It was November 2009. I was observing a Grade One language class in a remote tribal school in north Maharashtra. The teacher had written the varnamala from अ to ज्ञ (the Devanagari akshara set used to write Marathi) on the left-hand side of the board and on the right-hand side there was Barakhadi (symbols showing all possible combinations of a particular consonant with the secondary vowel signs, for instance, क, का, कि, की…).

One by one, the children came forward, picked up the long stick from the teacher’s table, pointed it at the aksharas on the board, and chanted the corresponding sounds. The voices of the other children joined in a chorus to this chanting. This went on for quite some time, then they started with the barakhadi!

I observed this for some time. Then I asked the teacher about her plan for the day. She said that the children had not memorized all the akshars yet, so doing anything else was out of the question.

“For the past six months, I have been trying hard but they just don’t get it. Some can remember the akshars in the varnamala order. But they struggle to recongnize them when they appear in the word,” she complained.

The teacher appeared to be genuinely hard working. She told children stories regularly, she had collected some material to do hands-on maths activities, but her approach to teaching decoding was entirely traditional. She really believed that unless the students mastered the entire varnamala, it was pointless to teach them ‘reading’.

This belief is common. Many of us who have studied in the vernacular medium have learnt reading this way and finding an alternative strategy to teach decoding seems an unnecessary invention.

Command on decoding is an important aspect of reading. Unless children decode with fluency and a certain degree of effortlessness, they struggle with reading. So it is important for a teacher to deploy a well-thought-of strategy to teach decoding.

Linguists classify Indian scripts as alphasyllabaries, or Abugidas. Such scripts are written with the consonant-vowel sequence as a unit, in which the consonant is represented completely while the vowel notion is secondary. For example in the unit मी the consonant म is seen clearly while the vowel ई is shown by an abbreviated vowel sign called ee ki matra in Hindi or deergh velantee in Marathi. Because of this system, the matras may appear on all sides of the letter (top, bottom, left and right), and the reader has to read the sequence as a unit, and rather than based on their left-to-right position.

Since the script has a unique symbol to represent each sound, it has a fairly regular sound-symbol correspondence. This could  be considered as a strength of the script in terms of aiding young learners to master it. Conversely, this feature of the script also makes the code very large and exhaustive, as every letter representing a consonant may appear in combination with 12 to 14 matras . The exhaustiveness of the code is further increased because the consonants are sometimes combined to newer symbols to represent blended sounds. For example, (sk) -स्क, (st) -स्ट so on and so forth.

When you juxtapose the exhaustive code against the traditional way of teaching decoding by expecting children to memorize the entire varnamala and barakhadi, you realize that this is quite a humongous task for young children. The traditional way of teaching the varnamala  hinges on the rote memorization of set of meaningless symbols; hence, children are deprived of reading anything meaningful for a long time. So, what’s the solution?

The strategy to teach decoding could be altered in order to reduce this burden of rote memorization. In QUEST, we have developed a series of books named Maze Pustak that adopts an alternative approach to teaching decoding. This approach was first proposed and used successfully for Marathi by Dr. Maxine Berntsen from Phaltan block of western Maharashtra.

In this approach, rather than teaching the entire varnmala at one go, aksharas are introduced in groups, along with some matras in a way that the children can decode controlled but meaningful written discourse before they master the varnamala. For example, in Marathi, if the child is able to decode the following set of aksharas and matras, she could attempt reading some words and short coherent text.

The set of symbols:  क, म, ल, च, न, आ की मात्रा, ई की मात्रा

Examples of short texts children can decode using these symbols:

काका आला का?    (Did paternal uncle come?)

आला.                         (Yes, he did.)

मामा आला का?      (Did maternal uncle come?)

आला ना.                     (Yes, he came too.)

काका काकी चला.

मीना आली का?

आली. चला.

मामा मामी चला.

माला आली का?

आली ना चला.

काका आला. काकी आली.

मामा आला. मामी आली.

मीना आली. माला आली.

Though these texts are controlled and somewhat crafted, they are quite close to children’s spoken language. Our experience shows that this type of predictive and repetitive texts is helpful in the initial stage of decoding. If they are illustrated, it helps with meaning making too. After the child has decoded the text, the teacher can follow it up with a discussion. One could ask questions such as, ‘What is this text about?’, ‘Can you guess who is the Kaka in this picture?’ ‘Why do you think so?’.

These texts are normally organized according to difficulty level, taking into account parameters such as text length, sentence length, context of the text, complexity of the plot or topic, and tone of the language used.

Children with similar decoding abilities are grouped together, and they are asked to read text of a particular level. The teacher moves among the groups and helps children whenever needed.

Normally, the guided reading is followed by an extension activity. Children could draw a picture of what they have understood from the text, or the teacher can display some less familiar words from the text and ask children to decode them in isolation and use them in sentences.

Groups are reorganized from time to time based on ongoing assessment so that a child gets texts matched to her current decoding ability.  

Sometimes, in schools where the teacher-student ratio is more than 1:50, it becomes difficult to make small groups. In such cases, the teacher writes the text on the board and calls on a couple of children with similar decoding ability to read aloud and make sense of the text. Other students in the class observe them reading and extend help if needed.

This approach of using controlled text has many advantages. In no way do I want to suggest that this type of text is a substitute to the use of authentic children’s literature in the classroom. In fact, children should be exposed to both types of texts simultaneously.  However the controlled texts open the world of meaning making quickly to the child. Learning to decode and learning to make meaning go hand-in-hand. After the first two or three sets of symbols are learnt, learning newer aksharas goes at a much faster pace.

Having said that, this approach also throws some challenges. Children coming from different home languages and cultural contexts require different sets of aksharas to be used, so that the text they decode is meaningful.

We have observed that writing controlled, yet meaningful text is a demanding task for the teachers. However, considering its advantages, I believe that it is worth exploring this path. Much deeper research is needed in this regard.

Often, the innovations in teaching reading in Indian languages are heavily influenced by the research done for teaching decoding the Roman script. Such strategies often neglect the critical difference between the scripts. If we really want to universalize literacy in a diverse country like ours, we will have to convert our classrooms into knowledge-generation centres, where research is done collaboratively by the teachers and university scholars. And one of the major areas for such research would be how to teach decoding in a language that uses an alphasyllabic writing system.