Reading education

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A variety of different methods of teaching reading have been advocated in English speaking countries.

The debate is often more political than objective. Parties often divide into two camps which refuse to accept each others terminology or frame of reference. Despite this both camps often incorporate aspects of the other's methods. Both camps accuse the other of causing failure to learn to read and write.

Currently (2007) the preferred names of the two camps are Whole Language and Phonics.

Contents 1 "Whole Word" or "Sight Word" 2 Initial teaching alphabet 3 Phonics 4 Print exposure 5 Other Linguistic Models of English Spelling 6 Practical application 7 See also 8 External links

[edit] "Whole Word" or "Sight Word"

The "Sight Word" method is not synonymous with "Whole Language" approach, but is often considered to be part of it.

The "Sight Word" method also appears prominently in avowedly "Phonic" teaching such as the National Curriculum for England & Wales , where words that do not fit the rules of phonics are placed on a list of sight words for rote memorization.

Some advocates claim that it is the same method used to acquire literacy in languages such as Chinese, assumed by the advocates to be based on ideograms. This claim would appear to be ignorant of the structure and semantic relationships of Chinese characters.

Students learning English using this method memorize the appearance of words, or learn to recognize words by looking at the first and last letter from rigidly selected vocabularies in progressive texts (such as The Cat in the Hat). Often this method is taught by slides or cards with a picture next to a word, teaching children to associate the whole word with its meaning. Often preliminary results show children taught with this method have higher reading levels than children learning phonics, because they learn to automatically recognise a small selection of words. However later tests demonstrate that literacy development becomes stunted when hit with longer and more complex words later. However, they can learn the 5,000 most common words in roughly three years which is sufficient for basic literacy. The classic implementation of this approach was the McGill reading curriculum used to teach most baby boomers to read in the U.S.

The method was invented by Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, the director of the American Asylum at Hartford in the 1830's. It was designed for the education of the Deaf and Dumb by juxtaposing a word, with a picture. In 1830, Gallaudet provided a description of his method to the American Annals of Education which included teaching children to recognize a total of 50 sight words written on cards and by 1837 the method was adopted by the Boston Primary School Committee. Horace Mann the then Secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts, USA favored the method and it soon became the dominant method state wide. By 1844 the defects of the new method became apparent to Boston schoolmasters, that they issued an attack against it urging a return to an intensive, systematic phonics. Again Dr. Samuel Orton, a neuropathologist in Iowa in 1929 sought the cause of children's reading problems and concluded that their problems were being caused by the new sight method of teaching reading. (His results were published in the February 1929 issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology, “The Sight Reading Method of Teaching Reading as a Source of Reading Disability.”)

[edit] Initial teaching alphabet

This method was designed to overcome the fact that English orthography has a many to many relationship between graphemes and phonemes. The method fell in to disuse because children still had to learn the Latin alphabet and the conventional English spellings in order to integrate with society outside of school. It also recreated the problem of dialect dependent spelling, which the standardisation of spelling had been created to eliminate.

[edit] Phonics

"Phonics" is distinct from the linguistics terms "phonetics" and "phonetic", although there have been deliberate attempts to obfuscate the terms within debates on primary education.

Phonics refers to an instructional design for teaching children to read. The method teaches sounds to be associated with letters and combinations of letters. The applicability of the Alphabetic principle to English is disputed by opponents of phonics.[1]

There are several different varieties of phonics. "Embeded Phonics" is often seen within teaching schemes belonging to the "Whole Language" camp, whereas "Synthetic Phonics" and "Analytic Phonics"[2] are most commonly seen as rivals for dominance within the "Phonics" camp. The differences are principally between ways of presenting information, rather than the information itself. Embeded phonics advocates mini-lessons embeded within other subjects, whereas the Synthetic and Analytic varieties advocate exercises and standardized tests.

Generally, phonics instructs students to memorize sound-letter associations. They learn to sound out and then blend sound combinations to produce words. This method requires direct teaching of "sounding out" methods, and memorization of pronunciation rules.

N.B. Phonics does not use the term "blend" in the linguistic sense of the term. There are many instances where phonics uses terms that are homophones of linguistic terminology, but with very different meanings.

One method used by some teachers to develop students' ability to sound out words and blend sounds is Elkonin boxes.

Samuel Orton produced what he claimed to be "the most perfect phonetic system", the Orton phonography, originally developed to teach brain-damaged adults to read. Orton described 73 "phonograms", or letter combinations, and 23 rules for spelling and pronunciation. By following these rules one can correctly pronounce and spell all but 123 of the 13,000 most common English words. The Orton-Gillingham corporation market products products and training derived from the work of Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham.

Advocates of phonics cite the large reading and spelling vocabulary that phonetic students can theoretically obtain. However, critics of phonetic methods talk of students that fail at each one of the method's many mandatory skills. Almost all students learn letter-sounds. Many students find it difficult to "blend" the letter sounds to produce sensible speech. Some students also fail to apply rules to select letter sounds. Also, critics charge that in phonetic programs, students can learn to pronounce a sentence without ever learning to understand it. The same holds true for "look say".

[edit] Print exposure

Print exposure is simply the amount of time a child or person spends being visually aware of the written word (reading)--whether that be through newspapers, magazines, books, journals, scientific papers, or more. Research has shown that the amount of print material that a child accesses has deep cognitive consequences. In addition, the act of reading itself, for the most part irrespective of what is being read, increases the achievement difference among children.

Studies have shown that the most critical factor in a child's development of vocabulary is not through oral language, but through reading.^{[citation needed]} Research has shown repeated times that children who are exposed to large amounts of print have more success in reading and have a much larger vocabulary to draw from than children who see less print.^{[citation needed]} The average conversations among college graduates, spouses or adult friends contain less rare (advanced) words than the average preschool reading book. Other print sources have increasingly higher amounts of rare words, from children's books, to adult books, to popular magazines, newspapers, and scientific articles (listed in increasing level of difficulty). Television, even adult news shows, do not have the same level of rare words that children's books do.

The issue is that oral language is very repetitive. To learn to read effectively a child needs to have a large vocabulary. Without this, when the child does read they stumble over words that they do not know, and have trouble following the idea of the sentence. This leads to frustration and a dislike of reading. When a child is faced with this difficulty he or she is less likely to read, thus further inhibiting the growth of their vocabulary. This cycle leads to the "rich get richer, poor get poorer" phenomena known as the Matthew Effect.

Children who enjoy reading do it more frequently and improve their vocabulary. A study of out-of-school reading of fifth graders, found that a student in the 50th percentile read books about 5 minutes a day, while a student in the 20th percentile read books for less than a minute a day. This same study found that the amount of time a child in the 90th percentile spent reading in two days, was the amount of time a child in the 10th percentile spent reading all year.

Print exposure can also be a big factor in learning English as a second language. Book flood experiments are an example of this. The book flood program brought books in English to the classroom. Through focusing their English language learning on reading books instead of endless worksheets the teachers were able to improve the rate at which their students learned English.

"Reading Can Make You Smarter" by Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich; National Academy of Elementary School Principles

[edit] Other Linguistic Models of English Spelling

Attempts to make English spelling behave phonetically have given rise to various campaigns for spelling reform, none have been generally accepted. Opponents of simplified spellings point to the impossibility of phonetic spelling for a language with many diverse accents and dialects.

Linguists documenting the sounds of speech use various special symbols, of which the International Phonetic Alphabet is the most widely known. Linguistics makes a distinction between a phone and phoneme, and between phonology and phonetics. The study of words and their structure is morphology, and the smallest units of meaning are morphemes. The study of the relationship between words present in the language at one time is synchronic etymology, part of descriptive linguistics, and the study of word origins and evolution is diachronic etymology, part of historical linguistics.

English orthography gives priority first to morphology, then to etymology, and lastly to phonetics. Thus the spelling of a word is dependent principally upon its structure, and its relationship to other words. It is usually necessary to know the meaning of a word in order to spell it correctly, and its meaning will be indicated by the similarity to words of the same meaning and family.

English uses a 26 letter Latin alphabet, but the number of graphemes is expanded by several digraphs, trigraphs, and tetragraphs, while the letter "q" is not used as a grapheme by itself, only in the digraph "qu".

Each grapheme may represent a limited number of phonemes depending on etymology and location in the word. Likewise each phoneme may be represented by a limited number of graphemes. Some letters are not part of any grapheme, but function as etymological markers. Graphemes do not cross morpheme boundaries.

Morphemes are spelt consistently, following rules inflection and word-formation, and allow readers and writers to understand and produce words they have not previously encountered.

Examples of strict linguistic teaching methods include the Real Spelling approach.

[edit] Practical application

In practice, many many children are exposed to both "Phonic" and "Whole Language" methods, coupled with reading programs that combine both elements. For example, the extremely popular book, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, by Siegfried Engelman, et al. (ISBN 0-671-63198-5), teaches pronunciation and simple phonics, then supplements it with progressive texts and practice in directed reading. The end result of a mixed method is a casually phonetic student, a much better first-time pronouncer and speller, who still also has look-say acquisition, quick fluency and comprehension. Using an eclectic method, students can select their preferred learning style. This lets all students make progress, yet permits a motivated student to use and recognize the best traits of each method.

Speed reading continues where basic education stops, and teaches the student to read multiple words at once, even whole pages at once^{[citation needed]}. Usually after some practice reading speed can be increased fivefold^{[citation needed]}. At this speed, it is necessary to stop any "talk to myself" action in your brain, because this would slow you down^{[citation needed]}. There are various speed-reading techniques. Hopify is a GPL tool to practice speed-reading.

However, speed reading does not guarantee comprehension or retention of what was read.

Readability indicates the ease of understanding or comprehension due to the style of writing. Reading recovery is a method for helping students learn to read.

[edit] See also

Dolch Word List

[edit] External links

• Reading Rockets
• Helping the Underachiever in Reading. ERIC Digest.
• Reading Recovery. ERIC Digest.
• Helping Underachieving Boys Read Well and Often. ERIC Digest.
• Motivating Low Performing Adolescent Readers. ERIC Digest.
• Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself
• Don Potter's Education Page
• The Phonics Page
• Starfall - free software to help kids learn to read from ABCs to full reading