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Ask HN: How does one help a teenager teach himself how to read?

10 points by markessien ↗ HN
I live in Africa, and in many houses there are these "gateboys" who are typically teenage boys that came from some small village far away to the cities looking for work. Their jobs involve opening the gates for visitors, gardening, cleaning and so on. They have a lot of free time on their hand. And many of them are saving up with these jobs to be able to go back to school and learn to read.

With the power of the internet, surely there must be some kind of material that one can print out that can act as a self-learning course for a person to learn how to read. The boys may or may not know how to read the alphabet, but they certainly know how to read numbers (from their phones).

My ideal would be if one could print out some kind of book that the teens can use to figure out how to read, and just distribute it to them. What is the best approach to go about this?

5 comments

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sillysaurus2
Tangential question, but: can anyone here remember learning how to read?

I've never thought about it before, but... I don't remember at all what it was like to learn to read! There's a big blank spot in my head for kindergarten, and then I remember reading some spooky children's books in first grade, but I have no idea how I came to acquire that ability.

So does anyone remember how you picked up your ability to read? If so, which learning techniques were effective for you? Maybe there's a way to transfer those techniques into book form.

Although I wonder whether it's even possible to learn to read just by looking at squiggles on paper. At the very least, it seems like there would have to be text + images. But how do you print out a sequence of text + images which somehow teaches the reader the meaning of that text? There's so much to cover: the alphabet, then the individual words, then the meaning of particular word combinations...

It almost seems like going to school would be the most effective way for them to learn, because they'd be learning from someone and they'd be able to ask questions when they get frustrated.

t0
Most people that don't know how to read probably know how to pronounce almost every word, so they're just associating the letters to something they already know. That being said, I don't think anything on paper could really help, aside from a picture of an apple next to the word to just memorize.
keiferski
I can't help you with the specifics, but I do have a suggestion: look into how people learned how to read pre-mass literacy via the school system. Before 19XX, a sizable portion of people learning to read were adults. You might be able to glean some ideas from their experiences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

LarryMade2
I remember when learning how the read was getting down letter sounds then syllables. Then trying to picture the words as you sound them out.

I think for some of the beginning basics you need more than a book to translate the written into the appropriate sounds, etc. Once you can get a handle on that it get easier.

Another tool to employ is to get them to learn the most common words (i,e, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolch_Word_List ) that will help them trough most words in sentences...

waivej
How about "graphic novels". Perhaps pick some comic books young boys would read more than once. I've puzzled over some Dutch ones for years and heard of others using them to learn a language.