Why is overlearning emphasized in the Bannatyne Program?
Overlearning is the key to fast, fluent, accurate, automatic reading, spelling and writing. Fast, fluent, accurate, automatic reading, spelling and writing enables the student who has completed the Bannatyne Program to “forget” he or she is coding and decoding so that that student can concentrate only on communicated thoughts, on the content of what is being read or written, just as an adult would while reading a fascinating novel. The Bannatyne Program incorporates a wide variety of enjoyable methods and activities to make overlearning permanent. Most of these methods and activities, such as splitting and blending key words and speed reading, are not even recognized as overlearning by students or even, sometimes, teachers. There are dozens of implicit techniques in the Bannatyne Program that operate seamlessly and, in a manner of speaking, “invisibly.” Just one example is the training of correct saccadic eye movements by almost eliminating long fixations, near-misses and over-correcti
