So much of being an ABE student is psychologically, and/or socially, risky. It is risky to turn up at all. It is also testing - it is not at all clear what will be done, by whom, to whom, with whom and how. There will, though, probably be rather public engagement with exactly those activities which it has been so urgently necessary to avoid for so long, for very solid social and psychological reasons. ABE is psychologically risky, but if learning is to happen risks must be willingly taken. For this to happen, for students to attend and to volunteer input at all, a genuine atmosphere of positive confidence, success, discretion, honesty, reliability and trust must predominate. A genuine atmosphere cannot, of course, be simulated but it can, and must, be cultivated and demonstrated.

It boils down to providing good method which is well understood and defensible; to making clear what is taking place, why and how; to giving unconditional permission to question and debate; to encouraging input and creativity; to enabling experiment; to allowing, even encouraging, mistakes; to making it possible autonomously to learn from these mistakes, and finally to getting out of the students’ way when learning is going on. This last is especially obviously necessary when it comes to learning literacy, which is a ‘doing’ skill par excellence. It really is impossible to teach literacy, only to learn it. The learning is in the doing; the doing is the learning. We have to enable and facilitate that.

We have dealt with ownership of learning and literacy. Now we consider techniques and autonomy. It seems to me to be essential to conceptualise ‘literacy’ as three distinct components - writing, reading and spelling, from the very beginning. Learning the concrete skills of literacy is easier if it is broken into separate and distinct activities. What we do, cognitively speaking, when engaged in each of these is quite distinct from what we do when engaged in either of the others. Learning within and about each activity is simpler if they are separately envisaged and learning is approached through the deployment of distinct, and well understood, sets of techniques specifically appropriate to each activity (and see notes to this chapter). The mind focuses better, and understanding, internalisation and transference seem to happen more securely, when addressing a small, well defined and understood subject area rather than a larger and less well defined one (like ‘literacy’). The better we understand precisely what is to be studied, the more rapidly it can be learned and the more securely it can be made our own.

Writing, for example, is more easily mastered by a student if it is made quite clear that we approach its consideration as either author or secretary (Smith 1982). We review our own writing first as its author. While we are considering a piece of our own writing as author, solely for its beauty and truth, we specifically do not consider its spellings. We apply only the techniques we know to be valuable in knocking writing into the shape we want, and into saying what we want said clearly and well. When we are finally satisfied, as the author, that it is good writing which we like we switch into secretary mode and can begin looking at the detail (spellings and punctuation, for example) without paying any further attention to its linguistic merit. Both aspects of our literacy (we know because we have been specifically thus taught) employ distinct assessment and correction methods, and the skills of each are separately learned and are best separately deployed.

Tuition must deliver early and palpable success. It must demonstrate, immediately, the relevance and value of literacy to students. It does this best when it is student-centred (and validating students’ experience), when it is problem-centred (directly relevant to students’ felt and real-life needs), when it is immediately successful at the students’ level, and when it advances at a speed which will challenge, yet not overwhelm, students. How will anyone other than Supertutor deliver such a broad collection of desiderata? The answer, of course, is that old, fundamental stand-by, language experience. (Beard 1993, Campbell 1995, Gittins 1993, Harrison & Coles 1992, Wray, in Wray & Medwell 1994) (And see notes to this chapter.)

The use and ownership of clearly understood methods with clearly understood purposes will enable success and the ownership of it, allowing the student to ride literacy rather than the other way about. This success, at the technical level, is half the battle against the corrosion of negative affect; the other half is simply the increasing awareness of affect itself as a relevant issue - its likelihood and its power. In itself, this awareness is something of an antidote to learned helplessness. Shifts may unconsciously occur. At the very least a balance may be tilted thereby. Awareness, though, is not the end of it. There are useful things to be done but there are also useful truths to be uncovered. In the affective wilderness there is probably nothing quite like a ‘fact’.