vib8505.htm

A Reading Teacher Learns to Read Braille

Frances Neer

3365 Sacramento St., San Francisco, Calif. 94118

I am a retired teacher. In the field of early childhood education I devoted special effort and study to linguistics and reading instruction, training others to teach reading as well as teaching reading myself. My dissertation research centered on the melodies of language and the relationship between intonation and beginning reading instruction. This article, however, is personal as well as theoretical, because I am now the student learning to read braille at age 67 because of rapidly failing vision.

This article was written in three stages as I (1) learned to accept my blindness, (2) struggled with braille, and (3) woke up to the fact that my special skills could be applied to the field of teaching adults to read braille. My interest in the subject is such that I have recently enrolled in the Special Education Graduate Program at San Francisco State University in order to earn my teaching credentials in Special Education, and realize my new dream of teaching braille more efficiently to adults than it is now being taught. I hope that my observations will help researchers and teachers of the visually impaired to take a closer look at this clientele: older blind persons who can be taught to read braille!

Turning Myself Around

When my vision began to fail I thought things were pretty tough for me, but I learned gradually that I'm the same person I've always been and that there are other ways of doing the things I want to do, especially enjoying and teaching reading. As a first step in turning myself around, I went back to the classroom and finished a California certificate in Gerontology. I listened closely in class, a blind student for the first time in my life. One day as I struggled with my new pastime, braille, I realized that I had a whole new world in my hands-the stuff from which course outlines are made. Maybe I could take advantage of my know-how in reading and find a better way to teach braille to adults. Everything fell into place that day. What I had suspected about the difficulty of learning to read as I taught others in my professional life now confronted me directly. I could now empathize with the struggles of people who were beginning to learn to read, because I myself was a beginning reader.

Finding My Way

My approach to learning to read braille has always been that the melody and rhythm of langauge that can carry a child through learning to decode print would likewise carry me though learning to decode braille. However, to my horror I found in my initial braille lessons that I would be learning in a much different way-one dot means "a" and two dots means "b." This approach of learning to read by isolating letters was contrary to the language experience approach that I had espoused and practiced successfully with beginning readers myself. In the area of braille reading, there was no alternative method to be found, no matter how well motivated or well versed in reading theory the student might be. This time I had to suffer someone else's inappropriate method of teaching, because braille was something I felt I had to learn quickly in order to survive being blind in a world of information.

I needed to be highly motivated. In the beginning braille primer a student is given a list of words to memorize, all of which are not only hard to decode in and of themselves, but which are made even harder to decode because they have no relation to each other. Instead of making this lesson easy at the beginning, "hooking" the student, and increasing his motivation to learn, this first experience with braille reading is often discouraging.

The only benefit to be found in my frustration with learning to read braille was that for the first time I realized how hard beginning reading is for a child, especially when what he is learning to read has no relation to his life or to anything he cares about. I began to remember the good old days, when I was the teacher and not the student. I would read the whole story aloud to the class so that students were prepared for what they would be learning to read and eager to read it. I always kept in mind that a text is like a jigsaw puzzle. Nobody puts a jigsaw puzzle together without looking at the complete picture as a guide. Why not do the same in reading? Why not give the student a good idea of what he is about to work through?

In other exercises the children and I would decide beforehand what thought or feeling we wanted to express that day, for example, "We had a good time at the beach." This thought was directly related to their experience of the beach. I wrote that sentence on the board and we used it to learn more about reading. And here I was, faced with the braille lesson book, so thick and unfathomable, suddenly feeling as if I were a six-year-old who wanted the teacher to read the story to me first, before I tried, to figure it out for myself. At the very least I wanted someone to pull a braille sentence from that primer that had some meaning to my life and start there.

An adult learning to read braille has to memorize a code of dots and learn to recognize these dots tactilely instead of visually. As I struggled along, I realized that in the context of sentences and fragments that had no vital meaning to my own life, I had no interesting theme to keep me on the right track. I ended up having to memorize over two hundred braille signs out of context. As an adult with a lifetime of growth, I had to learn to let go of my ideas about education and simply memorize, in order to go forward with braille. The rewards have been great, but far too much time and struggle were involved.

I cannot recommend too strongly that a more realistic approach be used to teach braille to adults. The braille primers seem to be modeled on print primers for beginning readings, which may not be the best materials to use. However, that is where the dissimilarity between teaching adults and teaching children ends, with the level of materials. The teaching methods that work for age six can work for age 60 if we give them a chance.

Marking the Route

Teaching braille and learning braille are not mutually exclusive activities. The teacher can't just pour information into the student and neither can the student simply repeat something the teacher has told him. It is a mutual activity that needs to be treated as such.

The teacher encountered by a newly blinded adult seeking braille instruction should be, first and foremost, a teacher of reading. This teacher needs to understand the philosophy, form, and structure of language.

No matter what the language, whether smoke signals or tom-tom beats, it still depends on the spoken language that we hear, written language that we perceive, and take into our minds, and respond to with our mouths. This is the basis of language, and until this process is mastered -spoken word to printed page to the mind and the spoken word again-true reading cannot exist. In the case of the braille reader, the only difference is that the page is in braille and not in print.

The adult braille student comes to the class with a background of experiences and preconceived ideas about reading, as well as memories of the reading experience -some of which may not be very pleasant. She has her own habits of reading, strengths and weaknesses, individual tastes, and her own level of literacy. She also needs to get on with her life and personal goals, and she wants braille to help her do that. It is the obligation of the teacher to recognize the individuality of the students and help them meet their various goals.

The materials that the teacher and student share in the classroom can be of any type (though at present there is not much variation). There is the literary language of fiction, nonfiction, the language of technology and science, or perhaps the language of cooking and recipes. Which language does the teacher want to use for each student? Which language is the student interested in learning?

An additional consideration is the level of reading the student has attained in print. I met a man in one of my braille classes who read the braille code very efficiently, but didn't understand a word of what he was reading. His vocabulary didn't match the material he was given to read. Again, reading is not an isolated skill. It is related to writing, spelling, and speaking. Learning a new approach to the reading and writing segment, the braille approach, can be a joyful experience if it is presented in conjunction with other experiences of language in a meaningful way.

Learning the braille symbols can be the simplest part of the process, if the lessons are presented correctly. The adult comes to braille knowing how to spell, and the discovery that two or three letters in print can be expressed in a single configuration of the braille cells is new and interesting to him. The configuration itself is only as hard as the teacher thinks it is. If the teacher believes that learning is fun, then the student will believe it as well. The deeper problems for the adult braille learner, once he has the dedicated, well trained teacher to help him master the code, are tactile sensitivity and memory.

When reading braille, our taking in information through sight is replaced by use of our other senses. The major sense used is the tactile sense. Because we can no longer rely on seeing body language, facial expressions and inkprint, we need to develop an exceedingly organized memory to help establish context.

This kind of memory is hard to develop, especially when one has been accustomed to remembering things by writing them down and looking at them later when needed. The ability to scan a page of inkprint is appreciably reduced. One needs to store ideas more carefully. Now one's major links to words are what is heard and felt.

By becoming more sensitive to the rhythms of the spoken language, the new braille reader can more readily grasp groups of words under his fingers, instead of single words or, even worse, single letters.

People come to braille, I think, in part because the assault on the ears from radio, television, cassettes, and records is so great. They wish to retreat a little into themselves and internalize information at their own pace.

The best reading teacher and the best teacher of braille would take an eclectic approach and use varied ideas from basal methods, the phonics method, the language experience method, and the linguistic method. The teacher needs to know which of these methods in what combinations will work with each of his students. One student might want to begin his braille lessons by learning from a favorite poem, or some of his own thoughts that he can "see" in braille for the first time. It is the proper material used at the proper moment that counts. If the student wishes to start learning braille with a transcribed notice about the sales at Macy's the following weekend, then why not give him that information to practice on?

I have met adults who have been "learning" braille for over 10 years. I have seen adults spend precious time spelling out words such as "the" and "cow," and I have rarely heard teachers ask them, "What are you reading about? What does it mean?" I have also met sighted adults in braille classes attempting to learn to decode braille by touch. These people, generally transcribers with a good command of the code, have no idea of the many approaches that good teachers take to teach reading. Yet, these people, with the proper instruction, could one day become braille reading teachers.

In sum, the braille teacher needs to understand the nature of language, both spoken and written, and know the nature of the students at hand, their desires, and their various backgrounds.

The braille student needs to apply himself to learning the braille code in a slow but not necessarily painstaking way, because it can be a lot of fun breaking the code of dots. When the student does gain confidence in his braille reading, he will find that his fingers flow along the paper very much as his eyes did, with a good steady reading rhythm, though he will be much more conscious of his fingers taking in whole groups of words at once than he ever was when he did it with his eyes. The student needs to develop a better memory, and he needs to consider why he wants to read braille and what he wants to read. He may actually want to write braille more than read it, and it will help the teaching process immensely if he realizes this beforehand.

The joy of adventure and the ultimate experience of being able to internalize the written word again can be created for the adult student by the properly educated teacher using the most creative methods.

The author, a retired university professor, lives in San Francisco.