Again, why literacy?
From our write-a-thon on International Literacy Day, I ended up writing this: a personal memoir about undiagnosed dyslexia. This is just an excerpt; perhaps it resonates with you? If so I will share the rest. To me, International Literacy Day means dismantling barriers to learning how to read and to expanding how we think about literacy especially for children who face the additional challenge of learning differences.
I struggled with learning how to read as a child. I was born in Hong Kong, China in the 1970s (a British colony at that time), to a British mother and Swiss father. We spoke English at home. For me it was those years when children typically gain a foothold in reading and writing skills. Later we also lived in Japan, where I attended elementary school at one of the few International Schools in Tokyo. At that time I don't believe any of my teachers knew much about dyslexia, or how to identify it, or how to help a child with any learning difference. I remember that despite this, there was also a lot fresh discussion about the concept of dyslexia. Most parents were petrified that their elementary school student might receive the label “dyslexic”. There was also a narrative that if a child was not reading the words backwards then she was probably not dyslexic. So I was probably not dyslexic, according to my parents. My father proposed that my slowness in learning to read was because I grew up seeing lots of signs in Chinese and Japaneses, rather than “roman letters”. My development, he surmised years later, had simply slowed down, and according to his recollection, I had quickly recovered.
Looking back on those years, two exposures may have helped with remediation of my reading “slowness”; these were not formal interventions. First, my mom, who had tested into a coveted grammar school in Northern Wales by age eleven, had always encouraged me to sound things out. She had a strong sense of pronunciation and an even stronger feel for accents. Accents in the UK were a person's social fingerprint. With a spoken sentence you could “place” someone easily, knowing if their accent was posh, or not-so-posh. In other words your accent would give everything away, the town where you grew up, your economic class, your educational attainment. My mother had bettered herself by securing a place in that regional grammar school. Perhaps it was there that her accent became more neutral, less traceable, her annunciation clearer and tone sharper.
When we were kids my mother could imitate any accent on the planet, she could disguise her voice, and parrot celebrities. She had us in stitches with these voices. Although not formally trained in phonics or linguistics, my mother was a true savant when it came to spelling. She could guess the etymology of words. I often wondered how she could spell anything thrown her way. Her trick had something to do with knowing how certain words came from “old English” or were borrowed from "German", "Latin" or “French”. She knew somehow that vowels would sound different in English but were following rules in their origin language.
My mother tried to teach me how to spell. She told me how to look out for certain blended vowel sounds. Despite her efforts, it was the vowels, especially when paired, that continued to baffle me. Yet, one of my fondest memories is how she taught me to spell the word Wednesday. I can still hear her saying it now: “WED–NES– DAY... the day you marry”, which had nothing to do with the word’s origin or its meaning, but it made me giggle. Her over annunciated pronunciation of the syllables didn’t sound anything like Wednesday. But I could hear her repeating it in in a sing-song manner in my mind and it was that, rather than a rule, which actually helped me remember how to spell Wednesday correctly on a spelling quiz, which I didn't totally bomb.
A second thing that must have helped— was listening to books on record—what we now call audiobooks. I had a children’s record player, made in Japan. I still dig it up every now and then. It has a bright red cover, a turntable, a built in speaker, and a plugin microphone. Although built as a toy meant for kids, it was heavy and serious. It still works. It has outlasted every stereo system and smart speaker I have ever owned. In the late seventies in Tokyo, that record player was my lifeline.
Someone in the English speaking community, perhaps an American expat who had left Tokyo, gifted me their stack of children’s records. Many were English language books or radio plays on record, with famous narrators, and music accompaniment. They were the popular stories of that era, Disney’s Black Beauty, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Peter Pan, and Mary Poppins. Soon I had these audiobooks memorized. Later, I could "hear" the story play back in my mind, and unlike spelling, I could recall every detail, the story’s twists and turns, songs, the characters' accents. The records slipped neatly into their large album covers which on one side opened up like a giant storybook featuring illustrations and song lyrics. I spent hours staring at these whilst listening to the records. At that time this was the only way I could "read" stories.
In that same period, I sensed that I had terribly frustrated my teachers and parents with my slowness in learning how to read. I knew I had disappointed them by lacking a calm, flowing and competent reading voice. Due to my shame around how I stumbled through reading, butchering sentences and mispronouncing words, I learned to keep a low profile and avoid attention. This was my skill that I carefully honed and then mastered. I would set my gaze lower, avoid eye contact, and imagine myself shrinking into a Tinker Bell sized pixie. Often, I would simply slip out of the classroom to use the bathroom when it was close to my turn to read. I was excellent at avoiding getting called on to read out loud, or participate in any activity related to books, despite my absolute love of stories.