Stress
Introduction
Stress is talked about so much nowadays, that it can be hard to focus on what it really is.
The body is designed to react to fear and excitement in very clear ways. Historically, fear and excitement were normally linked to danger in the form of other tribes or large carnivores.
At those moments, survival depended on how you reacted. You really had three options; fight, flight or immobility (so that you went unnoticed). Our stress reaction is designed to achieve one of the three.
In all three cases, the brain shuts down the higher thinking areas of the frontal cortex and moves control to the more basic ones of the brain stem (the "lizard" brain). So you will see raised emotion and a much reduced ability to think clearly.
The only exception to this is people who have been trained to deal with stress and remain capable of thinking clearly. Being yelled at on the parade square by a sergeant-major is an example of basic training in dealing with stress and a lot of military training is largely an extension of that.
Stress and Reading
Reading is very much a higher brain function. So it is no surprise that stress is generally a negative factor when learning to read.
However, as anyone knows who has helped someone struggling to read, stress levels tend to rise very quickly, sometimes for everyone involved!
So it is very easy to get into a negative spiral of failure - leading to stress - leading to failure. In fact the conventional experience of learning to read is an inevitable series of public failures as the learner stumbles over words that cannot be read.
The Solution to Stress
I would rate psychology as 50% of the content of Easyread. If a child is not happen and excited doing Easyread, particularly over the first weeks, then our task is far harder than it needs to be.
There are various ways to achieve that.
First is to make the process genuine fun. We use silly and sometimes slightly rude imagery that gets children laughing.
Second is to make it seem OK to find the whole thing hard. We talk to the children quite a lot about that.
Third is to create a path that seems achievable. There are many elements to this, but in Easyread our TrainerText is probably the most important. It gives the learner the capability to work through difficult words without needing help. So that moment of failure has been turned into a moment of triumph.
In that way, we aim to reverse the spiral of failure into a spiral of success and growing confidence.
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