Two Men Who Have Made Children's Books Together for More Than 30 Years, on What It Means to Create for Children

"What matters is not teaching children how to read, but training them to be good observers who can understand everything beautiful in the world," says Roderick Hunt.

Roderick Hunt is 78. He writes English readers for children. The story begins more than thirty years ago, with a small tale he told in his own living room.

Hunt remembers telling his son and his son's friends a story about a little boy named Chutney. The adults around him asked: why don't you write it down?

That story became Roderick Hunt's first published children's book.

In 1983, Hunt joined a research project run by Oxford University Press called the Reading Scheme, which set out to find a new way of teaching reading to replace the old one. The scheme was aimed at children who had not yet started school, and Hunt says he had "absolutely no experience teaching young children" at the time. The project later became the prototype of the Oxford Reading Tree. Hunt wrote a few short stories for it, and the publisher's editors began looking for the right illustrator.

At first they asked several illustrators to draw scenes from the plot. But Hunt thought none of them had caught the pictures in his head.

"When I start thinking about a story, I always sit in my big, comfortable chair and stare at the ceiling until some interesting picture appears in my head. I write it down the moment it does," Hunt says. Whenever he describes how he works, he begins with "a picture." That is why it mattered so much whether the illustrator could draw what he saw in his mind.

By chance, an editor showed Hunt a picture book by the illustrator Alex Brychta, a story about a boy named Danny. Hunt felt he had finally found the right partner.

In 1985, the first Oxford Reading Tree set the two made together, The Magic Key, was published. The original series held 30 short stories about the three children of the Robinson family — Biff, Chip and Kipper — and their dog, Floppy, and how they all lived together.

Brychta was born in 1956 in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), to parents who were both illustrators. He came to England with his family at 11, when he could not speak English at all.

"I could only express my ideas by drawing," Brychta says. "And I have to say, the English books I was reading then were really boring." At 16, his high school teacher recommended him to a publishing editor, and he began his career illustrating books.

Since meeting Hunt, the two have worked together for nearly 35 years.

In those 35 years the Oxford Reading Tree has grown from 30 stories to more than 400. They are sorted into 11 learning levels, each level containing several stages, together forming a complete set of English readers that covers a child's whole language-learning period. Oxford University Press now distributes the books in more than 150 countries, and 80% of British primary schools use them as reading-training material.

The Oxford Reading Tree uses phonics. The method comes from the way English-speaking countries teach their own children the language. It differs from the traditional approach of learning a word's pronunciation from phonetic symbols printed beside it: instead, children memorize the different phonemes made by combinations of the 26 English letters, and from those work out how each word sounds. Often two letters make one sound — ea makes /iː/, and so does ie — and once children fit these sounds into words, they know how to sound a word out correctly. Step by step, the method teaches the link between letters and sounds, so children quickly get the hang of spelling and reading.

Unlike other picture books, which simply tell children a story, the Oxford Reading Tree is reading-training material, and phonics shaped a great deal of how Hunt wrote. He and his colleagues had to build each story out of a limited English vocabulary, matched to the language base and comprehension of children at each stage.

"Sometimes it's really hard. You know, the simpler the story, the harder it is to write," Hunt says. "At the first stage, for example, children get very simple sentences: 'Kipper went on a swim,' or 'Biff swam in the pool.' The words I can use are very few. You can't hand them a long sentence straight away. I call this thin text — you just list the name in the subject, the verb, and then the object."

The constraints of language teaching notwithstanding, The Magic Key had two built-in advantages that let it grow into today's system of more than 400 books.

The first is the story the original series set up: Biff, Chip and Kipper find a magic key and start exploring other dimensions. That thread let the creators put in any element they liked, real or unreal, freeing them from a narrative that could only happen in the real world.

The second, and the more important, is Hunt's belief that where words cannot carry the whole meaning behind a story, pictures do extraordinary work. "In reading methodology we have a theory: don't rely too much on pictures. But I don't agree with that," Hunt says.

In Hunt and Brychta's process, words and pictures take turns supporting each other. Writing the story and drawing it are not two separate jobs; each keeps making the other more complete.

As Hunt says, his stories begin as a scene in his head. He writes the scene down first, something like a caption for a picture. Then he hands the draft to his editor and they talk about whether the story can go that way. The editor passes the discussed draft to Brychta. At that point Hunt and Brychta sit down together and work through the details face to face, and only once Brychta has drawn a series of sketches — rather like a storyboard — does Hunt write the final story from them.

"Every story has a special meaning behind it. Getting at that meaning through words alone is a very boring process," Hunt says. "And being able to read words doesn't by itself make a child a good reader."

"You may not have noticed, but some of the stories Rod wrote have no words at all. On the importance of pictures — especially when children are learning to read — they actually learn to read pictures first," Brychta adds.

Roderick Hunt and Alex Brychta spoke to QDaily at Shanghai United International School. In the library there is a room where teachers borrow books, and the Oxford Reading Tree fills almost two rows of shelves, sorted by level and stage onto different racks.

Maria, who runs the school's international division, told us: "Teachers pick different storybooks depending on the grade they teach, as extra reading for English class."

Q = QDaily

Rod = Roderick Hunt

Alex = Alex Brychta

Q: What do you think is different about writing English-learning material for children and writing ordinary stories?

Rod: I don't think there's much difference between the two, really. Every story has to be complete in itself. You have to respect the reader. Whenever I write a story, I become the reader. I ask myself: how old am I now? How old are the children reading my book? Usually there's a 5-year-old inside me, so I want the things in my story to appeal to 5-year-olds too.

It's not very different from what an ordinary novelist goes through writing a novel. You can't take shortcuts, and you can't drop logic just because it's "magic." Everything that happens in the book has to happen for a reason. I think my books appeal to children because they give a feeling of safety, and because there's enough in them that is interesting.

One more thing I'd add: children can copy the pictures in the book easily, because Alex's drawings are so simple and so beautiful. So we get countless drawings children send us of their own work. Both the stories and the pictures fit the stage of mental development children are at, and fit how they understand the world. That is why this series succeeded.

Q: What made The Magic Key turn into such a huge series of stories? What is unusual about it?

Rod: Children today have plenty of picture books to read, and they see all kinds of images and stories, some printed in books, some on television. How do they decode what is printed on the page? Books pass on information silently, through symbols.

There's a film called Black Robe in which a chief asks a missionary to show him the point of teaching his people to read. The missionary says to the chief: tell me something only you know. The chief says, "My wife's mother died in a great snowstorm last year." The missionary writes it on a piece of paper and hands it to a colleague, who at once says to the chief: "So your mother-in-law died last winter." The chief cries: "How did you know that?"

You see, information travels silently. What I want children to learn is that printed words, printed symbols, have meaning behind them. That's my final goal, and there are many ways of getting there — storybooks, films, television, Nintendo games, cartoons. All of them help me reach it.

Alex: I think what finally sets the Oxford Reading Tree apart is that when Rod writes these stories he draws on his own family life, on things that happened between him and his son. Children can match the stories to their own lives. The second thing is humor — we put a lot of funny things into the stories. What children hate most is being bored, and if there's something funny in the book, their interest is roused.

Q: The Magic Key has also been made into a cartoon. Given that, is there still any need to open the book?

Rod: Whether they watch television or turn pages, children enjoy a story in much the same way. But imagine there were no digital technology left in the world. How would you get new knowledge? Only by reading. Reading is the most basic skill there is. When you read, your mind works on what you read. When you watch television, the information has already been worked on before it reaches you.

Q: Over more than 30 years, English itself must have changed. Does that show up in what you write now?

Rod: Perhaps it does. The language we use in the Oxford Reading Tree is a narrative language. Take a sentence like "Mum's cut up ten lemons" — there are now some different ways of saying that out loud. So you're right, English is changing, especially in speech. When we teach children to read, speaking aloud matters a great deal too. So children learning English as a second language also need two-way spoken exchange with their teacher.

But when we write the stories, we try to carry the meaning with the simplest sentences and words, without being swayed by new, young spoken words and slang. The evolution of language is very complicated: English evolved and developed as a language that blended many cultures. How do you explain the present tense and the past tense to children? The reasons behind them are hard to trace.

Cover image from: Oxford Owl