John Bald/language and literacy

Sara's first lesson, with updates.

Sara is 11 and has an assessment of dyslexia for which her parents paid £2000. Her main problem is in spelling, and this lesson aimed to show her how to spell using Slimmed Down Spelling. This technique combines phonics with other properties of letters, including groups of letters that cannot be read one letter at a time, extra letters, and “awkward” letters and groups, derived either from foreign languages, or  the result of shortcuts in speech. I did not asked to film the lesson, as Sara was very nervous at first, but some filmed examples are on this site, and I’m happy to demonstrate further pro bono. The lesson started at 5.30, after a school day, as it was the only time available that week. Sara’s mother sat on her left, and I on her right,  at right angles to her.

We started with Sara’s name, and agreed that it had one sound for each letter. I explained that, if we heard a sound we said a word carefully, we had to have a letter for it. This clearly works with Sara’s name, and is the basis of nearly all initial phonics schemes.

I then asked if Sara could spell table. She couldn’t, so I wrote it for her. Why did she think table was spelt with the l before the e? She didn’t know. I said the word carefully and slowly in French, and asked if she could hear the l before the e. She could. I then explained that we had been invaded by William the Conqueror around a thousand years ago, and that he did not speak English, but a kind of French. I embroidered the story a little, talking about William’s misdeeds, and getting across the idea that things tended to be done his way.

After a quick check that Sara could spell a simple three letter word – cat – I explained that sometimes single letters did not tell us all we needed to know in order to read a word, and that sometimes that has worked in groups. I asked to spell station. She wrote down sta   n. The letters she used were correct, but she did not know the tion group. I wrote tion on a piece of paper, asked her to look at it, then put my hand on it, and asked what the four letters were. She remembered it accurately. I then added tion to sta, asked Sara to look at it, then put my hand over it again, and asked her to spell the word while I wrote it. She got it right. Much praise, and mother clearly very pleased. Sara then wrote the word herself, accurately, but in poor handwriting which we will deal with another time.

I then explained that our brain works by making connections between cells, the fingers of our hands might touch, though of course a brain cell has many more connections. As we practise, specialist brain cells deposit a substance called myelin, which works a little like the insulation on a cable, and speed things up. As we learn more words with similar structures, they form a network in our brain, and each reinforces the others in the group. So, looking again at station, how much she spell nation? I covered station, and she wrote nation correctly. I extended the idea to situation, which has one sound for each letter, followed by the group. This took two attempts, but Sara wrote the word correctly, without copying it. One of the principles of this technique is that the learner does not copy, but holds information in their mind, and writes without looking at any prompt. If they do not get it right first time, I praise the parts that are right and draw attention to the part that needs to be improved. They try again. Each extension requires careful judgement, so that the child is challenged, but can succeed if they try.

The next stage is to explain that some words have an extra letter. This doesn’t represent a sound in itself, but usually changes the sound of another letter. I wrote mat, which Sara read, followed by mate, which she could not read. I explained the principle, in simple English, then wrote hat, followed by hate, both of which Sara read accurately. With an older pupil, or earlier in the day, I would probably have gone on to the softening effect if e, i and y after c and g (face, city, cycle, gentle, gin, energy), but at this stage I just wanted to introduce the idea, without overloading her. I did, though, explain that some extra letters show that the word comes from Greek. Asking Sara to spell chaos, she wrote caos. Very good - all of the letter sound correspondences were in place. Showed her the h, and explained why. Sara then wrote chaos without copying.

Finally, we returned to table and William. The language, I reminded her, was about 1000 years old, and if we were 1000 years old, we’d have a few wrinkles. But once we knew what the wrinkles were, we could use them. For example, we agreed that you only saw the same letter three times in a row in cartoon strips. Thinking about table, how would she spell cable? Correct. Did she like horses? Yes, she used to enjoy riding. Where did horses sleep? In a shed. (Served me right for asking the question in that way.) Did she know if the shed had a special name?  No. I explained that it was a stable, and like the other words. Sara wrote stable.

How do we spell was? Sara got it right. Why do we spell it like that, and not wos. I explained that the people that William defeated with Anglo-Saxons, that Saxony was a part of Germany, and that their language was a lot like German. I pronounced it in a Germanic way, and we worked on water, and warm (a word completely sharing spelling and meaning with German), and we noticed that the a in these spellings followed a w. This let us build up a group.

Did Sara think she was well-behaved? Yes. Did that mean she was perfectly behaved all of the time, some of the time or nearly all the time? We settled on nearly all. Letters, I said, were a bit like that. They do as we expect most of the time, but we need to be ready for when they don’t. We use what the letters tell us, but don’t believe they tell us everything. Some things we need to know.

Oh, and was Sara learning a language? No, as she was dyslexic. I pointed out that several of the words we’d been working on were French – nearly every word in tion is shared, though not always with exactly the same meaning – and we practised saying the words we’d worked on in French. Sara adapted her pronunciation remarkably easily. Did she feel she’d learned something this afternoon? Yes. Did she feel she would learn a lot more with me? Yes. We’ll meet again next week, and perhaps do a little more French. Sara and her mother were laughing and joking as they walked home. Apart from two tries at situation, this severely dyslexic girl had got everthing I’d taught her right at the first attempt.This is the first lesson. I'll post on progress next week. 

Update 1. Sara's second lesson had to be postponed because of a birthday party. However, her mother sent me a message saying she had "remembered all I'd taught her, and found it very helpful. Further updates will follow. 

Teacher training and the teaching of reading - errors, sociology and good intentions.

Mylast article (below) outlined errors made by successive governments in  their handling of the teaching of reading. This one will deal with the far greater errors of teacher trainers and academics. These are rooted in good intentions. Across the world, public education does not ensure that everyone learns to read and write fluently and well. With rare exceptions, languages are complicated by issues such as complex grammatical rules (German), large numbers of silent letters (French) and, in English, by the fact that there is not a direct and consistent correspondence between every letter and every sound, so that trying to sound out words, one letter at a time, will often fail. As a result, English-speaking countries have always had a long tail of weak readers in international comparisons. Something needed to be done. But what?

The first step was to try to determine what we actually do as we read, and how we think. During the sixties, evidence of eye movements was confined to the large jumps our eyes make as we read down a page, while research on memory showed that we could not hold more than 6 or 7 items in working memory at a time. Taken together, these suggested that we could not hold in our mind all of the letters in longer words, and that we were not paying attention to every detail of print as we read. That led to the fallacy of reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game”, and to Frank Smith’s proposition that “We learn to read by reading”. Smith’s brilliant, hilarious presentations at conferences won wide acceptance for the theory in teacher training colleges and university departments of education. Rebranded, it became the basis of Reading Recovery’s “multicue” theory and of Labour’s Searchlights.

Modern technology, also used by the military to direct smart bombs, shows that we track not only every word, but the form of every letter as we read. The second error, on the use of memory, is caused by not taking account of the grouping of letters into syllables. Many words have more than seven or eight letters but almost none have more than that number of syllables. The final flaw in the theory was the role of context in identifying the meaning of a word. A series of studies in the 80s, and a doctoral thesis by Morag MacMartin, showed that context and pictures were more likely to mislead than help, as children were likely to misread subsequent words to try to make them fit what they had gleaned from the context.

Having written about these battles for the Times Educational Supplement throughout the eighties, I had thought the issue was settled, but it is not, and the issue is complex. Some academics and teacher trainers use phonics as an Aunt Sally, imposed by governments, and what do governments know? Others, like Professor Dominic Wyse in his contributions to a recent paper publicised by our friends at The Guardian, say that the neglect of phonics has been a weakness, but that they need to be balanced by other methods. These “other methods”, though, do not involve additional teaching of the use of the alphabet in English, which I’ve described in previous postings and in my books – but elements of guessing, which don’t work, as there are too many possibilities in a writer’s choice of words, or in links between texts and pictures, for them to be relied on.

Phonics, though, are only a small part of the argument. Most of the academics involved are more interested in sociology than in reading. Professor Bradbury’s only published paper on phonics does not consider its impact on reading skills, but attacks it as leading teachers to group pupils by their abilities, an approach that the Director of the Education Endowment Foundation considers “symbolically violent”. Professor Wyse has been a primary teacher. His doctorate, The Teaching of English:Research Evidence and government policy argues that policy has been insufficiently supported by research evidence, but does not involve direct research on the teaching of reading. . Dr Mary Bousted, of the National Education Union, wrote her thesis on “The Ideology of English teaching”. Their knowledge and understanding of reading research is limited, and they apply arbitrary selection criteria. For example, they cite an important paper by the Australian, Anne Castles and UK colleagues, but not its key point on the role of phonics in teaching children the principles of alphabetic writing. There is no mention of the late Professor Katharine Perera’s discoveries of the role of accurate reading of words in the development of phrasing, or of the current findings of brain research, notably from Stanislas Dehaene.

Cherry-picking, or a reflection of the authors’ limited knowledge? Perhaps a little of both. In either event, their reliance on a “meta-analysis” of a large number of studies, some of which were not even carried out in English, is grasping at straws. Professor Wyse has long championed randomised controlled trials as the only way of providing reliable evidence, so it is fair to ask why he has chosen to rely on studies from other countries, rather than carry out any on his own approach. The fallacy of over-reliance on such studies is demonstrated by this one, carried out by two of their main advocates, and one of the worst-ever studies in the field of literacy. The academic critics of researchers such as Professors Shona Johnstone and Anne Castles need to up their game or find other work to do.

The government’s sharp response to this paper is fully justified. Phonics has improved matters, and there is a second wind that helps children to read the generally regular words derived from Latin and Greek that they will meet in secondary school. My reservations about “whole phonics”, and the neglect of alphabetic knowledge not directly related to current speech, remain. I continue to demonstrate that filling this gap is the key to solving many serious literacy problems. What we do not need is a return of Searchlights, multicue systems, and other guesswork under the banner of balance. We guess when we don’t know. It doesn’t work. To become literate, children need to know.

J - an amazing turnround. More will follow.

All of my teaching and remote CPD is now pro bono. Please get in touch if I can help.

I’m the Y6 teacher of J and am amazed at the turnaround we have seen since working with John Bald and using his expertise/method. My LSA has taken on board this concept too and together, reading with him every day, we are seeing more and more progress and more confidence  He has changed the way he thinks. At the start of the year I didn’t think this was possible. I’d encourage anyone to try it and read the article. Thank you, John 

and from J's mother

Good morning John,

J  is really starting to enjoy reading. He’s seems to be coming home wanting to do homework and reading more. We are so pleased with him. We thank you for all your help.

and father

It's an emotional tear that I'm wiping away now. 

Language Show Live - Alternatives to disapplication for pupils with SEND - Success and enjoyment in learning languages.

Wonderful to have 330 people sign up for this webinar, and so many positive comments.  

Download Success and Enjoyment in Language Learning for pupils with SEND. Languages Show 2021

Reading, Dyslexia and Special Educational Needs.

The influence of major Education Secretaries can be measured in decades.

Butler’s 1944 Act lasted two, Crosland’s secondary modern comprehensives, four. Michael Gove’s reforms are into their second, despite the early need to accommodate Liberal Democrats, and the major error of listening to Dominic Cummings. Michaela and Katharine Birbalsingh shine brightly, but Nadhim Zahawi and his new team have plenty to do.

Zahawi made a brilliant start at our Conference. Born in Saddam’s Baghdad, arriving in Britain with no English, he learns to read – key point – graduates in engineering from UCL, makes a fortune from YouGov, and becomes a member of Her Majesty’s Government. No latter-day Dick Whittington, though. Like another noted Conservative, he didn’t turn. Zahawi’s story is one of single-minded determination and staying power, backed by intellect.

It was a nice touch to call for a round of applause for Oxford University’s achievements in vaccination. But Zahawi and the new skills minister, Alex Burghardt, are also intent on reviving Further Education and apprenticeships as an alternative route to qualification. I recently explained the benefits of this – including Btech – to one of my students in the care sector – and expanding degree apprenticeships is the key improving the supply of nurses. A review of Btech is a good idea – taking a scythe to it is not.  At the heart of this change is the final recognition that Blair’s huge expansion of universities has been a disaster both for the students saddled with permanent debt, and for the Treasury, for which loans have become a money pit. The argument that apprenticeships are for “other people’s children” does not diminish enthusiasm for them in Germany, whose economy is both more successful, and more strictly regulated, than ours.

Work is also needed on the continuing review into special needs, and the major changes in reading teaching brought in under Nick Gibb.

Since Baroness Warnock’s review of special educational needs provision, the education of these children has become focused almost exclusively on dealing with severe behavioural problems, with next to no attention to the teaching of reading. The waste of human potential has been enormous, and half-hearted attempts in the last years of the Labour governments to redress the balance by means of private tuition were held back by yet another series of authoritarian guidelines to tutors, written by apparatchiks who knew little or nothing about the work. This error was repeated at the height of the pandemic by recruiting unqualified and inexperienced companies to organise tuition.

The key to progress is to introduce rigorous monitoring of all initiatives in terms of their impact on pupils’ progress, rather than the self-advertisement of their proponents. We have not had a nationally standardised test of reading since our opponents hijacked the membership of Margaret Thatcher’s commission on falling reading test scores, and decided that the best solution was to abolish the test. NS6, as it was, would require modest alterations to be returned to service, and would give us a clear idea both of where we stand nationally, and of the real standing of individual pupils. It would also give decisive evidence on the ability of the Reading Recovery programme, which refuses to include phonics, to deliver long-term progress.

The phonics programme itself is half-finished. The key evidence in its favour, the research in Clackmannanshire that showed benefits in word recognition and spelling from initial phonics teaching five years later, has since been reinforced by work showing that this was essential to orient children towards using information from print to read (the “alphabetic principle”) rather than guessing. This information does not, however, tell us all we need to know, as the same letter or group of letters can indicate different sounds. One of my pupils, fourteen and assessed as dyslexic, has become engrossed in the diary of Anne Frank. She was stumped last week by “whitish”, which phonics would not help her distinguish from “British”. To read it, we had to go back to “white”. But it was knowledge of the language beyond phonics that solved the problem.

This little example supports the French Professor Stanislas Dehaene’s theory that we learn by building up ideas based on our experience, and modify them when something doesn’t fit. There could not be a more accurate picture of the process of learning to read in English – or indeed in French, which has four times as many silent letters as English, and uses them to tie things in grammatically. My teaching of reading and spelling, on which I based my application for fellowship of the Chartered College of Teaching, makes these variations clear to children and adults in plain English. It was reported in the Times Educational Supplement 25 years ago, and repeated this morning, pro bono, with an 11 year old non-reader, with his deputy headteacher watching. It changes lives. It deserves serious attention as part of the special needs review.

This article first appeared on Conservative Home.

Success and Enjoyment in Language Learning for Pupils with SEND.

Here is the ppt from my presentation yesterday at the National Modern Languages Conference for Inside Government. Happy to discuss further pro bono.

Download Success and Enjoyment in Language Learning for pupils with SEND.

 

Shaywitz Why some people who have overcome dyslexia continue to read slowly.

We like to think that information travels the world at the speed of light, but this is not the case with books. It took a personal visit and invitation by Dame Rachel De Sousa to make E.D. Hirsch’s work, originally in book form, widely known in the UK. Some key texts, notably Nobel laureate Eric Kandel’s In Search of Memory, are still little known here.

The latest example I’ve met is Dr Sally Shaywitz’ Overcoming Dyslexia, based on the work of the Yale Centre for the Study of Learning and Attention.

Yale pioneered the use of MRI scanning, and the evidence in Chapter 6 of this book explains why some highly intelligent people who have overcome dyslexia still read slowly – they rely on frontal areas of the brain, which are used for decoding, rather than on what Dr Shaywitz terms the “word form area”, a form of long-term memory, in which information about specific words – eg the difference between should and shoulder – is stored, allowing us to read words without working them out from scratch. Decoding, which is based on phonics, is the key to the early stages of learning to read. The word form area stores the knowledge of variations that enables us to build on this and develop fluent reading in English.

 

B and D confusion. Using speech to clarify the problem.

In the early twentieth century, Annie Sullivan (Helen Keller's teacher) and Grace Fernald discovered the benefit of using movement to reinforce learners' understanding and use of letters for communication. Writing "d" as an extension of "a", for example, made it less easily confused with "b" than traditional printing, which starts both letters at the top, and leaves a decision to be made at the bottom of the first stroke - does the ball go to the left, or the right? With my current fourteen year old, this was not enough. She did not make errors in reading, but would confuse the letters when writing, even after practice.

The solution lay further back, in the production of the sounds "b" and "d" in speech. If we say "dad", we can feel our tongue touch our top palate, just above the teeth, and our lips don't touch. When we say "boy", we press our lips together to release the consonant (keeping our tongue low, though this is incidental to the teaching point). So, saying the word we want to spell gives us a direct and reliable indication of which letter to use. Lips touch - b. Tongue touches roof of the mouth - d. So far, it is working.

International Case Studies of Dyslexia Peggy L. Anderson and Regine Meier-Hedde.

This book seeks to restore the systematic case study approach to dyslexia, the beginnings of which the authors trace to Grace Fernald, whose Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects (McGraw-Hill, 1943) was the pioneering text on multisensory teaching, and has been misrepresented and neglected to the point that it was not even considered as part of the recent English review of dyslexia. Fernald’s work was recommended to me by the late Dr Margaret Peters of Cambridge University, and remains an inspiration. I have two copies, one from my review of the book in 1981 for the Times Educational Supplement, and one I rescued from the skip at Cambridge Education Department’s library. Old texts, a librarian explained, were being weeded, and Dr Peters had died. You might find a copy on Bookfinder.com, but don't buy the reprint, which does not have the case studies.

The 18 case studies here come from virtually every developed country in the world,  except, for some reason, the UK and are chosen by the  “single criterion of dyslexia diagnosis as verified by the researcher from that particular country.”  The studies are more limited than Fernald’s, as they are based on interviews with parents and children and do not go into detail on teaching techniques – in so many languages, this would have taken a whole series of books. They demonstrate that, irrespective of the writing system used,  there are people the world over who, in spite of sound intelligence, struggle with reading  for no visible reason, and identify a common strand in the  experience of children with dyslexia, who are often made to feel that those who could help have instead turned their backs on them. Children’s and parents’ voices come through strongly.

 Most have to wait a long time for their difficulties to be recognised and treated, but there are good as well as bad points in individual systems. Felix in France is assessed orally and not in writing. This reflects a long tradition of oral assessment in France, which is not a soft option.  Hassan in Egypt is learning English, Arabic and French at the same time. His mother reads to him for 28 hours  a week to help him study, and he has extra oral explanation from teachers at breaktimes.  All of the pupils have problems with homework, which is much heavier in most countries than in the UK.

There are some familiar themes  - João from Brazil has  recurring bouts of ear infections. Most of the children have parents or relatives with similar problems.  They tend to work slowly, and are punished for it  –  Felix is not allowed out to play, and Christian in Germany is called stupid in front of his faster classmates, who are praised. Anxiety is universal – Christian – If  I mess up first grade, I will mess up my whole life – also depression. Christian’s slowness reflects Uta Frith’s finding of the effects of dyslexia in Austrian pupils – they could read, as the language is very regular, but excruciatingly slowly.  Christian’s salvation also strikes a chord –  his former clinical therapist explains to the school board that he was participating in a international study, in which his lack of progress would be reported.  Lo and behold, an immediate and comprehensive individualised remedial programme.

Insights abound. Hassan understands better than Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman that words matter - …if I was trying to read I wound up skipping over a hard word and nothing made sense after that. And a study by Mousa, 2006 shows children  learning Arabic and English experiencing more difficulties than children just learning Arabic. 

I don’t pretend to have read all 18 studies yet, let alone the copious references to research and teaching techniques. A pity that Fernald’s own work is not described in more detail, but this is still a book I will return to with pleasure and interest, despite its hefty price tag.

 

The demise of Dyslexia Action/The Dyslexia Institute.

In April last year,  Dyslexia Action went into administration. Formerly the Dyslexia Institute, this was the largest provider of assessments, teaching and training in its field, with centres across the country. At its peak, it had its own diploma qualification,  royal patronage,  an annual conference  that attracted hundreds of teachers,  and a clientele of thousands of children.  In the year it closed, it still had an income of £6.4m.   The organisation's passing went largely unreported,  but leaves a big gap in provision, and raises questions about what dyslexia is, what should be provided to children and adults who are assessed as dyslexic, and who should pay for it.

I was very critical of the set-up Dyslexia Action exemplified.    Although many good people were involved in it, the system was a racket - anyone with any kind of weakness in reading or spelling could pay £5-600 for an assessment, based on simplistic tests that were protected behind  a veil of confidentiality, and provided a  very easy morning's work for a psychologist. Reports, like the tests, were usually formulaic, and followed by a standard set of recommendations that usually involved having someone learn to read all over again, beginning with three-letter words.  The memory tests, usually limited to recalling sequences of recited numbers, forwards or backwards, were a particular weakness, bearing no relationship to the way we use memory in reading and spelling, and very easily gamed. Reports, moreover, very rarely made an outright statement that a person was, or was not dyslexic - they usually hid  behind the formula that results were "consistent with" such a finding. Whatever else they might be consistent with was left to the imagination.

The incentive for gaming was extra time in examinations, and assessments from private schools far outweighed those from state schools, for the simple reason that parents could afford them. The psychologists themselves were in a very unusual professional position. If we go to a medical consultant, we expect diagnosis to be followed by treatment. A lawyer follows an opinion with action, including arguing the case in court. The psychologist provided none of these follow-up services, referring clients to teachers, less well-paid and with fewer qualifications than the psychologist, who actually did the work. It is perhaps unsurprising that local authorities systematically ignored their legal obligation to take account of assessments provided by parents, but they had no better alternative. "Support" in schools was usually provided by untrained assistants, whose quality was a matter of chance. At worst, the assistant would do the work for the pupil, who gained no benefit at all. This remains the case. My advice to parents seeking help from local authorities on  dyslexia is not to bother, as it would probably  be worse than useless.

So what would a better system look like?  First, teaching in schools needs to be based on accurate information on the patterns and history of English spelling,  the range and nature of learning difficulties, and the way the brain works as we learn.

The computerisation of the Oxford English Dictionary has provided new access to the history of the language, and allows us to track the introduction of variations from the phonically regular Anglo-Saxon of a thousand years ago. These variations, the bulk of them from French, have been grafted onto the phonic roots of the language over centuries, and it is not enough simply to describe them as "sight words" that children are supposed to learn without understanding them.  Many can do this, but for those who can't, they are a brick wall as far as reading and spelling are concerned. The solution is to knock a hole in the wall by means of clear explanation, in terms appropriate to the age of the person learning, and then to practise.

Next, we need to stop attaching the term  dyslexia" to every problem with reading and spelling.  Evidence of differences in brain activity among people assessed as dyslexic suggests that around 1.5% of the population are affected, rather than the 10% estimate that is sometimes derived from responses to checklists. A slightly larger proportion of people find reading very uncomfortable because of sensitivity to light, particularly  fluorescent light. Some of its effects are similar to those of dyslexia, and  The British Institute of Optometry has a £60 screening kit for this that is easy to use in schools.  Finally, teachers of children who find spelling difficult need to look at their work, and ask the simple questions, "What is it in this child's thinking that is preventing them from achieving as they would like to?" and "How do I help them adjust their thinking so that they can do so.

The case of a sixteen year old recently referred to me illustrates the benefits of this approach.  She was highly intelligent, and achieving A* in all of her schoolwork except English, where she was borderline C, because of frequent errors. Her selective private school had taken the usual step of going back once again to three-letter words, an approach that she found insulting. Two twenty-minute lessons by telephone were enough to explain spelling to her and to consolidate it. She obtained A* in English and English Literature three months later and is now a medical student.  The secret, if that is the word, was to teach her what she needed to learn, and not to drive her through a programme. Her mother's comment is here  www.johnbald.typepad.com.

Alas, the conflict between putting people through systems and what I will call bespoke teaching, has been with us since the earliest work on reading difficulties. After Annie Sullivan was inspired to trace "water" on the hand of the young Helen Keller as she held it under the pump, Grace Fernald used tracing as one of a range of techniques to teach a group of five people with serious reading and spelling problems, publishing the results in 1921. This was bespoke teaching, and a key element was that the students chose the words they wanted to learn. Just four years later, a group of psychologists led by Dr Samuel Orton took the tracing idea and used it as the basis of a graduated system in which one stage had to be mastered before the next was attempted. This was the first of many examples of such thinking, and the programmes of the Dyslexia Institute/Dyslexia Action were in this tradition. They generate progress - usually slow progress - but at the expense of time-consuming grind, frustration and misery. Grace Fernald's alternative, based on focussing the teacher's attention on the person in front of them and not on a formula, is our best hope of cutting dyslexia down to size, and dealing with it.

Would we, could we, should we? From a Guardian comments discussion with Michael Rosen.

This revolved around how to teach a child to read would.  Michael used context with his children - read on and see if that gets you to the word. My reply was that this worked sometimes, but depended on being able to read the context, which a weak reader was less likely to be able to do. I added that if I did use this approach, I would explain the connection between would, could and should, so as to begin to build a mental network.

But what was the connection? Would and should,  have a Germanic origin containing an l, which is retained in the modern equivalents, wollen and sollen. Could is different - the squire in Chaucer's Prologue coude do several things, with no l in sight. The OED tells us that, around 1525, its spelling was changed to match that of would and should, an arbitrary decision, but which at least gives us a group of three words rather than two, and so makes the whole easier to learn, once it is explained. Very easy to reinforce with all sorts of games for adults and children.