How It Works?

If a student was able to instantly recognise the sound of a letter, and all words were one letter long, then reading would be no problem. If a student was able to instantly recognise the sound of a letter, and then learnt to recognise the sound of two-letter combinations, then reading would be no problem. And so on for three-letter combinations and more.

This is what we do - train the student to instantly recognise the sound of the letter, then train them in combined letters, then let them loose on words and sentences.

This may seem like Synthetic Phonics, a system now decreed as mandatory by the British Government.

But what we have done is come up with a method for teaching the first step in a revolutionary new way by the use of memory assocations embedded in animated movies and reinforcing the learning with video gaming techniques.

In our programme, the student does not have to TRY to memorise anything, rather he/she simply watches and plays and the memorising looks after itself.

Here is an example. Imagine you are an English-speaker trying to remember that the Hindi word for rice is "chaaval". The chances are you will forget the word very quickly. Now do the following: - Take 10 seconds or more and get a picture in your mind of yourself shovlling rice into your mouth. - Have an imaginary voice in your head make the pun “let’s chaaval/shovel rice into your mouth”. You will now remember that rice = chaaval for several days or weeks. That’s because you made an association between the sound ‘chaaval’ and the unforgettable picture of rice being shovelled into your mouth.

The astonishing thing is that you, the reader, are being subjected to these techniques all the time. They are working on you, and you probably don’t know it. Well, when was the last time you bought anything significant that you HADN’T seen advertised on TV! Most TV advertisements use memory techniques to get you to remember their products.

We have an astonishing situation where most of the manufactured goods sold in this country are marketed using an extremely successful technique, yet in education, where it could revolutionise the whole education system as we know it, the technique is almost completely ignored.

Who invented memory techniques?

They have been around for thousands of years. They were practised by both the Greeks and the Romans. There IS one man who is an evangelist for memory techniques, and he has been our main influence in developing the ReadingWise method. He is Tony Buzan, an English psychologist and internationally best-selling author, famous for inventing the technique of Mind Mapping.

How the Programme was Built

Victor Lyons, an Englishman in Delhi, was vainly trying to teach himself how to speak Hindi. He found it difficult to remember the meanings of words. So he started experimenting with ancient memory systems used by the Greeks and Romans. He found that by the judicious use of memory techniques, he was able to remember up to 50 new words a day. Then he started to learn to read Hindi script, but had a hard time remembering which letter represented which sound. So he used the same techniques, and they worked very well indeed. Then he tried it on his friends, and they learnt as well.

Lyons came to work with TARAhaat, an organisation that specialises in vocational training in rural areas, and sets up village knowledge and business centres. TARAhaat incorporated these reading techniques and developed multi-media computer software programme and began showing it to adult illiterates in and around Delhi. The early results were very encouraging. After a lot of experimenting and re-versioning and consultations with expert educators and psychologists round the world, they built a product, manual,protocol and a training course.

Then TARAhaat did a pilot study on a community outside of Delhi with a large illiterate population. Three local volunteers were trained up as instructors, and enrolled 48 completely illiterate adult female students.

They were tested after 18 days and it was found that 73% of them could read! No, they weren’t about to sit down and go through War & Peace, they were still on the cat-sat-on-the-mat stage, but they could manage simple reading without any assistance. So the students were then put onto a Reading Club, which runs in the Community Hall every day, where they come and practice reading out aloud together to improve their reading speeds.

It is important to note that the drop out rate is less than 5%, an astonishingly low figure as anyone who has tried running similar schemes in Indian rural areas will tell you, and is now considerably less than this.

Following the success of TARA Akshar the Hindi programme, versions for other languages have been built. These are published and promoted internationally through ReadingWise.

TARA Akshar uses the ReadingWise technique for learning.
TARA Akshar is a TARAhaat venture.
TARAhaat is part of the Development Alternatives Group.

TARA Akshar has been funded by DFID (through its PACS Programme), Telecentre.org, Oxfam, Suzlon Foundation, Connect For Change UK and others.