Learning to read.

[rivka]

I feel like Alex has been on the cusp of reading for so long. She's known all the letters and letter sounds for a long time. She's had a handful of sight words, mostly names, since she was two. There have been a number of times that Michael and I have wondered if she can read, because she's displayed unexpected knowledge of text.

I've more or less come to the conclusion that she can't. She has a good memory, as preliterate children often do; she memorizes books and can recite them back after surprisingly few readings. And she has a very good ability to guess a word based on the context and the initial letter. Those two things, combined, often seem like reading. But she doesn't seem to get phonics at all. When asked to sound out a simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) word, she has a lot of trouble doing it - or even "saying the word fast" after we've helped her isolate the individual letter sounds.

I've often heard people say that reading is developmental; that it's not just a matter of collecting the right set of skills, but an actual process of cognitive maturation. And that does seem consistent with what we're seeing. Alex has the skills, but it's like the switch in her brain hasn't yet flipped to allow her to pull them together.

There's no hurry, obviously. Teaching reading seems hard, and I don't really want to do it - I've been hoping she'd learn on her own, the way Michael and I did. I let her play on Starfall sometimes when she asks for a computer game, and sometimes when she asks me what something says I'll encourage her to try sounding it out, but I don't feel any strong compulsion to propel her along the path to reading.

Except that lately she's been asking for reading lessons.

I've been writing CVC words on her Magnadoodle and asking her to sound them out. And she's been hitting a wall - not wanting to try, or guessing based on the first letter and getting sulky when encouraged to try again. I'll offer that the reading lesson can be over, and she doesn't want it to be. But the method hasn't been working.

Then yesterday she decided that she wanted to have some turns giving me a reading lesson. She was actually able to construct a few CVC words on her own for me to read, and it seemed much lower-stress for her than trying to decode my words. So I decided I was going about it all wrong.

Today when she wanted a reading lesson, I took the Magnadoodle and drew three pictures: a sun, a car, and a cup. "Pick one of these words, and let's see if you can write it." I gave her the option of having me write the letters or doing it herself, and she decided to do it herself.

In just a couple of minutes, the Magnadoodle read SON CAR CUP. No hesitation, no reluctance to try, no difficulty isolating the letter sounds. She went on to successfully write MAN and PIN in response to additional pictures before getting tired.

Looks like I've had the whole phonics thing backwards. I should've offered her writing lessons.

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Molly learned all her letters and all their sounds very young, but couldn't actually string them together into words for a long while after that. If you pointed at the word "letter" she could give you the sound of each letter, but blurring them together into a word -- no way. She liked writing, but was too much of a perfectionist to make up her own spellings; she would sit there and insist that I spell each and every word, slowly, so she could write it.

This sounds exactly like Alex. I do wonder what she'd be able to do if she were more willing to risk making a mistake, but she's very reluctant to try things that she thinks might be hard.

I had her read something out loud to me, and she hated reading out loud because there were words she didn't know and she STILL didn't actually know how to sound stuff out.

Huh. So Molly seems to have learned how to read in a non-phonics-based way? That's so interesting. Do you have a sense of what strategies she used? Phonics seem to be alien enough to Alex that I've wondered if she might learn to read a different way, except that I don't know what that way might be. Michael and I were both very early readers who didn't get phonics instruction before we learned to read, but I can't remember ever not being able to read so I have no idea how I learned.

[naomikritzer]

We read to her a lot, and as best as I can tell she learned to read by looking at the page as I read and memorizing what words looked like. Probably her long period of writing by demanding that I spell things out for her was a component here. She did start writing independently in kindergarten and did hit the point of willingness to come up with a spelling on her own.

In reading about the phonics vs. whole language wars, I read something that suggested that whole-language methods were developed based on the fact that many early readers learned to read via word-recognition. FWIW, I remember sounding out books for about a week and then never really sounding things out, ever again. It was like a key turned in a door and I could read.

Alex recently turned four, right? At four, neither Molly nor Kiera could read at ALL. Molly could print some of the letters with marginal legibility and that was it.

Incidentally, I mention this because it might amuse you: we never, ever "hothoused" Molly and I have philosophical objections to the very idea (play is the work! kids learn through play! etc.) Molly, however, does not share our objections -- in fact, she's made it clear she thinks our attitude is lazy and irresponsible -- and a fair amount of Kiera's early literacy is probably the result of Molly persistently playing Kindergarten with her and trying to teach her to read and do math. My kids amuse the heck out of me some days.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"In reading about the phonics vs. whole language wars, I read something that suggested that whole-language methods were developed based on the fact that many early readers learned to read via word-recognition. FWIW, I remember sounding out books for about a week and then never really sounding things out, ever again. It was like a key turned in a door and I could read."

First off, something I think is obvious, but still needs saying: I think "wars" of that nature are silly, mostly because humans are so variable that it's tough for there to be any "one best way."

But, as someone who started learning Mandarin 10 weeks ago, phonics strikes me as remarkably culture-centric. Such a thing is only possible if one's native language uses a phonetic alphabet in the first place. For a good chunk of the world, that's not an option. Yet, strangely, they manage to read anyway. :)

As for my own experience (here comes the anecdotal tie-in), the standard story in my family is I taught myself to read at about age two. Apparently the big push came from a boomlet in TV commercials at the time that used text lines which were read out loud in voice-over. I was reading Time magazine by age six or so -- a great-aunt commented on how even the pictures alone in Time could entertain someone my age, and my mom had me read to her to show it wasn't the pictures. Both mom and dad were teachers, and taught what was then (late 1960s) called "see-and-say," which googling implies is the "whole language" school.

[faxpaladin.livejournal.com]

...and noticing what the TV commercials were doing is what led to Sesame Street.

[shandra.livejournal.com]

I learned the same way you two did, and I still mispronounce things - I'm not the best decoder in some ways, and I also got a lot of words in my head the wrong way before I really encountered them out loud. I also did a three-year stint in reading support and special ed so I can say with some experience (if not really expertise) that a) fluent readers don't use phonics to actually read - it's way too slow. Phonics is a means to an end and an approach for new words; it's definitely not the end. And b) in my maybe not so humble opinion, while phonics seems to work for more kids than it doesn't, there were a significant percentage of kids I worked with that simply did not learn to read via phonics. They built up a core sight vocabulary by learning the whole words, either just via being read to or via visual dictionaries and that kind of thing, and then once they had acquired enough sight vocab, that would propel them over into actually reading. And really if you are paying attention most kids eventually use a combination of the two to tip over anyway. It's pretty fascinating stuff. Montessori teaches phonics in part by writing, before/alongside decoding.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

I've been having a lot of discussions with torontoteacher (who doesn't actually post on her LJ) about this. She teaches Reading Recovery, and did a Master's in something to do with teaching reading. El Capitano is very enamoured of getting the WML to sound things out, even when the things are not very phonetic. Thing is, the sounding-out tool isn't always the best one, because reading is what torontoteacher calls "a meaning-making process." We don't learn to read letters, really, and we don't actually learn to read words, per se. We learn to read for meaning. So the letters and the words are building blocks for meaning.

Part of reading is learning to sound out words, but the jump for sounder-outer kids comes when they can connect the word they've sounded out to one they know. So you can get them to sound out "cup" or "cat," for example, because they're phonetically simple, but more because the kids can then connect those simple sounds to something they know. They may have less success sounding out something like "bellow," even if they can tell it ought to sound like "yellow," if they've never heard the word "bellow" before—they've no meaning to connect it to. Or they may sound out "bellow," but because it means nothing to them, they won't really be reading it.

Guessing from first-and-last letters and context are part of the process of learning to read, and are among the ways we build meaning. So's plain old memory: once we've encountered a word often enough, we just remember it. Sounding things out is also a cool tool, except that parents who can remember only being told to sound things out tend to belabour it, and it's not as universally useful as we sometimes think.

[naomikritzer]

Oh YEAH. This drives me crazy when I'm working with the slow readers in my daughter's class as a volunteer. The teacher has me sit and listen to kids read, and there is this particular series of phonics books that she likes them to work through. The problem is that the books will focus on the sound, and on short, simple words, to the exclusion of useful meaning. So for instance, they'll use the word "pal" instead of "friend." Most of the first graders I've worked with have clearly been baffled by the word "pal." It's not really in common usage among kids right now. Even worse was "nab" instead of "grab" because god forbid we have a blended consonant in that book. The word "nab" was central to that particular story (I'm using the word "story" really loosely here) so the kid's unfamiliarity with the word was a really big issue.

They're also lame books. And they are full of white children, whereas my daughter's school is extremely diverse. Unless she insists I usually pick a different collection of easy readers to have the kids practice on.

What I would really love to see: a graphic novel series that have good stories, a truly diverse cast, and a mostly simple vocabulary but augmented with words that are both reasonably meaty and yet not too hard to sound out when they're unfamiliar, so that kids could practice both their sight reading and their decoding skills. And they'd WANT to because these books would actually be GOOD.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"They're also lame books. And they are full of white children, whereas my daughter's school is extremely diverse. Unless she insists I usually pick a different collection of easy readers to have the kids practice on."

Daniel Handler, who transcribes the Lemony Snicket books {cough}, had an interview on the radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge where he mentions how crummy children's books are. I wrote about it (http://notthatkindofoperation.blogspot.com/2007/09/lemony-snickets-insight-to-unfortunate.html) in my business blog, and the strange connection to business writing more generally.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Have you read Jim Trelease's The Read-Aloud Handbook? He's an eloquent advocate of reading vivid, interesting books to kids rather than using leveled phonics readers. He points out that, first of all, it's hard to learn to read if you haven't been exposed to a wide vocabulary and a lot of good examples of how sentences are put together. And second, kids who have mainly encountered reading via phonics readers have no motivation to learn to read. Because that stuff is BORING.

I think it is important for kids to learn phonic decoding skills, but you need to be very careful that you provide them with opportunities to experience the forest, not just an endless series of trees.