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7/10/00
Phonics
Lerning
to Reed
Imagine that you are fairly new to the
art of reading. And now see if you can read this sentence.
Wunce appon er tyme thar
lyvd ay narstie focks.
You
can read it, right? But you've never seen these particular 'whole-word'
shapes before.
You can read the sentence because you have developed one of the most important skills which help with
reading.
When you read the above sentence, you
firstly look at the words, fail to recognise them quickly, and so begin the task
of decoding the sound that the words would have (if articulated) by, loosely
speaking, converting the letters to the sounds that they have when spoken. In
this way, you can make a good job of reading the text.
And the very fact that our language has
an alphabet, whereby letters are related to the sounds of the words when spoken,
makes the task of learning to read a whole lot easier than if our language
script was 'ideographic' - like that of the Chinese, where the symbols that are
printed on the page bear absolutely no relation AT ALL to the sounds of the words when
spoken.
In Japanese, there are two kinds of
script. One is alphabetic and the other is ideographic, and, for example,
newspapers will carry a mixture of the two. Japanese children have to learn to
read both kinds of script. And, of course, they find it MUCH, MUCH easier to
learn the alphabetic script than the ideographic one.
Knowledge of the alphabet and the 'letter
sounds' are clearly extremely useful tools in learning to read.
It may therefore come as some surprise to
non-educationalists to learn that, for 30 years, teachers in the UK have used a
system of teaching reading to our children that ignores completely the value of
the alphabet as a 'teaching aid'. They have used something called the 'look-say'
method of teaching reading whereby the child is supposed to learn uniquely the
'overall shapes' of the words as they sit upon the page.
Under this system, the alphabet is
irrelevant, and children are supposed to learn to recognise words on the basis
of their different shapes.
The educationalists argued that learning the alphabet, and
learning the sounds of the letters (and the combinations of letters e.g. 'ing') were
too difficult for children to master and too tedious for them to learn.
They also argued that, for example, spelling should not be taught (or even corrected)
on the grounds that, bit by bit, the pupils would learn the spellings by some
process of absorption.
Instead, what actually happens (and particularly badly
so for dyslexic children or for those with various processing problems) is that the
many-different (and erroneous) ways of spelling the same words (which is what
the children do) which are found 'acceptable' by the teacher, simply amass
themselves into a huge confusion matrix within the children's brains, leaving
them unable to figure out easily the correct spellings and set them apart from all the erroneous ones!
I can never figure out the word
RECOMMEND.
Sometimes RECCOMEND or RECCOMMEND look correct. I get confused. And
even if I write this word correctly, I don't have confidence about it. So I pick
up that dictionary again.
It's a pain.
But can you imagine what it's like for
young children who have spelling problems with hundreds, and perhaps, thousands
of words? - together with the confusions caused by the presence of many TENS of
thousands of possible non-words, like RECCOMMEND, REKOMEND, RECKOMENED,
RECCOMENNED .... which the teacher finds 'acceptable'!
And yet our educationalists, for all this
time, seemed unaware
of these huge problems that they themselves had created by refusing to deal
with the task of teaching children to spell correctly, and also by purposefully
ignoring the letter-sound relations that our alphabetic system provides when
teaching them to read.
The overall result has been a complete failure to
teach our children to read and spell properly.
And the worse-affected have been the
boys.
It is boys who are most likely to find
difficulty in reading in the first place. Compared to girls, they are much more
likely to be dyslexic, have behavioural/attention problems, mixed (brain)
laterality problems, and/or to have other specific learning difficulties.
And having any of these makes learning to
read a very difficult task indeed for such children - even when reading is
taught to them by the very best of experts.
Further, as has been well known for decades,
when it comes to language, girls seem to have a particular talent. They are far
more verbally sophisticated than boys at every age. And they need far less help
in developing satisfactory language skills.
Over the past few decades there have been
about 120 valid, large-scale, carefully conducted studies comparing the two
methods of teaching children to read. And NOT ONE
has come up in favour of the look-say method.
In every one of the studies, the
'phonological' (sound) method has been shown to be better. And the overall
picture seems to suggest that using the look-say method for teaching reading
retards reading performance in the average child by about two years - TWO YEARS!
- the
retardation lasting throughout school and into adulthood.
So, can you imagine the effect that the
look-say method has had on those boys for whom learning to read would always
have been an extremely difficult task even under the very best of teaching conditions?
One can only shudder at the thousands of boys who completely gave up trying.
They are now, no doubt, the major part of the 7 million adults in the UK who cannot even
use the Yellow Pages. They are the ones who were completely let down by our
government, our teaching establishments and our schools.
But that's another story - so let's go back to the
reading.
Remember that the 'look-say' proponents
argued that children did not need to associate letters with sounds, and would
not benefit from doing so, but should learn to read simply by recognising the
overall shapes of the words.
Here goes ...
1. When you read the sentence Wunce
appon er tyme thar lyvd ay narstie focks you must be a bit like a child
coming across words never encountered before. (You've never seen them!) And yet
you can decode the sentence correctly because of your knowledge of letters and
their sounds. So could a child - PROVIDED THAT he knew the relationship between
letters and sounds! If the child doesn't know these relationships then he simply
cannot decode those words that are 'new', unfamiliar, rare, confused, or 'forgotten'.
2. How does a child use a dictionary to
look up words like ZEBRA if he doesn't know that ZEBRA is likely to start with
the letter 'z'? Having heard a word, the child only has some idea of how it is spelled by thinking
about the letters and their sounds. After all, if there is no relationship
between the spelling of a word and its sound, then ZEBRA might as well be
spelled XDT! Why not?
3. Given that there are thousands of different fonts and font sizes, and
infinite varieties of handwriting, how is a
young child supposed to read words simply by attending to their overall shapes?
For example, just look at these. Their
shapes are all different!
feminist feminist
feminist
feminist
feminist
feminist
feminist
feminist
feminist
feminist feminist
4. When a child begins to learn to read,
he can already speak! The child already hears and understands SPOKEN
language. So, for example, when the pre-reading child hears the word 'cat', he
knows what it is. In other words, there is already an access route into the
meaning-part-of-the-brain BEFORE a child learns to read - and it's a
PHONOLOGICAL route. It is a route that is based on SOUND. What could be more
silly than to pretend that this route into the brain doesn't already exist and
so fail to capitalise on it, but, instead, demand that children figure out words
on the basis of overall (visual) shapes instead!?
5. When a child is learning to read, the
teacher knows that the child is reading correctly by listening to him read. In
practice, the teacher knows that the child is reading accurately, or not, when
the child is articulating the words on the page. In other words, the pair of
them are operating on the basis of SOUNDS that are flying between them. Thus,
whether the teacher likes it or not, the child is having to create the letter
SOUNDS in order to demonstrate to the teacher that he can read!
6. I saw a giraffe
at the zoo is written on the blackboard. Mary has never seen the word
'giraffe' before - or hasn't seen it for a long time - or can't quite recognise
the shape - or can't get to grips with the never-seen-before handwriting on the
board. If she knows something about letters and sounds, however, she can easily
figure out what it says. She hears the word forming in her head as, step by
step, she decodes
the letters into sounds, and then, "Aha, I know that
word, and I know what a giraffe is." But, notice, if there was no
relationship between the letters and their sounds then 'g-i-r-a-f-f-e' might as
well spell 'rhinoceros' or 'orangutan' or 'helicopter'. Indeed, if there is no
relationship between letters and sounds, then giraffe could be spelled
'q-t-f-r-e-a' or even as 'xq'. Thus, it is the fact that Mary knows about
letter-sound relationships that allows her to read (and/or partially guess) that
'giraffe' is the correct word on the blackboard.
7. The very fact that almost no average
seven-year old would fall for 'q-t-f-r-e-a' as being the correct spelling for
'giraffe' shows somewhat conclusively that, whether teachers like it or not,
children are concerned to relate letters to sounds, and, further, that they do
so despite the fact that their teachers fail to capitalise on this important
relationship and would prefer that their children ignored it!
8. If children are not aware of
letter-sound relationships then what hope have they of spelling correctly? It is
true that many spellings are highly exceptional (e.g. tough, dough, bough) and
cause problems, but without the letter-sound relationships, a young child trying
to spell 'dog' might as well plump for 'xxwwtthhzzqq'. And the fact that the
child doesn't attempt to spell 'dog' like this, again demonstrates that the
child is relating letters to sounds whether the teacher likes it or not.
9. How on earth does a child cope with
learning about, and reading in, a new foreign language, if the alphabetic
letter-sound relationships that are available are ignored and not taught? For
example, My father is dead, in French, goes
something like this. Mon pere est mort. Ask a
typical non French-speaking nine year old to read this (or something, say, taken
perhaps from one of those foreign language 'phrase' dictionaries for tourists)
and he'll come up with something that sounds vaguely correct. A 'feel' for the
spoken language will help polish this further. BUT, if the child sees NO
relationship between letters and sounds, Mon pere est
mort, simply cannot be articulated! AT ALL! The
child might as well guess that it says, "Gugga bugga slubberdoxic
fishigans." In short, learning new
languages is made horrendously difficult by denying children knowledge of
letter-sound relationships.
10. Those of you who think that,
eventually, all children will EASILY grasp the relationships between letters and
sounds, whether they are taught them or not, must remember three things.
Firstly, the valid research shows a two-year reading retardation that lasts up
to adulthood when children are not taught letter-sound relationships. Secondly,
for hundreds of thousands of children, EVERY YEAR, reading is so difficult to
master that they give up trying almost completely. Thirdly, poor reading affects
EVERY single school subject.
It has been both astonishing and
sickening to watch our educationalists deal so badly with teaching reading
skills to our children for so many years. And even more astonishing and even
more sickening is how they have sat by and let it happen despite the evidence of
falling standards that have dropped and dropped before their very eyes, year after
year.
We owe our children AND
OURSELVES a much better deal from all the billions of dollars that we spend on
education.
10/03/02 One
in five children is on the special needs register nationally
(suspiciously, the same proportion as adult illiterates in the population)
but at some schools the proportion is as high as 55 per cent. Which begs
the question whether, in fact, it might not be the pupils that have
learning difficulties so much as the schools that have teaching
difficulties. Geraldine Bedell
11/02/05 2/3 Years Ahead Using Phonics Eleven-year-olds
in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, who used the "synthetic phonics" method
were three years ahead in reading. ... A seven-year study by Hull and St Andrews
universities also found pupils were on average almost two years ahead of others
in Scotland at spelling.
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