LEK : Building Reading and Writing Skills by Easing the Mental Burden

1. Understanding Cognitive Load and Why Reducing It Matters

The Theory of Cognitive Load tells us that our working memory, the part of our brain that actively processes new information, has a limited capacity. When children are learning to read and write, they're essentially tackling two main tasks simultaneously:

• Decoding: This is the mechanical part – recognizing letters, linking them to sounds, and blending those sounds to form words. Think of it as cracking a code.
• Comprehension: This is about understanding the meaning of the text, grasping the ideas and information being conveyed.

If the act of decoding words takes up too much mental energy, there's simply not enough brainpower left for comprehension. This makes reading a struggle to understand. The procedures within the LEK method are specifically designed to make decoding automatic before students start reading full texts. The goal is to free up their working memory so they can focus on what the words actually mean.

2. Core Principles Guiding the LEK Approach

The LEK method appears to be built on a multi-sensory and step-by-step approach. It breaks down the complex process of learning to read and write into manageable stages that build upon each other. We can see these stages as: Initial Preparation, Multi-Sensory Phonological Awareness, Developing Writing Skills (Graphomotor Skills), Integrating Language (putting words and sentences together), and Progressing Towards Independence. Each of these stages has a clear purpose in lessening the cognitive load on the learner.

Here are some key principles at play:

• Gradual Automation: By breaking down the learning into small, achievable steps and practicing them repeatedly (think of the body movements for sounds or the basic strokes for letters), these sub-skills become automatic. This means the brain doesn't have to consciously focus on them anymore, saving mental energy.
• Multi-Sensory Integration: Engaging multiple senses – sight, hearing, touch, and movement – helps create stronger connections in the brain. This makes it easier to access information without requiring a lot of conscious mental effort. It's like having multiple pathways to the same information.
• Scaffolding: The method provides temporary supports, like gestures and color-coding, that are gradually removed as the student becomes more proficient. This allows them to learn new skills without feeling overwhelmed. It's like having training wheels on a bike – they help at first, but eventually, you don't need them anymore.

3. How Each LEK Procedure Eases the Mental Burden

Let's look at how each part of the LEK method, based on the organized structure we discussed, helps students focus on understanding what they read:

• 1. Initial Preparation:

  • Pointing (Apuntador): Practicing smooth eye movements from left to right (like following a line) makes visual tracking during reading automatic. When students don't have to consciously think about "where to look next," their brain has more resources available for other tasks.
  • Semantic Analysis: Orally breaking down sentences into individual words (like saying "The-sun-shines") builds an early awareness of words as separate units. This makes it less challenging to identify individual words when they encounter them in written text.
  • Impact: These foundational skills become ingrained habits before letters are even introduced. This prevents students from being overloaded with trying to manage multiple new tasks at once.

• 2. Multi-Sensory Phonological Awareness:

  • Multi-Sensory: Linking sounds (phonemes) to specific body movements (kinesthemes, like making a fist for the /p/ sound) creates a "body memory" for sounds. This reinforces sound recognition in a way that doesn't rely solely on hearing or seeing. It spreads the learning across different sensory channels.
  • Connectors: Associating hand gestures with letters (like rubbing hands for "m") turns abstract letters into familiar, physical icons of the sounds they represent. This reduces the mental effort needed to remember a letter's shape and its corresponding sound separately.
  • Impact: By deeply internalizing sounds and their representations before reading, the act of decoding becomes more intuitive, freeing up mental space to think about the meaning of the words.

• 3. Developing Writing Skills (Graphomotor Skills):

  • Graphic: The step-by-step process of learning to identify, trace with guidance, and then independently write letters makes letter recognition and formation automatic. Using colors to represent directional strokes (like green for horizontal rightward lines) simplifies the process of forming letters, preventing motor or visual confusion.
  • Impact: When students can effortlessly form letters, they don't have to concentrate on "how to write it" while reading or writing, allowing them to focus their attention on understanding.

• 4. Integrating Language:

  • Syllabic Synthesis: Combining sounds into syllables (like "so") while using the associated gestures reinforces how sounds blend together in a natural way, before moving on to whole words.
  • Semantic Synthesis: Using pauses between syllables and Elkonin boxes (like saying "so-[pause]-lar") breaks down words into manageable chunks. This supports auditory and kinesthetic memory without overwhelming visual processing.
  • Sentence Synthesis: Using physical separators (like touching the chest) to indicate spaces between words in a sentence makes the sentence structure clearer without requiring conscious grammatical analysis.
  • Impact: By building words and sentences with multi-sensory supports, students practice decoding in simple contexts, making it more automatic before they encounter complex texts.

• 5. Progressing Towards Independence:

  • Scaffolding: Gradually reducing the reliance on supports like the full kinesthetic gestures ensures that decoding skills become fully internalized.
  • Impact: As the supports fade away, students no longer need to consciously think about the mechanical processes of reading, allowing them to dedicate their full attention to understanding the meaning of the text.

4. Underlying Theoretical Ideas in LEK

While the LEK method might not explicitly cite specific sources, its procedures clearly reflect principles from well-known educational and psychological approaches:

• Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller): The idea of breaking down complex tasks (like reading) into smaller, more manageable sub-skills (like individual sounds and syllables) and making them automatic directly addresses reducing intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load.
• Multi-Sensory Approach (Orton-Gillingham): The emphasis on using multiple senses to teach reading and writing aligns with this approach, which is known to strengthen neural connections and make learning easier, especially for students who might struggle.
• Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky): The use of progressive scaffolding, like the kinesthetic gestures and visual cues, supports students as they learn new skills, helping them bridge the gap between what they can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance.
• Motor Learning (Fitts and Posner): The repetitive practice of movements, such as the hand gestures and letter strokes, is consistent with principles of motor learning, where repeated practice leads to automatization and frees up cognitive resources.

5. The End Goal: Focusing on Meaning

By the time a student using the LEK method begins to read full texts, the procedures have worked to ensure that:

• Decoding (recognizing letters and forming words) has become an automatic process thanks to the multi-sensory and sequential practice.
• Their working memory is free to focus on understanding the meaning because they don't have to actively "solve" how to read each word.

Practical Example: When reading the simple sentence "The sun shines," a student who has learned with the LEK method won't need to consciously think about the individual sounds (/th/, /uh/, /s/, /uh/, /n/, etc.) or the specific strokes needed to write the letters. They will recognize the words almost instantly and can focus on the mental image of a bright sun.

In essence, the LEK method reduces cognitive load by carefully breaking down the process of learning to read and write into manageable steps, automating those steps through multi-sensory practice, and gradually removing supports. This ensures that when students finally engage with reading, they have already internalized the mechanics of decoding and can dedicate their cognitive resources to the true purpose of reading: understanding and engaging with the meaning of the text. If you'd like me to search for specific research studies or academic articles that support these principles, I can certainly do that for you.