (including children, adults and students with a variety of handicaps) not one has ever been reported as having had a problem reading regular English orthography in their textbooks or other printed materials, or with reading and spelling after he or she has finished the Bannatyne Program. In fact, they all find it much easier to read, write and spell the regular English orthography.
• Second, the changes to the graphemes are very small and in no way alter the fundamental visual or tactile shape of the letter. In fact, there are far greater changes as students move from font to font in their regular school textbooks, and from variations of the same font such as italics, bold and capital letters. In regular school books and work situations they may have to read a wide variety of font shapes for the same grapheme, and these have far greater variation than those used in the Bannatyne Program.
• Third, in the Bannatyne Program the tiny changes to letter-shapes are phased out in the Program itself as the words are speed read, overlearned and chunked, and therefore when students are exposed to other English font formats they have no trouble with them whatsoever.
• Fourth, research shows that it is not the variations in the visual shapes of the letters (graphemes) that cause students not to be able to read and spell, but rather it is the irregular arbitrary association of several sounds (phonemes) with those shapes (graphemes) that is the root of the problem. Japanese students, even the handicapped dyslexic ones, find it relatively easy to learn to read and spell their language because the sound-to-symbol orthography of the modern Kana phonetic script is completely regular. And that is exactly what the Bannatyne Program does for English! (See the Grapheme Book on DISC 1 when you purchase the Bannatyne Program)

How does the Bannatyne Program handle words like "the" in which the vowel may be pronounced in alternative ways?

Well, the word the is introduced in the Pumpkin Color Section of the Galleon Workbook because the Pumpkin phoneme /e/ is the most frequent vowel articulation of the. But shortly afterwards, in the Cutter Workbook the Green Vowel Color Section is learned. Thus, from that point on, Teacher and students can articulate the (when they read it) as the or the. Therefore, as soon as the less frequent Color Section alternative pronunciation of any particular word is also learned, students can articulate the vowel in question either way. In over three decades of using the Bannatyne Program, we have found these alternative vowel pronunciations, which occur in a very few words, are such a minor matter that this kind of discussion arises very rarely with students.

Why does the Bannatyne Program use the Grapheme t which has a tiny curve or flick at the bottom, rather than a cross-shaped t ?

There are five excellent reasons for using a t with a tiny curve or flick at the base.

• The t with a tiny curve or flick at the base is the one the students are going to READ in almost any school book or story book they pick up or use in school or at home. We are TEACHING them to READ as well as write, so why not use the letter shape they will READ right from the outset. Even fonts without serifs (like this one) almost always use this t with a tiny curve or flick, not a straight cross.
• There is NO valid motor or kinesthetic reason for using a straight cross t rather than a t with a tiny curve or flick at the base. They are equally easy to make, even at three years of age, so let us go with the one they will READ.
• In the Galleon Workbook, the specially modified grapheme (letter-shape) for the t in the words ending in -tion (such as action, fraction, fiction) has a tiny circle or closed curl at the bottom of it to represent the first phoneme /sh/ in the word-end /-shun/. This tiny circle or curl on the modified grapheme is a natural continuation of the curve or flick at the lower tip of the grapheme t. If the t was a cross (by this time ingrained) the formation of the circle would not only be motorically awkward, but the shapes of the two graphemes would be less visually equivalent.
• In the Workbooks the capital grapheme T is a cross, but some small children (and also some mentally or motorically handicapped students) sometimes start above the top cross-stroke and this would make the upper and lower cases of t indistinguishable if the lower case were also a cross. The obvious lower curve or flick on the lower case t makes it easily distinguishable from the capital grapheme (even when the latter is mis-drawn). In the Bannatyne Program both the capital grapheme and the lowercase grapheme are in conformity with the universal fonts these students will be READING ever afterwards.
• The fifth reason for the curve or flick on the lower end of the lowercase t is that all these students will eventually be learning cursive writing and then the printed lower curve t will naturally migrate to the cursive t because the cursive curve is already in place.

Thus it can be seen that even such a tiny detail as this matter of a t with a curve or flick (versus cross t) has been thoroughly thought out in the Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program. Therefore do NOT change any details of the Bannatyne Program or you may be unwittingly undermining your student's progress. If you have questions, just ask me!

Why is overlearning emphasized in the Bannatyne Program?

Overlearning is the key to fast, fluent, accurate, automatic reading, spelling and writing. Fast, fluent, accurate, automatic reading, spelling and writing enables the student who has completed the Bannatyne Program to "forget" he or she is coding and decoding so that that student can concentrate only on communicated thoughts, on the content of what is being read or written, just as an adult would while reading a fascinating novel. The Bannatyne Program incorporates a wide variety of enjoyable methods and activities to make overlearning permanent. Most of these methods and activities, such as splitting and blending key words and speed reading, are not even recognized as overlearning by students or even, sometimes, teachers. There are dozens of implicit techniques in the Bannatyne Program that operate seamlessly and, in a manner of speaking, "invisibly." Just one example is the training of correct saccadic eye movements by almost eliminating long fixations, near-misses and over-corrections. (See: GLOSSARY)

The Bannatyne Reading Program is an excellent, tested reading 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