In which I have totally expectedly strong opinions about reading pedagogy

[cahn]

A. has learned to read, and it has just really interesting watching him learning how to read. (More interesting than watching his sister E, who I think was somewhat atypical in how she learned; a little more on that later.)

What was so interesting to me is that he had four separate epiphanies (over a number of months) as he was learning:

(1) learn how to pronounce letter phonemes, along with combination-of-letter phonemes (like "oo") (ETA: conuly informs me that the correct word is "phonogram")
(2) realize that the letter pronunciations can be done run-together to form an actual word. This was a separate epiphany that came literally months after he knew how to form individual phonemes. (Over a course of about a week. It was really cool to watch.) This was the most surprising to me, that it required a separate and discrete understanding from simply understanding how to reproduce individual phonemes.
(3) learn that many English words do not conform to (1) and (2) and memorize those pronunciations. This was also a separate epiphany that came several months after (2) -- for a while he would laboriously and triumphantly sound out a word and I would say gently, "Well, you sounded that out correctly and it really seems like it should be pronounced like that! But because English is funny it is actually pronounced [like this]." The interesting thing was for a while that I would have to do this several times for the same word over the course of a week or two before he picked it up -- but several months after (2), he suddenly was able to pick up the word after I did it once. This may be less of an "epiphany" than a "now I'm comfortable enough with reading to memorize things," but I did get a distinct sense at one point that he actually did have the thought, "Ohhhhh, I need to sound out words sometimes but sometimes I just need to take the pronunciation and learn it!"
(4) Words are recognizable as patterns of letters, e.g., "ing" is always pronounced the same way. This came at around the same time as (3), and I'm not totally sure whether I should class it as a different epiphany (in fact it might be part of how one gets to (3)), but I do think it's a subtly different point.

I should append that his preschool has a "literacy-and-math" class that they go to for 15 minutes every day, where they talk about letters and numbers, do games with them, etc., and he's done this since he turned 3. This makes me strongly believe that when these epiphanies happen is highly individual, as obviously all his classmates have been doing the same thing, and very few of them have made the jump to actually reading yet. Of course at home we have talked about letters and putting letters together to form words. One of his favorite games (and E's favorite as well when she was that age) involved magnetic letters that we had from when I was a kid. We didn't use the magnet part (we have a sadly non-magnetic refrigerator) but A. would arrange random sets of letters on the ground (really random: bfkdqopcskwn, that kind of thing, only longer) and I would pretend to be horrified at them and then sound them out. This meant that although he didn't understand (1) or (2) at the time, he knew that I understood them, and he also knew I was doing something that mapped from the letters to some silly and fantastical word which he had control over and was nonsense, didn't have to be an actual word! And I would make up small nonsense consonant-vowel-consonant words ("vib," "mip," things like that) and we'd sound them out together. And of course we'd constantly read books to him (he loves being read to), and often I'd sound out words for him while reading, especially if it was a book with simpler words. So anyway, the point is that I feel that (1) and (2) were a sort of natural progression for him, and of course once you're reading at the (2) level, (3) and (4) come pretty naturally when you're reading books with English words that defy simple phonetic analysis :) So it was all fun and games to him, there was no stress at all, and it has been amazing to see his delight as he mastered each of those steps and saw the world open up to him. Seriously, he is LOVING reading cereal boxes and road signs etc. and realizing he can get all this information he couldn't before!

(When I say E was atypical, I mean that I didn't observe her having these separate epiphanies, certainly not in the very obvious way it happened with A. I feel as if her learning (1) through (4) was rather compressed -- I have something of a sense that it all kind of came together at the same time, or (probably more likely) that she didn't say anything to us about it until she basically understood all those things. We did do the same kinds of things with her, though.)

His slightly older (very bright) cousin O. has not yet learned to read. Of course perhaps her brain hasn't made those particular jumps yet. There are... several other things going on here as well, mind you . Thing #1: my parents live close to her and are Super Invested in their grandchildren Learning to Read Early. Because she who reads early wins, I guess?? *throws up hands* Thing #2: My sister is emotionally-if-not-intellectually invested in her child Learning to Read Early, partially I expect because she wants to please our parents. So even before getting out the gate, poor O. was burdened by the weight of all these expectations. And I don't know that it was presented as a game, as something fun. (Well, actually I do know. It wasn't.) And my sister would get stressed when O. was not learning things quickly enough. So she has a HUGE incentive to "guess the answer," is what I'm saying, where A. (who also likes to guess the answer, mind you) had rather less of one. (O. also by nature tends to be a people pleaser as well as highly emotionally intelligent and would easily pick up on things like her mom getting stressed, whereas I'm not entirely sure A. would pick up on that if I were stressed.)

Then there was Thing #3: My parents signed O. up for a reading class, one of those "guaranteed to teach your kid to read in two months!" kinds of things.

I wondered how the class could guarantee that, as my experience with A. had been that he had had to have these epiphanies, which happened at wildly varying, unpredictable times.

Well, I'll tell you: This reading class did BASICALLY ALL "SIGHT WORDS." (This is, like, flashcards with whole words on it. The class did very little phonetics.)

(Cynthia Voigt was writing about the evils of whole-word learning in the 80's! My school taught phonetics in the 80's! WHAT IS THIS??)

My sister, who doesn't have as strong feelings about reading pedagogy as I do but who knows a bad thing when she sees it, pulled O. out after a couple of sessions (my parents are still salty about this: "we even PAID for the class so our grandchild could learn to read and your sister just pulled her out!") but I think the damage was done. I think, mind you, that there are some children who can jump directly from (1) to (3-4) (I think E. might have been one of them, honestly; I was one of them, as my mom taught me via sight words before school; mildred_of_midgard, this must be you) because they have a lot of strong pattern recognition skills. But I believe strongly that not all children should. I think A. would have had a really hard time doing that. I also think it hasn't been good for O's reading skills. The problem is that if you do (3) before the others, it's easy to think the answer is to memorize everything. And that doesn't work for words you haven't seen before, unless you've also internalized (4), which is harder to do if you haven't yet done (2). Not impossible! But a lot harder.

When we saw them over Christmas I did the letter game with O. and she enjoyed the part where I had to sound out words a lot; the part where I tried to get her to sound out small words she was willing to do, but I'd put something down like "bim" and she'd sound out "bb... ii... mm... baby??" Really guessing, that is, and not having made that jump from (1) to (2) yet, but trying to skip to (3) and not really being able to yet.

Anyway, I don't mean to say that this is a big deal at all. O. will go to kindergarten this year and I think schools still do phonetics, right?? and she'll learn to read just fine, and my sister has about a billion books in her house and O. will grow up surrounded by books and the odds are 99% that she'll be more of a reader than E., who learned how to read super early. It's not a big deal at all, I just... feel like O. is a little frustrated right now, and that could have been avoided, and also I have strong feelings about whole-word/sight-word learning and why it sucks and stress on kids, is all :P

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Agreed, not all kids should, nor be expected to.

[hamsterwoman]

Watching my kids learn to read was very interesting for me, because I myself learned to read in a different language, which you ONLY read phonetically (I mean, there are some rules you learn, but even before you know the 'relax' your vowels and some consonants, at worst you will sound a little funny, not wrong). But also what I observed is making me think that:

"bb... ii... mm... baby??"

may certainly be due to the sight-words approach, but may also be due to the way an individual kid is wired. I taught L to read in Russian (i.e. phonetically) before she went to Kindergarten, and she could do it just fine. (She then had to learn that some of the same letters made different sounds when she was reading in English, which was legitimately confusing for a five-year-old, but I'm sure having a grasp of (1) and (2) from Russian helped her pick up English reading more quickly. I intentionally did not teach her to read English to avoid confusing her, though she got a bit of it in preschool, but she was the first kid in her class (minus the one-year-older girl who went into first grade after a few weeks) to start reading in English. BUT. As soon as she learned that in English you could sight-read words, she apparently decided that was the best approach, because she would keep trying to do that in Russian. Now, Russian words are quite a bit longer, and the endings have a lot of the important grammatical bits, but she would read the first part, and then try to guess the rest -- wrong, and wrong again, but she would keep trying, even though she could have just... kept reading phonetically and gotten it right. Even now that she's an adult (who reads Russian OK so long as she doesn't have to do it fast), she can't explain to me WHY she would do that.

Because I did see some letter confusion with L early on -- like, she spelled "nose" on her kindergarten spelling test with a C, which is the Russian S-sound -- I held off on teaching O to read in Russian until he was reading fairly solidly in English, i.e. first grade or so. And then he turned out to be the one to properly read Russian phonetically, even though he learned to read (English) via a mixture f phonetics and sight words.

So I think a lot of it is (as you say) a question of individual brains, and how they interact with the reading instruction they get. But getting both options presented to them is better than just one! (and I'm pretty sure learning to read phonetically helps with picking up another language later on, assuming the language is more phonetic than English. I remember how much trouble my American classmates had just reading Italian, without skipping sounds or getting things jumbled, and I didn't get it, but seeing how much learning to read in English is sight-words recognition, I understand that more.)

But yay for A reading! That's always exciting :D

[conuly]

Schools in the US primarily do not do either synthetic or analytic phonics programs. They do "balanced literacy" which, at the end of the day, is typically a little bit of half-hearted phonics mixed in with a whole lot of whole words.

(1) learn how to pronounce letter phonemes, along with combination-of-letter phonemes (like "oo")

The word you're looking here is "phonogram". English spelling is typically considered to have more or less 75 phonograms (depending, as always, on who does the counting) representing approximately 44-ish phonemes. Of course, many of those phonograms, such as /oo/, /ey/, /g/, or /ch/ can represent multiple phonemes, but at the end of the day English orthography is not quite as messy as many kindergarten and first grade teachers make out to the parents of the kids in their classes.

If your sister is particularly interested in teaching reading, she can do worse than look into a synthetic phonics program such as All About Reading or Logic of English. I personally favor the latter. If she wants to do it on the cheap I recommend Spalding, but using the modifications suggested here.

[luzula]

Interesting! This is not a subject I have ever really thought about.

[mildred_of_midgard]

I wondered if you were going to bring our Tillermans discussion into it!

My problem is that I learned to read before I was old enough to have memories, and so I'm going entirely on my memories of my mother telling me many years ago about her memories of things that happened many years before *that*. And having glanced at the baby book she kept when she only had one kid to look after and had time to write in a baby book, her stories of my acquisition of spoken language don't quite match up with what she recorded at the time.

I will say that I always had a working memory and pattern recognition skills that were well beyond my peers (and are still well above average), and so I could see a mostly whole word method, especially if it was indirectly phonetics geared, like doing a bunch of rhyming words at the same time, working for me.

As a linguistics major/PhD student, I took three phonology classes in college and grad school. And the bulk of the homework in all of them worked like this: Here's a data set consisting of the pronunciation of a bunch of words in a language you've probably never heard of. Figure out the conditions under which you pronounce a sound as 's' vs. 'z'.

And I was really really good at that. When I got to Greek 101 late in college, and the professor said, "Here are the rules for where the stress goes on a Greek verb. Here's a Greek verb. Tell me where the stress goes," and so many of the students couldn't do it, my mind was blown. I mean, they've told you the answer! Where I come from, they'd give us the verbs with stresses and tell us to to figure out what the rules governing stress were. If you can't do the mindless and deterministic job of applying rules that have been given to you, you'd never be able to make it in a class where you have to figure out the rules yourself.

So if you presented me with a bunch of Dr. Seuss type books that contain a lot of words with similarities grouped together, and I memorized them, I'd figure out the rules even at age three, I'm pretty sure. And I think some explaining was done, it was just heavier on the "teach the kid to memorize an entire book so she can read it on her own" approach than would work for a lot of other kids.

I would also point out that it was a low-stress approach. Reading time at age 2-3 was cuddle time on Mom's lap, and there was a game aspect to Mom reading most of the book, and me being responsible for one word whenever she paused. And though all the kids were read to, I was the only one who picked it up like breathing.

I have a lot of thoughts on how reading is taught in the high school/college/grad school world, by which I mean both literature in a familiar language and literature in an unfamiliar language, and at some point when I can brain again, and especially after I've had a chance to tackle some languages using a method I think will work much better and report on my results, expect a long post on the subject.

Meanwhile, I very much enjoyed yours!

Btw, I am not a guesser. I am a "refuse to open my mouth until I feel confident in my answer and have triple-checked everything" person. It meant I did really well in math class in school, and was massively crippled in math competitions where speed was of the essence. I still placed highly, but I'd get like second or third when I could have placed first if I'd given the answers I had as soon as I came up with them, but refused to give them in time, even when the penalties for being wrong and the penalties for silence were the same. I also think my GRE math score was like a 720 instead of an 800 because while there wasn't a single problem I couldn't have done in junior high (it was ridiculously easy), I resist being rushed.

Oh, linguistic trivia: "-ing" has two subtly different pronunciations that you intuit as a kid but no one ever points out explicitly until you're a linguistics major, which accounts for why "finger" and "singer" don't rhyme. ;)

[ambyr]

Huh, this is really interesting to me! I had vaguely heard of phonics as a literacy tool, but I don't think I've ever encountered it in the wild. My own learning-to-read experience was pretty much all, "Have parents read the same book aloud to me, while I look at the text, until I memorize it well enough to read it back to myself." So, whole word, basically, I guess?

[sophia_sol]

I've read articles before about the execrable lack of phonics in teaching-to-read in the US before, and it continues to baffle me that anyone thinks whole-word-memorization and guessing is in any way a useful tool to teach a person to be a strong reader able to read widely. Memorizing shapes of words teaches you how to read those specific words, and learning that the right approach to seeing a new word is guess what it is based on context leads you to not ever learning new words, but learning the rules of reading English (and of the various languages that contributed a lot of vocab, and of the ways in which English usually chooses to mangle those languages.....) means you have a very good chance of figuring out any new words you come across in your travels no matter how complicated or unfamiliar. It's so much more versatile and widely-applicable!

I have no idea what kind of reading education I received as a kid, but I can say as an adult that I use the guessing & memorization strategy approximately 0% of the time. Internalizing the spelling of a new word is vital to me in terms of being able to store it and read it fluently - which, I suppose, is not exactly phonics, because the pronunciation to me is a beneficial knock-on effect rather than where I start, but is like a close cousin?

[rosefox]

This is super interesting! Kit has just reached the stage of pointing to words in books and asking "What's that say?" so it's probably time for us to start sounding words out more—we do it here and there but not in a focused way.