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The foundation lesson aims to give the learner a clear idea of how the alphabet operates in English, and to begin to use it. It uses clear and understandable language, and explains variations or difficulties as they arise, so that each element is fully understood from the outset. This ensures that everything we say builds, consolidates or extends networks in the brain, and helps the person to adjust their thinking as they move from spoken to written language.

The content of the lesson depends on the learner’s age and maturity, what they already know, and their own view of their difficulties. We should study reports and assessments, including formal statements and Education and Healthcare Plans (EHCPs), notes from teachers and discussions with parents.

In all cases:

• We need detailed understanding of English spelling, its variations and the reasons for them. This enables us to give clear explanations, answer questions accurately, and  quickly identify similar words to build new neural networks. David Crystal’s Spell It Out gives a detailed account, and a Chapter xxx has a working summary.

• We explain that English spelling is built from elements of several other languages, beginning with ancient Britons, and continuing with Saxons (German) and Vikings, before the massive influx of French words following the Norman Conquest of 1066. Some combinations of letters, such as the le in table, are based on the sounds of these languages rather than those of English, and have English pronunciation put on top of them.

• An account of how these factors work in practice is in Ch xxx  How the alphabet really works.

• Two maxims. My driving instructor used to say that “We believe everything the mirror tells us, but we don’t believe the mirror tells us everything.”  A modification, taking account of the variations described above, is

We use everything the letters tell us, but we don’t believe the letters tell us everything. Some things we have to know.

The second, jokey one:

The language is a thousand years old. If we were a thousand years old, we have a few wrinkles.

We explain wrinkles as they arise, and do not leave anything unexplained.

• We choose our words carefully, and avoid saying anything that we might later have to contradict. This ensures that the learner can trust and rely on what we say, knowing that, if they use it, it will work.  

• The lesson ends with a clear and identifiable improvement in some aspect of the person’s knowledge, skills and understanding, so that they feel they have achieved something, and want to return. I always ask if they feel they have learned something, and  if they would like some more. I pay close attention to the answers.

• At some point in each lesson, we check to see if there is any evidence that the person may be sensitive to light, and particularly to fluorescent light. This is a hidden element in many reading difficulties, and a simple check, for example by changing the colour of a page in a word processor, will often tell us if the issue needs further investigation.

Examples

Sue Palmer’s account of a lesson with her daughter (TES, March 6 1996) provides a parent’s viewpoint.

 A couple of months ago my nine-year-old daughter couldn’t read. Now she can. As a one-time teacher of dyslexic children and thus well aware of the extent of her difficulties, the improvement seems to me little short of miraculous. It came about as a result of two hours’ consultation with a reading specialist and a couple of months practising his system for 20 minutes a day.

In six years teaching children with reading difficulties myself, I met only two other cases as bad as my daughter Beth. Although her school is marvellous and she’s bright, creative and happy in other respects, her progress in the 3Rs has been painfully slow. It’s not for want of trying: she’s had plenty of practice reading all sorts of books (structured schemes and “real” picture books): we’ve read to her at home until we were hoarse; she’s had endless specialist “dyslexia lessons” with every sort of mod con, and she works like a little Trojan, trying her heart out.

We’ve tried psychologists, orthoptists, ear, nose and throat specialists, Irlen Institute consultants (yes, we have the coloured glasses), even an educational kinaesiologist (an alternative therapy for the balance of the brain – when your child can’t read you try everything). But still, at nine-and-a-half, her reading age was three years behind and she could do no more than pick her way through simple texts, needing help on almost every unknown word.

Thus we ended up one Tuesday morning in the office of John Bald, a former special needs adviser now working as a private consultant in Cambridge. A session with a reading consultant is an interesting experience for one who, in an earlier life, used to do this sort of thing herself. John started with tests of vocabulary and reading and got the results I’d expect from a child like Beth – slightly higher than average vocabulary (10 years 2 months) and severely retarded reading development (6 years 7 months).

Then he launched into his teaching programme, and I sat back in admiration. In the course of an hour he explained the writing system of the English language (drawing on linguistic analysis, psychological research and the history of language) and the underlying reasons for Beth’s difficulties with literacy, all in terms comprehensible to a bright nine-year-old. Not that Beth was the main target for this information – it was, of course, intended to bounce off her towards the doting parent, who would later be working with her at home.

Anyway, Beth was too busy carrying out the tasks with which John illustrated his explanation. These too were designed to show a parent how to carry on the teaching at home – simple techniques of repetition and reinforcement which both taught the language knowledge she needed and ensured plenty of immediate success to keep up motivation. One thing he emphasised was the importance of noticing how the same spelling patterns crop up in lots of different words – whenever there was a word Beth had to learn, he always found at least one other that followed the same rule: catastrophe and apostrophe; head, bread and instead; danger, stranger and manger.

It was the sort of knowledge about language and how children learn it which would be helpful to every parent (and teacher) who works with a dyslexic child. In my case, however, as an old hand in the field, most of the content was pretty familiar. For instance, I was already well aware of the importance of analogy in learning to read – those repeated spelling patterns John was so keen to point out – but also of the difficulties in helping older, struggling readers to recognise and use analogy without boring them to death.

It’s one of the great problems of special needs teaching: how do you ensure children with appalling short term memory meet similar words in their reading frequently enough to develop analogising skills? Specially-written reading books using lots of similarly structured words draw readers’ attention to the similarities, but they can be mind-blowingly boring to read. Interesting books that children choose for themselves tend to be written in interesting language, which by its nature does not consist of the interminable repetition of spelling patterns. I was pondering this particular dilemma when John announced they would now do some reading practice.

Any text would do, he said. Hmmm, I thought sceptically. We had forgotten to bring Beth’s current reading book, so he used the test passage she had tried earlier. He started with a short homily to Beth. “Your memory isn’t working very well at the moment. But you’re going to have to find a way round that. No one can sort it out except you – so: when you come to a word you don’t know, learn it. Stop and learn it.”

Beth managed two words before she met one she didn’t know. It was “final”. John helped her, painstakingly, to work it out and discuss the meaning. Then, on his principle of “Never learn one word when you can learn more than one”, he also explained the meaning of the word “spinal” and wrote down the two for her to see. She read them a couple of times till she felt confident of remembering them, then went back to the book and started the sentence from the beginning. We continued like this for ten minutes, by the end of which Beth had managed two sentences. It didn’t look very productive to me.

However, John then produced an empty grid into which he wrote the groups of similarly-spelled words which had emerged from the reading session – this time mixing them all up. He started Beth reading across the grid. If she got a word right immediately, she was congratulated. If she didn’t, he encouraged her to break it down and use her memory to identify the spelling rule. If necessary, he referred immediately to one of the analogous words elsewhere in the grid. I began to understand.

I’d seen grids like this used before as part of a system called Precision Teaching, rife among educational psychologists in the early eighties, which had then struck me as rather deadly. But in PT, words were fed into the grid ad hoc, with no particular method.

John Bald’s leap was the use of home-made collections of analogous words, so that if Beth forgot a rule in one of them she had instant access to a selection of others, one of which she would usually remember. The grid provided an artificial means by which a child with poor short-term memory could learn to use analogy in the same way as a “normal” reader.

Like all the best ideas in teaching it’s breathtakingly simple and you can’t imagine why people haven’t been doing it for decades. Who needs a boring structured course introducing spelling patterns in rigid succession when you can just identify the patterns a child needs as she goes along and provide a quick way for her to meet them over and over until they are committed to memory?

When we got home, Beth and I started using John’s method in short daily lessons. It’s extremely difficult to teach your own child (perhaps especially so if you happen to be qualified in the field), but we’ve found this system pretty painless. Beth chooses the books herself. The first one was not particularly easy, and we filled five grids before she really took off – but then, suddenly, she began to read more fluently and we were using the grid less and less. Now she’s chosen a book with much simpler vocabulary, and is reading it almost faultlessly, which is doing wonders for her confidence. And whenever a word does stump her, we have a simple way of tackling it and providing frequent reinforcement of its most significant pattern.

Of course – again like all the best ideas in teaching – the system relies heavily on the skills and knowledge of the teacher and I don’t know how easy the average parent would find it to apply. John’s one-hour crash course in linguistics and psychology – tour de force though it is – is no substitute for a full-length programme on phonics, the English spelling system and individual teaching strategies.

Still, until he can be bottled (or better still, videoed) and made available in shorter bursts and greater depth, it’s a darn sight better than nothing. And as someone who has tried just about everything on the Anxious Parent’s List of Dyslexia Treatments, I would recommend a two-hour consultation with John Bald more than anything else currently on offer.

Sue Palmer is General Editor of the Longman Book Project.

Boy, 12, 2025-26.  “Peter”,  assessed as dyslexic, was attempting to read every word by combining the sounds indicated by individual letters. So, could not read the, but could recognise some longer words. He could not  read any text. At the time of this lesson, he had been accepted by a special school for dyslexic pupils, but had not  yet started. No knowledge of multiplication tables, but no additional learning difficulties. Diagnosed with Juvenile Idiosyncratic Arthritis, requiring regular visits to hospital. Eager to learn, with ambition to become a marine biologist. Peter and his sister, below, had been home-schooled for a time, including the Covid epidemic. When Peter had attended school, he had suffered serious bullying.

As the was the the first problem, I began by explaining  the invasion of  1066, which led to a massive introduction of French words, which causes problems, as their spelling reflects the sounds of French rather than English. Taking table as an example, I demonstrated how the French pronunciation reflects the l before the e, the English does not. Peter understood.

I then explained William’s hostility to everything Anglo-Saxon. His scribes used the Roman alphabet, and used the combination th to replace the old English letter thorn (þ), which represented the sound at the beginning of the. This unlocked other words with th, beginning with this, that and then, which he quickly learned. This example of letters working in combination, rather than individually, was the first step in helping Peter to adjust his thinking to use the way the English alphabet operated, and unlocked all other words using th.  

The next step was to use this to demonstrate that English spelling is not always perfectly logical, and that people who think logically themselves often have difficulty adapting to this. The language was a human construct, over a thousand years old, and if we were a thousand years old, we’d have some wrinkles. To read and write in English, we needed to combine the straightforward elements, that were easily understood, with variations that had grown up over time, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes just out of convenience. I used the maxim above,from my driving instructor, We use what the letters tell us, but we don’t believe the letters tell us everything, and explained that we have just 26 letters, and a language that contains something between 500,000 and a million words. The letters can’t convey this vast amount of information on their own – we have to know more than they can tell us individually, and to see how they operate in groups.

Peter’s grandmother had bought him Beasts from the Deep, a colourfully illustrated book on deep sea marine life, produced in conjunction with the University of Cambridge. Peter was deeply interested in this, and, once the vocabulary and spelling had been discussed and explained, found he could read and remember long and difficult words – e.g. invertebrate, bioluminescent – that could not be read by phonics alone, as these would not indicate where to put the stress on the word, or what sound was indicated by vowel (voice) letters. To deepen his understanding, we would complement the illustrations in the book with clips from YouTube, showing the creatures in movement. The book’s organisation showed the changes in light and life possibilities with increasing depth, beginning with the sunlight zone, and ending with the Hadal (from Hades, hell) and abyssal zones from the extreme depths of the ocean. Peter was interested in these and also in the BBC 2 film of the coelacanth, which showed the location and movement of its fins, and led us to speculate as to their purpose – e.g. in maintaining balance – in ways that had not been possible from examination of dead specimens.

Peter’s spoken vocabulary provided a further vehicle for developing reading and language. When he said he wanted to be a marine biologist, I wrote these words down, building further words on bio and -ist. It seemed paradoxical that these long words, possibly because of the greater amount of information conveyed by the letters, were easier to read than short words with any kind of departure from the most frequent links between letters and sounds. What, for example, took several attempts before my rather pathetic drawing of a top hat, with the phrase What a hat did the trick.

Next steps

Our lessons came to resemble music lessons, in which a new piece is often not expected to be played perfectly at sight first time, but is studied and its particular requirements practised. As Peter found it more difficult to read a short words, particularly irregular words, the longer ones that had been fully explained, we moved to David Walliams’ Gangsta Granny, which we approached slowly, paying attention to phrasing and intonation, again as we would in music. Peter’s reading fluency, phrasing, and attention to detail grew, and with it his confidence. His parents were delighted, and he had moved well beyond the initial stages of reading after a year. During this time, he had begun to attend his private school, at a cost to his local authority of approximately £50,000 per year, though his attendance was severely limited by frequent hospital visits, each of which usually cost at least one day of school time. The school was not addressing the issue of teaching reading, and did not respond to correspondence.

Peter’s sister, Sheila9, unable to read any text because of frequent errors, but could read words with the most frequent links between sounds and letters. Thought by school possibly to be dyslexic, though not yet assessed.  

 We started with a comic text in which all of the text was in block capitals. After discussing Sheila’s interests, we moved to Grita and the Giants, based on the work of Grita Thornburg. We took one page at a time, explaining each variation in spelling as it arose, adding examples of words with the same combinations of letters and sounds, then returning to the text, so that each page was read accurately and fluently before we moved to the next. We also discussed any new vocabulary. This gave Sheila the satisfaction of reading accurately text that was a little beyond the initial stages of phonics, phrasing her reading well, and knowing that she could read and understand longer words. As in Reading Recovery, we began each lesson by re-reading the work we had completed previously, consolidating neural networks by sending a pulse of electricity along them, a process which I explained to Sheila. Slow progress in the first few lessons gradually speeded up, and we finished the book in a little under three weeks.

Sheila’s progress encouraged me to move to Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the world, using the same approach. This book contains further examples of intermediate phonic patterns, including more variations, each of which I explained and exemplified as they arose. After three weeks, Sheila was able to read increasingly long sections of the book, with improved phrasing and accuracy, and was taking increasing satisfaction in her lessons, which she said were helping her. Note: this account is complete at the time of writing, and will be updated.

Spelling. High-attaining girl 15, assessed as dyslexic by private school, 2015-16.

“Angela” had the highest grades in all of her school subjects except English and English literature, where she was hovering around the lowest pass  mark because her writing was inhibited by lack of confidence in spelling. When she was not sure of how to spell a word, she would hesitate, frequently mis-spell it, and be unable to compose text of any sort clearly. Following her assessment, her school had started her on the most basic phonics course, with a three-letter words. This did not address the underlying problem, and she found it insulting. She was referred to me by a retired head teacher, and we began with a lesson by telephone, with a parent listening in.

I explained that very intelligent people, who thought logically, were often thrown by English spelling, as the patterns of letters often represented the sounds of other languages, most ofte French, but at times also German and Norse. This made unfamiliar words impossible to spell if we approached them through strict logic. English spelling was an example of fuzzy logic, in which each item contained part, but not the whole, of the underlying system. The problem was complicated by the fact that we had just 26 letters with which to write well over half a million words.

I explained the analysis set out in Slimmed Down Spelling – that, if we heard a sound in a word when we pronounced it carefully, we needed at least one letter for it, but sometimes letters worked in groups – station, for example, had one letter  for each of the first three sounds, then the group tion, and that sometimes a word had an extra letter, for example to distinguish hopping from hoping. We only used a group of letters or an extra letter when we had learned the word needed it, and wherever possible we found at least one other word with the same sound and spelling pattern. This, I explained, would start a new network in the brain, in which each item reinforced all of the others. Finally, I explained how spelling had changed over time, both from a series of invasions beginning over a thousand years ago, and from changes in pronunciation, including shortcuts in everyday speech. This led to some spellings being some way removed from normal pronunciation, and we discussed patterns in this, including  le at the ends of words such as table, stable,(from French), and words beginning wa – was, want warm, water (from German). Once again, we only used one of these spellings when we had learned the word needed it, and always found at least one other word with the same sound and spelling. Only a tiny number of words in English have no comparable word, so this worked well.

Finally, a small number of words – for example, go, no, so and do, to and who – the letters carrying the sound of our voice (vowels) gave no indication as to which sound they indicated, and learned these as groups rather than individual words, again forming a new neural network, which we would reinforce by practising writing and saying them without copying. Under no circumstances would we ever copy a word, but would study it, write it without looking, and check it. The lesson lasted a little under half an hour.

A second session the next week was even shorter. Angela asked a couple of questions for clarification, one of which concerned the letter group ough, and decided everything was clear. Without any further teaching, she achieved the highest grades possible in English language and English literature, and with this a complete set of top grades at GCSE, which ensured her entry to medical school without taking the normal entrance test. She won prizes at medical school.

A little later, Angela’s mother wrote to me this note

My daughter has always had trouble with her English and particular her spelling. We were put in touch with John Bald by a mutual friend and he coached my daughter in spelling remotely. His teaching methods and techniques were amazing and we could not believe the improvement in such a short period of time. My daughter achieved an A* in her English Language and English Literature which was quite an unbelievable achievement. 

This case, endorsed by the referring head teacher, was used in evidence for my Fellowship of the Chartered College of Teaching.

Sensitivity to Light: Three Cases Identified in the Foundation Lesson.

Girl, 16, Essex Comprehensive school, teacher observing. Read a short passage from a non-fiction book of her choice, accurately, but painfully slowly. When I suggested that she was particularly careful in her reading, she replied that she had to read everything twice, because the first time the letters were not clear. When I placed a blue overlay from the Institute of Optometry screening kit over the page, she immediately began to read faster than she could articulate the words. The pupil was provided with blue tinted lenses by an optometrist, and her grades grades in English and English literature rose to A, the highest available at the time. She chose to take A-level English, but became unwilling to use the glasses for cosmetic reasons.

Boy, 7, very unwilling even to look at a book in class. Found it much more comfortable to look at text with an overlay, and Institute of Optometry screening test showed a variety of colours producing some benefit. Referred by the charity A Book of My Own to a local optometrist, who referred him to Addenbrooke’s Hospital for further investigation. He was found to have hydrocephalus, which was treated. The condition would not have been discovered had it not been for this screening.

Adult examples. University lecturer, 50s. Found it uncomfortable to work in the library, lit by fluorescent lighting, headaches accepted as normal. Relief found with overlay. Primary school teacher, 50s, unable to read the class because of extreme discomfort. Also found relief found with overlay. Local Authority Science Inspector, 50s, enthusiastic response to blue overlay, relieving discomfort – “That’s my colour.” Teaching assistant, 20s, CPD session. Said she had been unable to complete any examination because of extreme discomfort, distress and headache under the fluorescent lights of the examination room, and hence left school with no qualifications. Had been engaged to help pupils with visual impairment on the ground that she had experienced a s

imilar problem. Immediate and remarkable relief from an orange overlay, describing course presenter as “an angel.” Overlay supplied immediately.

Note. Sensitivity to light in these cases is not in itself presented as a solution to a reading difficulty, but as a factor inhibiting teaching and learning.