How is TNLP™ New and Different?
Katherine Beauchamp, July 2024
1. The New Literacy Programme™ (TNLP) is for Learners of any age, stage or background, for use in many settings, guided by Helpers from diverse backgrounds, not only trained teachers.
2. Our Programme recognises the Learner as self-determining. We offer Learners wide choice in TNLP™ materials, activities and reading matter.
3. For Learners overwhelmed by earlier literacy teaching, we use a strengths-based approach, so they can start their learning journey afresh.
4. Rote learning and memorising have no place on TNLP. Helpers learn a modified Socratic inquiry technique and the use of games to help Learners answer questions of interest to them. Learners tend to become independent early on.
5. Speech sounds come first in conquering English language and reading. Thorough speech sound awareness must be developed first. Our unique Speech Sounds Suite does this through games and activities.
6. Through a friendly conversation with each Learner, we gauge where they should start and the minimum amount to buy. We don't do clinical testing. Learners can choose to be tested elsewhere.
7. Many Learners get the hang of English early on, often by Step 3 of our 8 steps, and want to go out and show off their new skills. We don't try to hold onto them.
8. All classes are as multi-sensory and outdoor as possible, full of action, creativity, connection and kindness. Screen-based learning is absent or minimal and age appropriate, per the applicable science.
9. Learners determine their own comfortable learning pace. Any, who can read a TNLP manual, could likely self-teach. Learners can pair, group with peers, work with a Helper or any combination of these. They may also become Helpers, a rewarding job.
10. TNLP has many more finely graded learning materials than any programme we’re aware of.
11. TNLP has more customised reading materials than other systems we know of (approaching one million words).
12. Each class builds on the last. Continuous voluntary self-assessment is inbuilt. Graduation is on scoring 100 percent on a class or Step and feeling ready to graduate.
How English Works: Full Disclosure
Our R & D journey showed that English was not a problem.
It, simply, has never been understood or explained well enough.
English has the most words of any language. Now it also has the most users.
It’s compact, allowing users to say more with less.
This is because groups of words, single words and parts of words have multiple meanings, conceptual and structural.
It works if you know the rules, if you have the codes.
Demand for English is rapidly escalating.
There are countless English teaching schools, styles and methods on offer across the world.
The industry's compound annual growth rate is estimated at 16.2%. The forecast market value by 2030 is USD $70.7 billion. Money is sloshing around.
Results? Not so much.
We studied English language and literacy teaching across two decades.
Our emphasis was on accessibility for all and results, in reasonable time frames.
After all, language and literacy are human rights.
The ability to communicate is essential for all aspects of living, especially obtaining an education.
Education largely determines cultures - of families, neighbourhoods, societies, nations and humankind.
Intelligent people recognise that literacy and education for all can only be of benefit to all.
Elites for a long time long monopolised English, especially its written form.
They saw no benefit in setting down its workings so everyone could take part.
We found that analysis of English by scholars and academics has been overspecialised, siloed, not reaching teacher trainers or teachers in classrooms.
We found trainers and teachers ill-equipped, under huge pressure, unable to take in or accommodate the reality of Learners, to discover how they learn.
Yet this is key to successful learning.
English language teaching is now suffering because of
1. Pressure of escalating demand and too few Helpers
2. Confusion about the fundamental building blocks of English
3. Lack of knowledge about the order in which to teach its different parts to different Learners
4. The legacy of 75 years of misguided teaching.
The English language has begun to break down under the strain of misuse.
To meet the demand for English and to protect the language, we now need
1. Clearer understanding of how English works
2. Better teaching method
3 To equip and enable many more Helpers, not just teachers
4. Knowledge of the right order in which to present the different parts of English to different Learners.
5. Accurate Learner-friendly materials
We found the English spelling system is not understood or explained well enough for Learners or Helpers.
Learners can't grasp whole language and its grammatical forms when they are constantly tripping up over the construction of individual words.
Some appear to grasp whole sentences and texts, but testing shows they are struggling, or if not, it is too often because of expensive outside tutoring.
What about all the people who can't have that?
Recently, a more analytical approach to teaching English began to regain favour.
It shows how the sounds of English are represented by some English spellings.
This is a phonics (speech sounds) approach.
Before this, across about 75 years, many Learners were mostly not shown how words are built.
They had to 'get' them from clues in surrounding text, ‘because everything is so relational’.
Clues included
1. Comparing the target word with outlines of other words (assuming Learners know the words and the words are relevant)
2. Consulting surrounding text (assuming Learners understand it)
3.Trying to deduce meaning from nearby illustrations (if there are any and they are relevant)
The results prove the worth of this approach. Generations of guessing greatly hindered the Learners subjected to it but also hollowed out the skills and morale of teachers.
Results from the re-emerging phonetic approach are proving its worth.
'The Science of Reading' is a buzz term currently.
The New Literacy Programme™ is, in part, a contribution to this emerging movement.
But just because phonics is back in vogue, it doesn’t mean it’s well enough understood or taught.
Our study found that it isn't.
It's still incomplete and even incorrect in significant ways.
But the good news is that there is considerable scope for much faster, better learning outcomes once these impediments are removed.
How words are said and encoded into writing depends on understanding the key terms involved in that process.
Yet we found key words such as ‘speech sound’, ‘vowel’, ‘spelling’, and ‘letter’, and many more, are unclear.
Some are even being used interchangeably.
To build a house, of course, an apprentice must learn to tell a door frame from a roof truss.
No one goes far employing a clutch as a brake, cooking with salt in place of sugar, or using numeral 3 when you needed zero.
Learners come to a new subject with clear minds - the tabula rasa, or ‘clean slate’.
They expect tools that work; instructions that are accurate.
The first big stumbling block Learners come across in English is the speech sound.
It isn’t defined accurately enough. It isn’t taught well enough or early enough.
The second big stumbling block is spelling. Spellings are the signals for speech sounds.
All spelling systems, examined in my study, contain significant errors. The errors hold the attention of Learners, without them necessarily recognising that. But they can't use the spellings well.
Some fall down and don't get up. Others just stagger along.
English often takes the blame.
I find this endlessly ironic. English, which gives us its vast and brilliant tools for communication, is the only player, in this grand drama, which cannot speak for itself.
Even more ironic, it must rely on people to speak for it – people who don’t know where the problem lies.
After completing our long investigation, we set about clarifying the descriptions of how English works.
First, we composed functional definitions for each element.
We applied these definitions to come up with data sets for each element in ‘the build’, the coding machine for English - speech sounds, vowels, spellings, syllables, spelling patterns and so on. Around forty sets.
You end up with a toolbox for a master code cracker, with all items present, in the right compartments, no longer jumbled up or incomplete.
The decoding instructions are contained within the definitions, because each definitions tells the Helper and the Learner the purpose of that part of English and the kind of job it does.
Next, we mapped data from one set to data from another - how sounds code for spellings, how vowels or consonants influence sounds next door or preceding or elsewhere in a word.
This kind of mapping helps to reveal and explain patterns in English - very handy for such a big but compact language.
For example, you can work out why speech sound (i) as in "i" in 'Big sister Pip sits still.' can never appear at the end of any English word.
(And why Monty Python's Knights who say "ni" (ni) sound endlessly funny.)
Complete Learner-friendly maps, for classroom use, hadn’t been drawn before, despite many attempts.
The late Professor Edward Carney, at Manchester University, in the 1990’s*, came closer than anyone.
He combined printouts from computer programmes, by earlier scholars, with his own brilliant observations of the English reading system.
Unfortunately, his excellent data sets were presented too densely for classroom teachers to work with - another unfortunate waste of superb work by an academic not supported by practitioners and teacher trainers. It is no one’s fault, but we have to work together more.
When clear maps are drawn, the order, in which different parts of English are best presented to different Learners, becomes obvious.
This important question has been either debated endlessly or abandoned.
Poor Learners! Poor Helpers! Where to begin reading lessons with young Henry, who cares only about dinosaurs? How to help the 1.4 billion for whom English is a second – or fifth – language, and the many more queuing for help?
After mapping, we ranked our data from simplest on upwards.
We arrived at a sequence of graded lessons that any Learner can use: 216 classes spread across 8 Steps.
One experienced educator and literacy teacher considered our materials "so finely graded you could teach a brick to read with them".
Once the major stumbling blocks of spelling and word construction were eliminated it became easy to teach syntax, (how words work in sentences and parts of sentences).
There was already excellent classroom work in this area, by the two greats, A S Hornby, from OUP, and Ronald Ridout, who specialised in teaching and writing texts for non-English speakers.
We excavated their invaluable texts from basements and offsite library stacks and used them as guides for contemporary class materials.
TNLP Learners use all these improved definitions, codes, data sets, maps, materials and games to predict or discern order and disorder in the English language.
They find far more of the first than the second.
Our learning schema is created as a big game.
The Learners know the rules. They have the codes.
Decoding English, getting the meaning, becomes a fair challenge, not an endless runway to take off.
TNLP Learners quickly become startlingly good English language code crackers and are highly confident. Most Learners “get it” on the early steps.
Many boys, having hated reading classes, feel right at home with the TNLP™ sciency problem-solving/games approach to learning English.
No doubt, further discoveries and refinements by others will smooth the way even more for English language Learners.
We look forward to that.
*A Survey of English Spelling, Edward Carney © Routledge 1994 London (also USA and Canada) pp 535. Paperback 2014 Routledge Taylor and Francis (ref: Brown LOB Louvain Heritage Thorndike computer surveys)
