Bannatyne Reading Program -- LITERACY VOLUNTEERS AND CENTERS AND ADULT LEARNERS

Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program

Third Edition

LITERACY VOLUNTEERS AND CENTERS

and

ADULT LEARNERS

A Community College in California used the Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program very successfully for many years as a special literacy program for adult students, almost all of whom had considerable difficulty learning to read during their childhood. While this Community College adult literacy education program was in effect, many, many adult students learned to read, write and spell competently.

Many adult and teenage dyslexic students and other learning disabled students have learned to read, write and spell by means of the Bannatyne Program. One important valuable characteristic (among dozens of others) is that the Program is age-neutral. The themes and content of the dozens of Stories and other Activities were deliberately selected to appeal to students from kindergarten to adulthood, and this age-neutral appeal has been validated in practice for over 25 years. For example, the Story of a young King Arthur pulling the Sword Excalibur from the stone appeals to everyone from age five to age seventy! Similarly, everyone enjoys the Story of the Dolphins and the Sharks. Humor is also a part of some Stories and of all the Cartoons.

In the Stories and in other prose contexts, the Bannatyne Program never uses any phoneme (sound) or grapheme (letter-shape), word or word part, spelling or pronunciation, until each has been thoroughly taught by the teacher or tutor. This fact means that students of all ages experience an enjoyable "right and right again" positive reinforcement, one which comes from constant success. In other words, inefficient trial and error learning has been virtually eliminated in this Program. Also, because the orthography (sound-to-symbol correspondence) of English has been completely regularized in the Bannatyne Program, students are not confronted with all the ambiguities, mirror images, reversals and other irregularities that exist in all the usual, traditional methods of teaching reading, writing and spelling.

One spatially intelligent, bilingual dyslexic 18-year-old I personally tutored for two hours per week using only the Bannatyne Program went from second grade to an eighth grade reading level in 18 months and then passed his High School Diploma which enabled him to enter the local Community College. Prorated, this means that this particular student progressed 6 grade levels in two school years (of nine months each). Other adults taught at our Center also progressed rapidly.

Jennifer is another adult dyslexic student in her thirties who enjoyed the Bannatyne Program. She was delighted with her success because she said it had transformed her life in so many ways. For example, she was no longer embarrassed to use her checkbook because she was able to spell and write certain numbers (dollars) correctly. She also recounted how pleased she was when she spontaneously read the word "Ceramic" on a shop she had often passed. She was able to read the word "Ceramic" because she had already learned the soft "c" phoneme (Cutter Workbook 7, Blue Section) and the "-ic" word-ending (Galleon Workbook 6, Azure Section).

Our oldest student was a participant in an Urban League literacy project. She was 72 and at the first meeting she announced, "I never went to school, and I just want to learn to read before I die." She was successfully progressing through the Jewels Series Workbooks until, unfortunately, the Federal Government withdrew much educational funding and the project was dropped.

The Bannatyne Program also teaches how the English language works so that students soon gain a mastery and command over its structure. As one example, syntax is taught from the first Workbooks, so that even young students quickly understand that rearranging the words in a sentence gives it a different meaning, or may even produce a question. Thus the words in the sentence, Jim has a job on a jet, can become the question, Has Jim a job on a jet? In the Bannatyne Program many other language structures and principles are taught in a seamless, easy-to-understand way. Comprehension for depth of meaning is also learned and mastered by students, in terms of recall, inference, induction and deduction. The 13 very comprehensive Step-by-Step Teacher Guides make the Bannatyne Program very simple to use with students of all ages.

Any literacy center teacher or tutor who uses the Bannatyne Reading, Writing, Spelling and Language Program with their students will be delighted with its ease of use, its comprehensive integrated content, and the rate of progress made by students of all kinds and ages.

Please read all the other pages on this Website in order to get a more complete picture of the eighty-eight-plus techniques and other valuable methods that are seamlessly built into this integrated, interlaced reading, writing, spelling and language program.

The Bannatyne Reading Program is a comprehensive, integrated reading program, writing program, spelling program, language program, and reading 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. It is especially valuable for literacy action programs of all kinds and it works well with students of all ages. In some Commonwealth countries the program may be referred to as: Bannatyne Programme, or Bannatyne Reading Programme.