Reading education
Encyclopedia
Reading education
is the process by which individuals are taught to derive meaning from text.
Government-funded scientific research on reading and reading instruction began in the U.S. in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers began publishing findings based on converging evidence from multiple studies. However, these findings have been slow to move into typical classroom practice.
in which the text is written, and the ability to recognize and process printed text. Each of these competencies is likewise dependent on lower level skills and cognitive abilities.
Children who readily understand spoken language and who are able to fluently and easily recognize printed words do not usually have difficulty with reading comprehension
. However, students must be proficient in both competencies to read well; difficulty in either domain undermines the overall reading process. At the conclusion of reading, children should be able to retell the story in their own words including characters, setting, and the events of the story. Reading researchers define a skilled reader as one who can understand written text as well as they can understand the same passage if spoken.
There is some debate as to whether print recognition requires the ability to perceive printed text and translate it into spoken language, or rather to translate printed text directly into meaningful symbolic models and relationships. The existence of speed reading, and its typically high comprehension rate would suggest that the translation into verbal form as an intermediate to understanding is not a prerequisite for effective reading comprehension. This aspect of reading is the crux of much of the reading debate.
, published late 1680s. There was little consideration for how best to teach children to read or how to assess reading comprehension.
Not until the mid-19th century did this approach change significantly. Educators, in particular Horace Mann
, began to advocate changes in reading instructional methods. He observed that children were bored and "death-like" at school, and that instruction needed to engage children's interest in the reading material by teaching them to read whole words. The McGuffey Readers
(1836) were the most popular of these more engaging graded readers. In the mid-19th century, Rebecca Smith Pollard
developed a sequential reading program of intensive synthetic phonics
, complete with a separate teacher's manual and spelling
and reading
books.
From the 1890s to at least 1910, A. L. Burt of New York and other publishing companies published series of books aimed at young readers, using simple language to retell longer classics. Mrs J. C. Gorham produced three such works, Gulliver's Travels in words of one syllable (1896), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland retold in words of one syllable
(1905), and Black Beauty retold in words of one syllable (1905). In the UK, Routledge published a similar series between 1900 and 1910.
The meaning-based curriculum did not dominate reading instruction until the second quarter of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, reading programs became very focused on comprehension and taught children to read whole words by sight. Phonics
was not to be taught except sparingly and as a tool to be used as a last resort.
In the 1950s Rudolf Flesch
wrote a book called Why Johnny Can't Read, a passionate argument in favor of teaching children to read using phonics
. Addressed to the mothers and fathers of America, he also hurled severe criticism at publishers' decisions that he claimed were motivated by profit, and he questioned the honesty and intelligence of experts, schools, and teachers. The book was on the bestseller list for 30 weeks and spurred a hue and cry in general population. It also polarized the reading debate among educators, researchers, and parents.
This polarization continues to the present time. In the 1970s an instructional philosophy called whole language
(which explicitly de-emphasizes teaching phonics) was introduced, and it became the primary method of reading
instruction in the 1980s and 1990s. During this time, researchers (such as the National Institute of Health) conducted studies showing that early reading acquisition
depends on the understanding of the connection between sounds and letters.
is said to be alphabetic if it uses symbols to represent individual language sounds. In contrast, syllabic writing systems (such as Japanese
kana
) and Chinese hanzi use a symbol to represent a single syllable .
Alphabetic writing systems vary in complexity. For example, Spanish
is an orthography
in the Latin alphabet
ic Writing system
that has a nearly perfect one-to-one correspondence of symbols to individual sounds. In Spanish
a shallow orthography, most of the time words are spelled the way they sound, that is, word spellings are almost always regular; . English a deep orthography, on the other hand, is far more complex in that it does not have a one-to-one correspondence between symbols and sounds. English has individual sounds that can be represented by more than one symbol or symbol combination. For example, the long |a| sound can be represented by a-consonant
-e as in ate, -ay as in hay, -ea as in steak, -ey as in they, -ai as in pain, and -ei as in vein. In addition, there are many words with irregular spelling and many homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings and often different spellings as well). Pollack Pickeraz (1963) asserted that there are 45 phonemes in the English language
, and that the 26 letters of the English alphabet can represent the 45 phonemes in about 350 ways.
It should be noted that the irregularity of English spelling is largely an artifact of how the language developed.
English is a West Germanic
language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian
and Old Saxon
dialects brought to Britain
by Germanic settlers and Roman auxiliary troops from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands
in the 5th century. One of these Germanic tribes were the Angles
, who may have come from Angeln
, and Bede
wrote that their whole nation came to Britain, leaving their former land empty. The names 'England' (or 'Aenglaland') and English are derived from the name of this tribe.
The Anglo Saxons began invading around 449 AD from the regions of Denmark
and Jutland
, Before the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England the native population spoke Brythonic
, a Celtic
language Although the most significant changes in dialect occurred after the Norman invasion
of 1066, the language retained its name and the pre-Norman invasion dialect is now known as Old English. Germanic language a constituent part of Indo-European
language system; and it has substantial influences from Latin
, Greek
, and French
, among others. Over its history, English adopted vocabulary from many languages, and the imported words usually follow the spelling patterns of their language of origin. Advanced English phonics instruction includes studying words according to their origin, and how to determine the correct spelling of a word using its language of origin.
Clearly, the complexity of English orthography
makes it more difficult for children to learn decoding and encoding rules, and more difficult for teachers to teach them. However, effective word recognition relies on the basic understanding that letters represent the sounds of spoken language, that is, word recognition relies on the reader's understanding of the alphabetic principle
.
In the United States, 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.
Sub-lexical reading
Sub-lexical reading, involves teaching reading by associating characters or groups of characters with sounds or by using Phonics
learning and teaching methodology. Sometimes argued to be in competition with whole language methods.
Lexical reading
Lexical reading involve acquiring words or phrases without attention to the characters or groups of characters that compose them or by using Whole language
learning and teaching methodology. Sometimes argued to be in competition with phonics methods, and that the whole language approach tends to impair learning how to spell.
Historically, the two camps have been called Whole Language
and Phonics
, although the Whole Language instructional method has also been referred to as "literature-based reading program" and "integrated language arts curriculum". Currently (2007), the differing perspectives are frequently referred to as "balanced reading instruction" (Whole Language) and "scientifically-based reading instruction" (Phonics).
Phonics
advocates assert that, to read a large vocabulary of words correctly and fluently requires detailed knowledge of the structure of the English language, particularly spelling-speech patterns. Whole Language
advocates assert that students do not need to be able to sound out words, but should look at unknown words and figure them out using context.
" 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 ideogram
s. The Chinese writing system
is however a complex logographic system with many morphosyllabic elements particularly in phonetic markers for frequently used characters. 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. This is disputed. Following almost a decade of hands-on research by Dr. Diane McGuinness
’ and three associates and a study of the last 25 years of reported research on teaching methods, she reports (three times for her emphasis):
Dr. Rudolf Flesch reported in his 1981 book Why Johnny Still Can’t Read:
Although the number of words taught by the whole word method may be different today, Dr. McGuinness’ studies shows that unless the students learn phonics (on their own or from help outside the classroom) in addition to their whole word training, they cannot learn more than about 2,000 words by sight alone. In any case, if the students know only 3,000 to 5,000 common words, they read so poorly that they do not like to read, seldom do so, and—-in most cases—-cannot hold an above-poverty-level wage job. The classic implementation of this approach was the McGill reading curriculum used to teach most baby boomer
s to read in the U.S.
The sight-word (whole language) method was invented by Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, the director of the American Asylum at Hartford in the 1830s. It was designed for the education of the Deaf 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 so 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
.”)
s. 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.
" is distinct from the linguistics
terms "phoneme
" and "phonetics
", which refer to sounds and the study of sounds respectively.
There are several different varieties of phonics.
Synthetic phonics
and analytic phonics http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/Database/Primary/phonicsdef.html are different but popular methods of teaching phonics. Synthetic and analytic phonics approaches both generally involve explicit, carefully sequenced instruction that teach a large body of phonics patterns.
The Orton phonography
, originally developed to teach brain-damaged adults to read, is a form of phonics instruction that blends synthetic and analytic components. Orton described 73 "phonograms", or letter combinations, and 23 rules for spelling and pronunciation which Orton claimed would allow the reader to correctly pronounce and spell all but 123 of the 13,000 most common English words.
During reading workshop, the teacher models a whole-group strategy lesson and then gives students large blocks of time to read and to practice the strategy. This practice can occur independently, with partners, or in small groups with a book or text chosen by the student. The teacher moves around the room and confers with the students about their reading. The teacher can meet with small, flexible groups to provide additional needs-based instruction. At the end of the workshop the whole groups comes together to share their learning.
The following is a list of the seven important strategies that all readers must be able to apply to text in order to read and understand content. The seven strategies are:
1. Making Connections;
2. Creating Mental Images;
3. Making Inferences/Drawing Conclusions;
4. Asking Questions;
5. Determining What Is Important;
6. Synthesizing; and
7. Monitoring Comprehension and Meaning.
Harvey, S., & Goudvis, A. (2007). Strategies That Work Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement. Portland: Stenhouse.
Miller, D. (2002). Reading with Meaning; Teaching Comprehension in the Primary Grades. Portland: Stenhouse.
Serafini, F. (2008). Workshop and Conference Handouts. Retrieved March 26, 2011, from Dr. Serafini's Page: http://www.frankserafini.com/MainPages/websites.html
instruction generally begins in pre-Kindergarten or Kindergarten. But other US educators consider this reading approach to be completely backward for very young children, arguing that the children must learn how to decode the words in a story through phonics before they can analyze the story itself.
During the last century comprehension lessons usually comprised students answering teachers' questions, writing responses to questions on their own, or both. The whole group version of this practice also often included "round robin reading," wherein teachers called on individual students to read a portion of the text (and sometimes following a set order). In the last quarter of the 20th century, evidence accumulated that the read-test methods assessed comprehension more than they taught it. The associated practice of "round robin" reading has also been questioned and eliminated by many educators.
Instead of using the prior read-test method, research studies have concluded that there are much more effective ways to teach comprehension. Much work has been done in the area of teaching novice readers a bank of "reading strategies," or tools to interpret and analyze text. There is not a definitive set of strategies, but common ones include summarizing what you have read, monitoring your reading to make sure it is still making sense, and analyzing the structure of the text (e.g., the use of headings in science text). Some programs teach students how to self monitor whether they are understanding and provide students with tools for fixing comprehension problems.
Instruction in comprehension strategy use often involves the gradual release of responsibility, wherein teachers initially explain and model strategies. Over time, they give students more and more responsibility for using the strategies until they can use them independently. This technique is generally associated with the idea of self-regulation
and reflects social cognitive theory
, originally conceptualized by Albert Bandura
.
-- and they have had no dyslexia. None of their graduates are real or functional illiterates, and no one who meets their older students could ever guess the age at which they first learned to read or write. In a similar form students learn all the subjects, techniques and skills in these schools.
Ever since alphabets were first invented, alphabetic languages have used a letter or letter combination to represent the sounds in the words. The easiest alphabetic languages to learn are those that use one specific grapheme (a single letter or a specific letter combination) for each specific phoneme (the smallest sound in a language or dialect used to distinguish syllables or words). English uses at least 1,768 graphemes to represent the 40 English phonemes. Although these 40 English phonemes could be spelled with 26 single letters and 14 digraphs (two letter combinations), they are spelled with all 26 single letters in the alphabet and at least 153 two-letter graphemes, 98 three-letter graphemes, 14 four-letter grapheme, and 3 five-letter graphemes, for a total of at least 294 different graphemes. This is less than the 1,768 mentioned above because every English phoneme is spelled with more than one grapheme. The number of spellings of the phonemes varies from at least four (for the TH phoneme in words such at this) to at least 60 spellings of the U phoneme in words such as nutty-—which is exactly what English spelling really is.
Some phonics spelling advocates claim that English is more than 80 percent phonetic. This is only possible, however, if you allow more than one grapheme for a phoneme. If you allow only one grapheme for every phoneme as logic and ease-of-learning demands, English is only a little more than 20 percent phonetic. The problem is that there is absolutely no way of knowing which word is spelled phonemically and which is not. There are no invariable spelling rules in English—-every rule has exceptions and some of the exceptions have exceptions. Edward Rondthaler of the American Language Academy in a personal letter to Bob Cleckler, author of Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, stated, “A 1986 round table of British linguists called by eminent scholars to discuss the underlying pattern of English spelling concluded, not surprisingly, that only one rule in our spelling is not watered down with exceptions: No word in English ends with the letter V.” Since Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary includes the words rev and spiv there are therefore no invariable spelling rules.
In addition, Dr. Diane McGuinness’ book Why Our Children Can’t Read explains the complex logic that is required to learn to read English. Unlike many alphabetic languages, there are tens of thousands of different syllables in English, with sixteen different syllable patterns in English: (C=consonant, V=vowel) CV, CCV, CCCV, CVC, CCVC, CCCVC, CVCC, CVCCC, CCVCC, CCVCCC, CCCVCCC, CCCVCC, VCCC, VCC, VC, and V. There are two or more syllables in most English words. Each syllable can have one of the sixteen syllable patterns. If each vowel and each consonant in each of these patterns consistently represented the same phoneme (one-to-one mapping), there would be nothing in the logic of these syllables that would be beyond the abilities of most four- or five-year-olds. But they do not. English
spelling
also has one-to-many and many-to-one mapping. This requires a type of logic that most children do not develop until they are eleven or twelve years old.
The types of logic required for one-to-many and many-to-one mapping are: (1) the logic of “classes” (categories where objects or events that are similar are grouped) and “relations” (where objects share some features but not all features, e.g. all poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles) and (2) “propositional logic,” which involves combining both the classes and relations types of logic
. This requires the ability to think of the same item in more than one way at the same time. These combinations require the use of relational terms such as “and,” “or,” “not,” “if—then,” and “if and only if” in formal statements of propositional logic, e.g. if an H follows the T, then say /TH/ as in thin or then; but if any other letter or no letter follows the T, then say /T/ as in top or ant.
The eyes of the fluent reader skip easily over a multitude of traps for the beginner. Most fluent readers who learned to read as a child have long since forgotten the difficulty they had in learning. Due to the difficulty of English spelling there are basically three ways of learning to read (a more precise explanation of the time required for learning is in the section “Time required to learn to read English
vs. other alphabetic languages” below):
As stated in the Whole Word method section above, the human mind cannot remember more than about 2,000 symbols,. Students of whole-word-only or whole-language
-only teaching cannot become fluent readers unless they also learn phonics-—either on their own or with help outside the classroom—-as a tool to help them “decode” new words. When phonics knowledge or contextual clues do not reveal the word they must consult a dictionary or ask someone.
The problem is that learning words individually until one knows enough words to be able to “get by” in life as well as they should—-as well as is required in our increasingly complex society-—takes much longer than is required in alphabetic languages. Although some phonics
advocates have recently designed much-improved methods of teaching phonics, learning to read in these programs still requires a year or more longer than a perfect one-grapheme-for-one-phoneme spelling system.
The problem with whole word (or whole language
) only type of teaching is that most of today’s adults cannot hold an above-poverty
-level wage job if they only know 2,000 common words (or perhaps as many as 5,000 if they have a superb memory) they learned by sight in the first four grades in school. Although there are several ways of determining functional illiteracy
, due to the fact that very few U.S. adults can afford to accept a job that pays less than they are capable of earning, the average yearly earnings is the best method—or certainly one of the best methods—of determining functional illiteracy. The most comprehensive study of U.S. functional illiteracy ever commissioned by the U.S. government proves that 46 to 51 percent of individual adults earn significantly less than poverty level wages. This percentage of families is not in poverty only because most families have more than one employed adult and most low-income families receive governmental and charitable assistance.Irwin S. Kirsch, et al., Adult Literacy in America (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 2002), pp. xvi, 63, 65, and 66, available for free inspection and download from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf. This is a 199 page report on the most comprehensive study of U.S. adult literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government. It consisted of lengthy interviews of 26,700 U.S. adults. The interviewees were statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in a dozen states across the U.S. to be representative of the U.S. population as a whole. It used statistically rigorous methods to ensure accuracy and was reviewed by an outside testing agency before it was released. No other persons had access to the study before it was released. The same group who prepared this study did a less statistically rigorous study with a slightly smaller database of interviewees and issued a report in 2003 that showed little or no statistically significant improvement from the earlier report. It is available at http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF.
is a West Germanic language
which originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialect
s brought to Britain
by Germanic invaders from various parts of what is now northwest Germany
and the northern Netherlands
.
Prior to the mid-eighteenth century writers spelled the words the way they sounded, but a specific spelling of the phonemes had not been settled upon. As a result, for example, Shakespeare often spelled a phoneme
two different ways in the same paragraph
in his original writings. To complicate the matter further, the early publishers hired many foreign typographers because originally there were very few British
typographers. These foreign typographers often knew little or nothing about English words. In order to avoid the difficulty of adding small lead pieces between each word in a line of type to justify the right margin, they would often add a “silent E” or double the letters in some of the words. The standardisation of English spelling, which began in the eighteenth century, led to the fossilisation of many of these consistencies and further consistencies arose from a tendency to preserve the spelling of foreign loanwords.
Due to the changes in pronunciation, inconsistencies are more pronounced today. According to Edward Rondthaler
and Edward Lias, "[S]pelling is the only branch of learning that has undergone no serious update or repair since before the 16th century. Other disciplines receive continuous updating. But not spelling."
In comparison, most U.S. students require two and one-half years or more to learn to read well enough to succeed in school. As Rudolf Flesch explains, “Generally speaking, students in our schools are about two years behind students of the same age in other countries. This is not a wild accusation of the American
educational system; it is an established, generally known fact. . . . What accounts for these two years? Usually the assumption seems to be that in other countries children and adolescents are forced to study harder. Now that I have looked into this matter of reading, I think the explanation is much simpler and more reasonable: Americans
take two years longer to learn how to read—-and reading, of course, is the basis for achievement in all other subjects.
Frank C. Laubach believes even more time is lost: “It is estimated that two and one-half years are lost in the student’s studies because of our chaotic spelling.”
Perhaps most convincing of all is this quote: “In November 1974 Professor Durr reported on a study trip to Russia
in the pages of The Reading Teacher. . . . He found that first-graders are taught to read 46 of the 130 national languages of Russia
. . . . All children in the USSR are given an ABC book and start to learn from it the day school begins. They learn at first about a letter a day and what it stands for, and gradually proceed to syllables and words. By December 15 of their first year all Russian children are through with their ABC books and start reading simple stories and poems. There is no further instruction in reading as such after the end of first grade.”
. In teaching adults to read in languages other than English
, he never once mentions being unable to teach some of his students to become fluent readers. When he makes the statement that “Over 90 percent of the world's languages have one sound for a letter and one letter for a sound. In such languages learning to read is swift and easy, requiring from one to twenty days.” it implies that they all learned to read. It follows that the literacy rates in non-English speaking countries is—-more than anything else-—a measure of the percentage of the population that has had reading training.
Unlike some other nations, which do not enforce universal education for all citizens, U.S. children are required to be in school until their mid-teens. It is in the short-term best interests of politicians and educators to believe the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the U.S. literacy
rate is 90 percent or more. There is not necessarily any conscious deception, but a brief study of how the Census Bureau made this determination will reveal why the reported figure can be so much higher than the true literacy rate.
The Census Bureau has included questions about literacy in each census from 1840 to 1930. Many of those most knowledgeable about U.S. literacy believe that literacy began to drop in the early 1960s and has been declining ever since.Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education (New York: The Free Press, 1993), p. 1 and elsewhere; David Barton, The Myth of Separation (Aledo, Texas: Wallbuilder Press, 1992), p. 212 and elsewhere. (See also pp. 209–216.); William J. Bennett, Ph.D., The Devaluing of America (New York: Touchstone, 1992), p. 55; William J. Bennett, Ph.D., The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators (New York: Touchstone, 1994), pp. 82–84. The Census Bureau reintroduced questions about literacy in 1970 at the insistence of the military.
In the 1970 census the only question asked about literacy
was on grade completion. The Census Bureau considered those with fifth-grade completion or higher to be literate. A little more than 5 percent reported less than a fifth-grade education. For some reason, the Census Bureau decided that 80 percent of these could read, so they reported 99 percent literacy.
In 1980 the Census Bureau mailed out forms and based most of their calculations upon written responses to questions about grade completion. In addition they used a small sample of home visits and telephone interviews. They asked people what grade they had completed. If the answer was “Less than fifth grade,” they asked if the person could read and write. As explained in Jonathan Kozol’s book Illiterate America
, this technique of determining literacy is almost certain to underestimate illiteracy.U.S. Census Bureau methods of determining illiteracy is almost certain to underestimate the level of illiteracy for the following reasons:
Because U.S. schools since the 1930s have mostly taught by the whole word method (or the whole language method) and due to new time-consuming pleasurable activities and negative influences explained below, roughly 46 to 51 percent of U.S. adults are now functionally illiterate. See Irwin S. Kirsch, et al., Adult Literacy in America http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf. pp. xvi, 63, 65, and 66 and http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF. Few if any non-English speaking nations use the whole word teaching method.They do not have to; phonics works for their language because it follows the alphabetic principle: the words are almost entirely spelled as they sound.
Children who are exposed to large amounts of print often have more success in reading and have a larger vocabulary to draw from than children who see less print. 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.
; 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. Several distinguished scholars, however, have thoroughly disproven all reasonable objections to spelling reform, including this objection. See, for example, Dictionary of Simplified American Spelling. Thomas Lounsbury, LL.D., L.H.D., emeritus professor of English, Yale University, presented a devastating rebuttal to all reasonable objections to spelling reform in his book English Spelling and Spelling Reform as far back as 1909, particularly the last chapter, pages 331 to 341. A shorter rebuttal of all the reasonable objections to spelling reform is available on pages 166 to 170 of Let's End Our Literacy Crisis published in 2005, ISBN 1-58982-230-7, available at http://www.pdbookstore.com/comfiles/pages/category7.shtml.
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 morpheme
s. 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, its relationship to other words, and its language or origin. 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 tetragraph
s, 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.
. 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. Usually after some practice, many students' reading speed can be significantly increased. 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.
Reading education
Reading education is the process by which individuals are taught to derive meaning from text.Government-funded scientific research on reading and reading instruction began in the U.S. in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers began publishing findings based on converging evidence from...
is the process by which individuals are taught to derive meaning from text.
Government-funded scientific research on reading and reading instruction began in the U.S. in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers began publishing findings based on converging evidence from multiple studies. However, these findings have been slow to move into typical classroom practice.
Competencies for proficient reading
Proficient reading is equally dependent on two critical skills: the ability to understand the languageLanguage
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
in which the text is written, and the ability to recognize and process printed text. Each of these competencies is likewise dependent on lower level skills and cognitive abilities.
Children who readily understand spoken language and who are able to fluently and easily recognize printed words do not usually have difficulty with reading comprehension
Reading comprehension
Reading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a text. This understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are written and how they trigger knowledge outside the text. ....
. However, students must be proficient in both competencies to read well; difficulty in either domain undermines the overall reading process. At the conclusion of reading, children should be able to retell the story in their own words including characters, setting, and the events of the story. Reading researchers define a skilled reader as one who can understand written text as well as they can understand the same passage if spoken.
There is some debate as to whether print recognition requires the ability to perceive printed text and translate it into spoken language, or rather to translate printed text directly into meaningful symbolic models and relationships. The existence of speed reading, and its typically high comprehension rate would suggest that the translation into verbal form as an intermediate to understanding is not a prerequisite for effective reading comprehension. This aspect of reading is the crux of much of the reading debate.
History of reading education in the U.S.
In colonial times, reading instruction was simple and straightforward: teach children the code and then let them read. At that time, reading material was not specially written for children but consisted primarily of the Bible and some patriotic essays; the most influential early textbook was The New England PrimerThe New England Primer
The New England Primer was the first reading primer designed for the American Colonies. It became the most successful educational textbook published in 18th century America and it became the foundation of most schooling before the 1790s....
, published late 1680s. There was little consideration for how best to teach children to read or how to assess reading comprehension.
Not until the mid-19th century did this approach change significantly. Educators, in particular Horace Mann
Horace Mann
Horace Mann was an American education reformer, and a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1827 to 1833. He served in the Massachusetts Senate from 1834 to 1837. In 1848, after serving as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education since its creation, he was...
, began to advocate changes in reading instructional methods. He observed that children were bored and "death-like" at school, and that instruction needed to engage children's interest in the reading material by teaching them to read whole words. The McGuffey Readers
McGuffey Readers
McGuffey Readers were a series of graded primers that were widely used as textbooks in American schools from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, and are still used today in some private schools and in homeschooling....
(1836) were the most popular of these more engaging graded readers. In the mid-19th century, Rebecca Smith Pollard
Kate Harrington (poet)
Kate Harrington, born Rebecca Harrington Smith and later known as Rebecca Smith Pollard, was an American teacher, writer and poet. She was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania on September 20, 1831. She spent her most productive years in Iowa. She died in Ft. Madison on May 29, 1917. Her...
developed a sequential reading program of intensive synthetic phonics
Synthetic phonics
Synthetic phonics is a method of teaching reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words...
, complete with a separate teacher's manual and spelling
Spelling
Spelling is the writing of one or more words with letters and diacritics. In addition, the term often, but not always, means an accepted standard spelling or the process of naming the letters...
and reading
Reading (process)
Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas...
books.
From the 1890s to at least 1910, A. L. Burt of New York and other publishing companies published series of books aimed at young readers, using simple language to retell longer classics. Mrs J. C. Gorham produced three such works, Gulliver's Travels in words of one syllable (1896), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland retold in words of one syllable
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland retold in words of one syllable
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland retold in words of one syllable is a retelling by Mrs J. C. Gorham of Lewis Carroll's novel, written in 1905 and published by A. L. Burt of New York. It is one of a series of "One Syllable Books" published by Burt, which were "selected specially for young people's...
(1905), and Black Beauty retold in words of one syllable (1905). In the UK, Routledge published a similar series between 1900 and 1910.
The meaning-based curriculum did not dominate reading instruction until the second quarter of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, reading programs became very focused on comprehension and taught children to read whole words by sight. Phonics
Phonics
Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations...
was not to be taught except sparingly and as a tool to be used as a last resort.
In the 1950s Rudolf Flesch
Rudolf Flesch
Rudolf Flesch was an author , and also a readability expert and writing consultant who was a vigorous proponent of plain English in the United States. He created the Flesch Reading Ease test and was co-creator of the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test...
wrote a book called Why Johnny Can't Read, a passionate argument in favor of teaching children to read using phonics
Phonics
Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations...
. Addressed to the mothers and fathers of America, he also hurled severe criticism at publishers' decisions that he claimed were motivated by profit, and he questioned the honesty and intelligence of experts, schools, and teachers. The book was on the bestseller list for 30 weeks and spurred a hue and cry in general population. It also polarized the reading debate among educators, researchers, and parents.
This polarization continues to the present time. In the 1970s an instructional philosophy called whole language
Whole language
Whole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from whole language...
(which explicitly de-emphasizes teaching phonics) was introduced, and it became the primary method of reading
Reading (process)
Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas...
instruction in the 1980s and 1990s. During this time, researchers (such as the National Institute of Health) conducted studies showing that early reading acquisition
Reading skills acquisition
Learning to read is the process of acquiring the skills necessary for reading; that is, the ability to acquire meaning from print. Learning to read is paradoxical in some ways...
depends on the understanding of the connection between sounds and letters.
Alphabetic principle and English orthography
Beginning readers must understand the concept of the alphabetic principle in order to master basic reading skills. A writing systemWriting system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
is said to be alphabetic if it uses symbols to represent individual language sounds. In contrast, syllabic writing systems (such as Japanese
Japanese writing system
The modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts:*Kanji, adopted Chinese characters*Kana, a pair of syllabaries , consisting of:...
kana
Kana
Kana are the syllabic Japanese scripts, as opposed to the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji and the Roman alphabet known as rōmaji...
) and Chinese hanzi use a symbol to represent a single syllable .
Alphabetic writing systems vary in complexity. For example, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
is an orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
in the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
ic Writing system
Writing system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
that has a nearly perfect one-to-one correspondence of symbols to individual sounds. In Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
a shallow orthography, most of the time words are spelled the way they sound, that is, word spellings are almost always regular; . English a deep orthography, on the other hand, is far more complex in that it does not have a one-to-one correspondence between symbols and sounds. English has individual sounds that can be represented by more than one symbol or symbol combination. For example, the long |a| sound can be represented by a-consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
-e as in ate, -ay as in hay, -ea as in steak, -ey as in they, -ai as in pain, and -ei as in vein. In addition, there are many words with irregular spelling and many homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings and often different spellings as well). Pollack Pickeraz (1963) asserted that there are 45 phonemes in the English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, and that the 26 letters of the English alphabet can represent the 45 phonemes in about 350 ways.
It should be noted that the irregularity of English spelling is largely an artifact of how the language developed.
English is a West Germanic
West Germanic languages
The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three traditional branches of the Germanic family of languages and include languages such as German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, the Frisian languages, and Yiddish...
language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian
Anglo-Frisian languages
The Anglo-Frisian languages form a group of West Germanic languages consisting of Old English, Old Frisian, and their descendants...
and Old Saxon
Old Saxon
Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, is the earliest recorded form of Low German, documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken on the north-west coast of Germany and in the Netherlands by Saxon peoples...
dialects brought to Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
by Germanic settlers and Roman auxiliary troops from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
in the 5th century. One of these Germanic tribes were the Angles
Angles
The Angles is a modern English term for a Germanic people who took their name from the ancestral cultural region of Angeln, a district located in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany...
, who may have come from Angeln
Angeln
Modern Angeln, also known as Anglia , is a small peninsula in Southern Schleswig in the northern Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, protruding into the Bay of Kiel...
, and Bede
Bede
Bede , also referred to as Saint Bede or the Venerable Bede , was a monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth, today part of Sunderland, England, and of its companion monastery, Saint Paul's, in modern Jarrow , both in the Kingdom of Northumbria...
wrote that their whole nation came to Britain, leaving their former land empty. The names 'England' (or 'Aenglaland') and English are derived from the name of this tribe.
The Anglo Saxons began invading around 449 AD from the regions of Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
and Jutland
Jutland
Jutland , historically also called Cimbria, is the name of the peninsula that juts out in Northern Europe toward the rest of Scandinavia, forming the mainland part of Denmark. It has the North Sea to its west, Kattegat and Skagerrak to its north, the Baltic Sea to its east, and the Danish–German...
, Before the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England the native population spoke Brythonic
Brythonic languages
The Brythonic or Brittonic languages form one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic language family, the other being Goidelic. The name Brythonic was derived by Welsh Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word Brython, meaning an indigenous Briton as opposed to an Anglo-Saxon or Gael...
, a Celtic
Celtic languages
The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...
language Although the most significant changes in dialect occurred after the Norman invasion
Norman conquest of England
The Norman conquest of England began on 28 September 1066 with the invasion of England by William, Duke of Normandy. William became known as William the Conqueror after his victory at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066, defeating King Harold II of England...
of 1066, the language retained its name and the pre-Norman invasion dialect is now known as Old English. Germanic language a constituent part of Indo-European
Indo-European
Indo-European may refer to:* Indo-European languages** Aryan race, a 19th century and early 20th century term for those peoples who are the native speakers of Indo-European languages...
language system; and it has substantial influences from Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, among others. Over its history, English adopted vocabulary from many languages, and the imported words usually follow the spelling patterns of their language of origin. Advanced English phonics instruction includes studying words according to their origin, and how to determine the correct spelling of a word using its language of origin.
Clearly, the complexity of English orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
makes it more difficult for children to learn decoding and encoding rules, and more difficult for teachers to teach them. However, effective word recognition relies on the basic understanding that letters represent the sounds of spoken language, that is, word recognition relies on the reader's understanding of the alphabetic principle
Alphabetic principle
According to the alphabetic principle, letters and combinations of letters are the symbols used to represent the speech sounds of a language based on systematic and predictable relationships between written letters, symbols, and spoken words...
.
Instructional methods
A variety of different methods of teaching reading have been advocated in English-speaking countries.In the United States, 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.
Sub-lexical reading
Sub-lexical reading, involves teaching reading by associating characters or groups of characters with sounds or by using Phonics
Phonics
Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations...
learning and teaching methodology. Sometimes argued to be in competition with whole language methods.
Lexical reading
Lexical reading involve acquiring words or phrases without attention to the characters or groups of characters that compose them or by using Whole language
Whole language
Whole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from whole language...
learning and teaching methodology. Sometimes argued to be in competition with phonics methods, and that the whole language approach tends to impair learning how to spell.
Historically, the two camps have been called Whole Language
Whole language
Whole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from whole language...
and Phonics
Phonics
Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations...
, although the Whole Language instructional method has also been referred to as "literature-based reading program" and "integrated language arts curriculum". Currently (2007), the differing perspectives are frequently referred to as "balanced reading instruction" (Whole Language) and "scientifically-based reading instruction" (Phonics).
Phonics
Phonics
Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations...
advocates assert that, to read a large vocabulary of words correctly and fluently requires detailed knowledge of the structure of the English language, particularly spelling-speech patterns. Whole Language
Whole language
Whole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from whole language...
advocates assert that students do not need to be able to sound out words, but should look at unknown words and figure them out using context.
Whole Language
The whole language methodology involves the teaching of reading skills and strategies in the context of authentic literature. Word recognition accuracy is considered less important than meaning accuracy; therefore, there is an emphasis on comprehension as the ultimate goal of reading. In a whole language classroom, students are immersed in a literature-rich environment, in which they are given the opportunity to appreciate real-world purposes for reading."Whole Word", "Sight Word", or "Look (and) Say"
The "Sight WordSight word
A sight word is any word that is known by a reader automatically. Sight words are the basis behind the whole-word approach to reading education. Some have suggested that sight words and the whole-word approach to reading are a significant teaching technique considering 65% of the population...
" method is not synonymous with "Whole Language
Whole language
Whole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from 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
Literacy
Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
in languages such as Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
, assumed by the advocates to be based on ideogram
Ideogram
An ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.Examples of...
s. The Chinese writing system
Writing system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
is however a complex logographic system with many morphosyllabic elements particularly in phonetic markers for frequently used characters. Chinese characters
Chinese character classification
All Chinese characters are logograms, but there are several derivative types. These include a handful which derive from pictograms and a number which are ideographic in origin, but the vast majority originated as phono-semantic compounds . In older literature, Chinese characters in general may be...
.
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. This is disputed. Following almost a decade of hands-on research by Dr. Diane McGuinness
Diane McGuinness
Diane McGuinness is a cognitive psychologist who has written extensively on sex differences, education, learning disabilities, and early reading instruction...
’ and three associates and a study of the last 25 years of reported research on teaching methods, she reports (three times for her emphasis):
“The average number of words in daily conversations on the streets of any town in the world today is about 50,000. . . . But when people are asked to memorize what word goes with which abstract visual symbol scribbled on clay, or papyrus, or paper, the upper limit is around 1,500 to 2,000, not enough for any language. Not even close. . . . There is a natural limit on human memory for memorizing codes with too many confusing symbols. This limit, from the evidence so far, is around 2,000 symbols. . . . What turns out to be “natural” is that ordinary people (including children) can only remember about 1,500 to 2,000 abstract visual symbols.”
Dr. Rudolf Flesch reported in his 1981 book Why Johnny Still Can’t Read:
“And how does look-and-say [now called whole word] work? It works on the principle that children learn to read by reading. It starts with little “stories” containing the most-often-used words in English and gradually builds up a ‘sight vocabulary.’ The children learn to read by seeing those words over and over again. By the end of first grade they can recognize 349 words, by the end of second grade 1,094, by the end of third grade 1,216, and by the end of fourth grade 1,554. (I got those numbers from the Scott, Foresman series, but all look-and-say series teach about the same number of words.) . . . Now consider the look-and-say trained reader. The word rectitude is of course not among the 1,500 or 3,000 words he learns to recognize during his first three or four school years.”
Although the number of words taught by the whole word method may be different today, Dr. McGuinness’ studies shows that unless the students learn phonics (on their own or from help outside the classroom) in addition to their whole word training, they cannot learn more than about 2,000 words by sight alone. In any case, if the students know only 3,000 to 5,000 common words, they read so poorly that they do not like to read, seldom do so, and—-in most cases—-cannot hold an above-poverty-level wage job. The classic implementation of this approach was the McGill reading curriculum used to teach most baby boomer
Baby boomer
A baby boomer is a person who was born during the demographic Post-World War II baby boom and who grew up during the period between 1946 and 1964. The term "baby boomer" is sometimes used in a cultural context. Therefore, it is impossible to achieve broad consensus of a precise definition, even...
s to read in the U.S.
The sight-word (whole language) method was invented by Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, the director of the American Asylum at Hartford in the 1830s. It was designed for the education of the Deaf 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
Horace Mann
Horace Mann was an American education reformer, and a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1827 to 1833. He served in the Massachusetts Senate from 1834 to 1837. In 1848, after serving as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education since its creation, he was...
the then Secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
, USA
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
favored the method and it soon became the dominant method state wide. By 1844 the defects of the new method became so apparent to Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
schoolmasters that they issued an attack against it urging a return to an intensive, systematic phonics. Again Dr. Samuel Orton
Samuel Orton
Samuel Torrey Orton was an American physician who pioneered the study of learning disabilities. He is best known for his work examining the causes and treatment of reading disability, or dyslexia....
, a neuropathologist in Iowa
Iowa
Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New...
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
Sight reading
Sight-reading is the reading and performing of a piece of written music, specifically when the performer has not seen it before. Sight-singing is often used to describe a singer who is sight-reading.-Sight-reading:...
Method of Teaching Reading as a Source of Reading Disability
Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a very broad term defining a learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in being able to read, and which can manifest itself as a difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, or rapid...
.”)
Initial teaching alphabet
This method was designed to overcome the fact that English orthography has a many-to-many relationship between graphemes and phonemePhoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s. The method fell in to disuse because children still had to learn the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
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.
Phonics
Phonics refers to an instructional method for teaching children to read. The method teaches sounds to be associated with letters and combinations of letters. "PhonicsPhonics
Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations...
" is distinct from the linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
terms "phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
" and "phonetics
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
", which refer to sounds and the study of sounds respectively.
There are several different varieties of phonics.
- Embedded phonicsWhole languageWhole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from whole language...
is an instructional approach where letter sounds are taught opportunistically, as the need arises and in meaningful contexts, such as the reading of a storybook. Embedded phonics is often associated with a whole language approach to teaching reading.
Synthetic phonics
Synthetic phonics
Synthetic phonics is a method of teaching reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words...
and analytic phonics http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/Database/Primary/phonicsdef.html are different but popular methods of teaching phonics. Synthetic and analytic phonics approaches both generally involve explicit, carefully sequenced instruction that teach a large body of phonics patterns.
- Synthetic phonicsSynthetic phonicsSynthetic phonics is a method of teaching reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words...
emphasizes the one-to-one correspondences between phonemes and graphemes. In synthetic phonics programs students say the sounds for the graphemes they see and orally blend them together to produce a spoken word. In the context of phonics, the word blendBlendIn linguistics, a blend is a word formed from parts of two or more other words. These parts are sometimes, but not always, morphemes.-Linguistics:...
takes on a different meaning from its use in linguisticsLinguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
. - In analytic phonics, students often learn phonograms, the rimeSyllable rimeIn the study of phonology in linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda. It is the part of the syllable used in poetic rhyme, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech.The rime is usually the...
parts of words including the vowel and what follows it. Students are taught to generalize the phonogramPhonogram (linguistics)A phonogram is a grapheme which represents a phoneme or combination of phonemes, such as the letters of the Latin alphabet or the Japanese kana...
to multiple words. The phonogram -ail can be used to read fail, trail, mail, wail, sail, and other words.
The Orton phonography
Samuel Orton
Samuel Torrey Orton was an American physician who pioneered the study of learning disabilities. He is best known for his work examining the causes and treatment of reading disability, or dyslexia....
, originally developed to teach brain-damaged adults to read, is a form of phonics instruction that blends synthetic and analytic components. Orton described 73 "phonograms", or letter combinations, and 23 rules for spelling and pronunciation which Orton claimed would allow the reader to correctly pronounce and spell all but 123 of the 13,000 most common English words.
Controversy about phonics
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. Some 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". However, studies show that if students are guided through phonics by a trained, certified teacher (as opposed to a parent, para-pro, or tutor with minimal knowledge of phonics), they will be successful at blending the sounds, comprehending material, and reaching grade level.Other instructional methods
Some methods of teaching reading are not easily categorized as either phonics or whole word, but are rather a mixture of each. Native reading, for example, uses both phonics and whole word techniques, but differs from both in that it emphasizes teaching reading beginning at a very early age, when the human brain is neurodevelopmentally most receptive to learning language. Native readers learn to read as toddlers, starting at the same time they learn to speak, or very soon thereafter.Reading Workshop
Reading Workshop is based on the premise that readers need time to read and discuss their reading. Readers need access to a wide variety of reading materials of their choice. Classrooms must acquire a wide variety of reading materials to accommodate this need. Readers need to respond to the text and demonstrate quality literate behaviors. There is not a script to follow but a frame work to guide instruction. Students are exposed to a variety of learning experiences. There is time for student collaboration and a time for engaged reading.During reading workshop, the teacher models a whole-group strategy lesson and then gives students large blocks of time to read and to practice the strategy. This practice can occur independently, with partners, or in small groups with a book or text chosen by the student. The teacher moves around the room and confers with the students about their reading. The teacher can meet with small, flexible groups to provide additional needs-based instruction. At the end of the workshop the whole groups comes together to share their learning.
The following is a list of the seven important strategies that all readers must be able to apply to text in order to read and understand content. The seven strategies are:
1. Making Connections;
2. Creating Mental Images;
3. Making Inferences/Drawing Conclusions;
4. Asking Questions;
5. Determining What Is Important;
6. Synthesizing; and
7. Monitoring Comprehension and Meaning.
Harvey, S., & Goudvis, A. (2007). Strategies That Work Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement. Portland: Stenhouse.
Miller, D. (2002). Reading with Meaning; Teaching Comprehension in the Primary Grades. Portland: Stenhouse.
Serafini, F. (2008). Workshop and Conference Handouts. Retrieved March 26, 2011, from Dr. Serafini's Page: http://www.frankserafini.com/MainPages/websites.html
Reading comprehension
Many educators in the USA believe that children need to learn to analyze text (comprehend it) even before they can read it on their own, and comprehensionReading comprehension
Reading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a text. This understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are written and how they trigger knowledge outside the text. ....
instruction generally begins in pre-Kindergarten or Kindergarten. But other US educators consider this reading approach to be completely backward for very young children, arguing that the children must learn how to decode the words in a story through phonics before they can analyze the story itself.
During the last century comprehension lessons usually comprised students answering teachers' questions, writing responses to questions on their own, or both. The whole group version of this practice also often included "round robin reading," wherein teachers called on individual students to read a portion of the text (and sometimes following a set order). In the last quarter of the 20th century, evidence accumulated that the read-test methods assessed comprehension more than they taught it. The associated practice of "round robin" reading has also been questioned and eliminated by many educators.
Instead of using the prior read-test method, research studies have concluded that there are much more effective ways to teach comprehension. Much work has been done in the area of teaching novice readers a bank of "reading strategies," or tools to interpret and analyze text. There is not a definitive set of strategies, but common ones include summarizing what you have read, monitoring your reading to make sure it is still making sense, and analyzing the structure of the text (e.g., the use of headings in science text). Some programs teach students how to self monitor whether they are understanding and provide students with tools for fixing comprehension problems.
Instruction in comprehension strategy use often involves the gradual release of responsibility, wherein teachers initially explain and model strategies. Over time, they give students more and more responsibility for using the strategies until they can use them independently. This technique is generally associated with the idea of self-regulation
Self-regulated learning
The term self-regulated can be used to describe learning that is guided by metacognition , strategic action , and motivation to learn...
and reflects social cognitive theory
Social cognitive theory
Social cognitive theory, used in psychology, education, and communication, posits that portions of an individual's knowledge acquisition can be directly related to observing others within the context of social interactions, experiences, and outside media influences.-History:Social cognitive theory...
, originally conceptualized by Albert Bandura
Albert Bandura
Albert Bandura is a psychologist and the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University...
.
Learning to read and write in Sudbury schools
Sudbury model of democratic education schools assert that there are many ways to study and learn. They argue that learning is a process you do, not a process that is done to you; That is true for everyone. It's basic. The experience of Sudbury model democratic schools shows that there are many ways to learn without the intervention of teaching, to say, without the intervention of a teacher being imperative. In the case of reading for instance in the Sudbury model democratic schools some children learn from being read to, memorizing the stories and then ultimately reading them. Others learn from cereal boxes, others from games instructions, others from street signs. Some teach themselves letter sounds, others syllables, others whole words. Sudbury model democratic schools adduce that in their schools no one child has ever been forced, pushed, urged, cajoled, or bribed into learning how to read or write -- no need to do that to the modern child, streetwise and nurtured on TVLiterate environment
A rich literate environment typically contains written materials , electronic and broadcast media and information and communications technology , which encourage literacy acquisition, a reading culture, improved literacy retention and access to information.Literate environments can be found...
-- and they have had no dyslexia. None of their graduates are real or functional illiterates, and no one who meets their older students could ever guess the age at which they first learned to read or write. In a similar form students learn all the subjects, techniques and skills in these schools.
Comparing reading education in English and other alphabetic languages
Many will claim that failure to learn to read in English is due to a failure of the students to apply themselves properly to the task, or to various societal problems, or to inadequate teaching. The lack of the alphabetic nature of English is the real culprit, however, in this sense: (1) although most students can learn to read English, it requires significantly longer to learn to read than in alphabetic languages Frank C. Laubach, Teaching the World to Read (New York: Friendship Press, 1947), p. 103 and 108; Sanford S. Silverman, Spelling For the 21st Century (Cleveland, Ohio: self-published, 2003), pp. vi-vii. This is the Preface by Steve Bett, Ph.D., Editor, Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society; Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read—and What You Can Do About It (New York: Perennial Library, 1983), and (2) an unknown but substantial number of students are so resistant to the lack of logic and inconsistency of English spelling that they cannot learn to read without the extensive help of a one-to-one tutor for a year or more. Different students have different abilities. Some people—-particularly young girls—-are very good at memorizing. Young boys and most adults prefer to learn new things by comparison to what they already know-—i.e. they like to learn by logic. Unfortunately, the lack of logic is a complete “turn off” to some of the most intelligent students who are looking for logic in what they learn. Sir James Pitman, Alphabets and Reading (New York: Pitman Publishing Company, 1969), pp. 38, 54, and 161;Ever since alphabets were first invented, alphabetic languages have used a letter or letter combination to represent the sounds in the words. The easiest alphabetic languages to learn are those that use one specific grapheme (a single letter or a specific letter combination) for each specific phoneme (the smallest sound in a language or dialect used to distinguish syllables or words). English uses at least 1,768 graphemes to represent the 40 English phonemes. Although these 40 English phonemes could be spelled with 26 single letters and 14 digraphs (two letter combinations), they are spelled with all 26 single letters in the alphabet and at least 153 two-letter graphemes, 98 three-letter graphemes, 14 four-letter grapheme, and 3 five-letter graphemes, for a total of at least 294 different graphemes. This is less than the 1,768 mentioned above because every English phoneme is spelled with more than one grapheme. The number of spellings of the phonemes varies from at least four (for the TH phoneme in words such at this) to at least 60 spellings of the U phoneme in words such as nutty-—which is exactly what English spelling really is.
Some phonics spelling advocates claim that English is more than 80 percent phonetic. This is only possible, however, if you allow more than one grapheme for a phoneme. If you allow only one grapheme for every phoneme as logic and ease-of-learning demands, English is only a little more than 20 percent phonetic. The problem is that there is absolutely no way of knowing which word is spelled phonemically and which is not. There are no invariable spelling rules in English—-every rule has exceptions and some of the exceptions have exceptions. Edward Rondthaler of the American Language Academy in a personal letter to Bob Cleckler, author of Let’s End Our Literacy Crisis, stated, “A 1986 round table of British linguists called by eminent scholars to discuss the underlying pattern of English spelling concluded, not surprisingly, that only one rule in our spelling is not watered down with exceptions: No word in English ends with the letter V.” Since Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary includes the words rev and spiv there are therefore no invariable spelling rules.
In addition, Dr. Diane McGuinness’ book Why Our Children Can’t Read explains the complex logic that is required to learn to read English. Unlike many alphabetic languages, there are tens of thousands of different syllables in English, with sixteen different syllable patterns in English: (C=consonant, V=vowel) CV, CCV, CCCV, CVC, CCVC, CCCVC, CVCC, CVCCC, CCVCC, CCVCCC, CCCVCCC, CCCVCC, VCCC, VCC, VC, and V. There are two or more syllables in most English words. Each syllable can have one of the sixteen syllable patterns. If each vowel and each consonant in each of these patterns consistently represented the same phoneme (one-to-one mapping), there would be nothing in the logic of these syllables that would be beyond the abilities of most four- or five-year-olds. But they do not. English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
spelling
Spelling
Spelling is the writing of one or more words with letters and diacritics. In addition, the term often, but not always, means an accepted standard spelling or the process of naming the letters...
also has one-to-many and many-to-one mapping. This requires a type of logic that most children do not develop until they are eleven or twelve years old.
The types of logic required for one-to-many and many-to-one mapping are: (1) the logic of “classes” (categories where objects or events that are similar are grouped) and “relations” (where objects share some features but not all features, e.g. all poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles) and (2) “propositional logic,” which involves combining both the classes and relations types of logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
. This requires the ability to think of the same item in more than one way at the same time. These combinations require the use of relational terms such as “and,” “or,” “not,” “if—then,” and “if and only if” in formal statements of propositional logic, e.g. if an H follows the T, then say /TH/ as in thin or then; but if any other letter or no letter follows the T, then say /T/ as in top or ant.
The eyes of the fluent reader skip easily over a multitude of traps for the beginner. Most fluent readers who learned to read as a child have long since forgotten the difficulty they had in learning. Due to the difficulty of English spelling there are basically three ways of learning to read (a more precise explanation of the time required for learning is in the section “Time required to learn to read English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
vs. other alphabetic languages” below):
- Young children can learn (a) the very limited number of common English words that are phonemically regular (one-to-one mapping) either by phonics teaching, by whole word, or by whole language teaching, (b) learn a few hundred sight words (most of which are almost totally unphonemic) by the whole word or whole languageWhole languageWhole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from whole language...
method, and (c) if being taught by the phonicsPhonicsPhonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations...
method, memorize—-without understanding the logic involved—-the hundreds of many-to-one and one-to-many phonemePhonemeIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
-to-grapheme mappings. Then—-with constant practice in reading that extends past the age when they can understand the logic required—-using their knowledge of phonicsPhonicsPhonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations...
, they learn one-at-a-time all 20,000 or more of the words in their reading vocabulary required to be a fluent reader. This process requires at least two-and-one-half years to give young children the foundational knowledge and confidence to continue reading long enough to become fluent readers and—-for most students-—extends past their eleventh birthday. - Begin learning to read after age eleven or twelve—-when they can understand the logic involved—-and spend at least one to one-and-one-half years learning strictly by phonics. Then with additional reading experience, learn one-at-a-time all 20,000 or more of the words in their readingReading (process)Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas...
vocabularyVocabularyA person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
required to be fluent readers. This method, of course, is totally impractical. Children should begin learning to read at the age of four to six years of age when they are best able to learn to read. Furthermore, students of almost all other school subjects need the ability to read to be able to do the classwork, homework, and testing required to learn each subject. Delaying this instruction would place students at a serious competitive disadvantage with students of almost every other nation. - If taught only by the whole word or whole languageWhole languageWhole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from whole language...
method and if they do not learn phonics—-on their own or with help outside the classroom—-they can learn 2,000 or so words (or perhaps as many as 5,000 or a little more if they have a superb memory) and join the ranks of the functionally illiterate (see U.S. statistics on functional illiteracyFunctional illiteracyFunctional illiteracy is a term used to describe reading and writing skills that are inadequate "to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level." Functional illiteracy is contrasted with illiteracy in the strict sense, meaning the inability to read or...
below). Those who can only read 2,000 to about 5,000 simple words they learned in the first four grades in school have difficulty competing in our increasingly complex and competitive world as well as they should.
As stated in the Whole Word method section above, the human mind cannot remember more than about 2,000 symbols,. Students of whole-word-only or whole-language
Whole language
Whole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from whole language...
-only teaching cannot become fluent readers unless they also learn phonics-—either on their own or with help outside the classroom—-as a tool to help them “decode” new words. When phonics knowledge or contextual clues do not reveal the word they must consult a dictionary or ask someone.
The problem is that learning words individually until one knows enough words to be able to “get by” in life as well as they should—-as well as is required in our increasingly complex society-—takes much longer than is required in alphabetic languages. Although some phonics
Phonics
Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations...
advocates have recently designed much-improved methods of teaching phonics, learning to read in these programs still requires a year or more longer than a perfect one-grapheme-for-one-phoneme spelling system.
The problem with whole word (or whole language
Whole language
Whole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from whole language...
) only type of teaching is that most of today’s adults cannot hold an above-poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
-level wage job if they only know 2,000 common words (or perhaps as many as 5,000 if they have a superb memory) they learned by sight in the first four grades in school. Although there are several ways of determining functional illiteracy
Functional illiteracy
Functional illiteracy is a term used to describe reading and writing skills that are inadequate "to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level." Functional illiteracy is contrasted with illiteracy in the strict sense, meaning the inability to read or...
, due to the fact that very few U.S. adults can afford to accept a job that pays less than they are capable of earning, the average yearly earnings is the best method—or certainly one of the best methods—of determining functional illiteracy. The most comprehensive study of U.S. functional illiteracy ever commissioned by the U.S. government proves that 46 to 51 percent of individual adults earn significantly less than poverty level wages. This percentage of families is not in poverty only because most families have more than one employed adult and most low-income families receive governmental and charitable assistance.Irwin S. Kirsch, et al., Adult Literacy in America (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 2002), pp. xvi, 63, 65, and 66, available for free inspection and download from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf. This is a 199 page report on the most comprehensive study of U.S. adult literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government. It consisted of lengthy interviews of 26,700 U.S. adults. The interviewees were statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in a dozen states across the U.S. to be representative of the U.S. population as a whole. It used statistically rigorous methods to ensure accuracy and was reviewed by an outside testing agency before it was released. No other persons had access to the study before it was released. The same group who prepared this study did a less statistically rigorous study with a slightly smaller database of interviewees and issued a report in 2003 that showed little or no statistically significant improvement from the earlier report. It is available at http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF.
History of English spelling
The EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
is a West Germanic language
West Germanic languages
The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three traditional branches of the Germanic family of languages and include languages such as German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, the Frisian languages, and Yiddish...
which originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
s brought to Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
by Germanic invaders from various parts of what is now northwest Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and the northern Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
.
Prior to the mid-eighteenth century writers spelled the words the way they sounded, but a specific spelling of the phonemes had not been settled upon. As a result, for example, Shakespeare often spelled a phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
two different ways in the same paragraph
Paragraph
A paragraph is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. A paragraph consists of one or more sentences. The start of a paragraph is indicated by beginning on a new line. Sometimes the first line is indented...
in his original writings. To complicate the matter further, the early publishers hired many foreign typographers because originally there were very few British
British people
The British are citizens of the United Kingdom, of the Isle of Man, any of the Channel Islands, or of any of the British overseas territories, and their descendants...
typographers. These foreign typographers often knew little or nothing about English words. In order to avoid the difficulty of adding small lead pieces between each word in a line of type to justify the right margin, they would often add a “silent E” or double the letters in some of the words. The standardisation of English spelling, which began in the eighteenth century, led to the fossilisation of many of these consistencies and further consistencies arose from a tendency to preserve the spelling of foreign loanwords.
Due to the changes in pronunciation, inconsistencies are more pronounced today. According to Edward Rondthaler
Edward Rondthaler
Edward Rondthaler was a typographist as well as a simplified spelling champion and chairman of the American Literacy Council. He was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania...
and Edward Lias, "[S]pelling is the only branch of learning that has undergone no serious update or repair since before the 16th century. Other disciplines receive continuous updating. But not spelling."
Time required to learn to read English compared to other alphabetic languages
Following Frank C. Laubach’s thirty years of experience in teaching adult illiterates around the world in 300 or more different languages, he stated, “Over 90 percent of the world’s languages, writing styles, have one sound for a letter and one letter for a sound. In such languages learning to read is swift and easy, requiring from one to twenty days.” Furthermore, he found that in 295 of these languages (98 percent of them) students could master reading and writing in less than three months.In comparison, most U.S. students require two and one-half years or more to learn to read well enough to succeed in school. As Rudolf Flesch explains, “Generally speaking, students in our schools are about two years behind students of the same age in other countries. This is not a wild accusation of the American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
educational system; it is an established, generally known fact. . . . What accounts for these two years? Usually the assumption seems to be that in other countries children and adolescents are forced to study harder. Now that I have looked into this matter of reading, I think the explanation is much simpler and more reasonable: Americans
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
take two years longer to learn how to read—-and reading, of course, is the basis for achievement in all other subjects.
Frank C. Laubach believes even more time is lost: “It is estimated that two and one-half years are lost in the student’s studies because of our chaotic spelling.”
Perhaps most convincing of all is this quote: “In November 1974 Professor Durr reported on a study trip to Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
in the pages of The Reading Teacher. . . . He found that first-graders are taught to read 46 of the 130 national languages of Russia
Languages of Russia
Of all the languages of Russia, Russian is the only official language. 27 different languages are considered official languages in various regions of Russia, along with Russian. There are over 100 minority languages spoken in Russia today.-History:...
. . . . All children in the USSR are given an ABC book and start to learn from it the day school begins. They learn at first about a letter a day and what it stands for, and gradually proceed to syllables and words. By December 15 of their first year all Russian children are through with their ABC books and start reading simple stories and poems. There is no further instruction in reading as such after the end of first grade.”
Success rate of reading education in the USA
National literacy rates range from about 10 percent to 99+ percent. Frank C. Laubach’s books Teaching the World to Read and Forty Years With the Silent Billion detail much of his experience in teaching in 300 or more languages around the worldWorld
World is a common name for the whole of human civilization, specifically human experience, history, or the human condition in general, worldwide, i.e. anywhere on Earth....
. In teaching adults to read in languages other than English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, he never once mentions being unable to teach some of his students to become fluent readers. When he makes the statement that “Over 90 percent of the world's languages have one sound for a letter and one letter for a sound. In such languages learning to read is swift and easy, requiring from one to twenty days.” it implies that they all learned to read. It follows that the literacy rates in non-English speaking countries is—-more than anything else-—a measure of the percentage of the population that has had reading training.
Unlike some other nations, which do not enforce universal education for all citizens, U.S. children are required to be in school until their mid-teens. It is in the short-term best interests of politicians and educators to believe the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the U.S. literacy
Literacy
Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
rate is 90 percent or more. There is not necessarily any conscious deception, but a brief study of how the Census Bureau made this determination will reveal why the reported figure can be so much higher than the true literacy rate.
The Census Bureau has included questions about literacy in each census from 1840 to 1930. Many of those most knowledgeable about U.S. literacy believe that literacy began to drop in the early 1960s and has been declining ever since.Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education (New York: The Free Press, 1993), p. 1 and elsewhere; David Barton, The Myth of Separation (Aledo, Texas: Wallbuilder Press, 1992), p. 212 and elsewhere. (See also pp. 209–216.); William J. Bennett, Ph.D., The Devaluing of America (New York: Touchstone, 1992), p. 55; William J. Bennett, Ph.D., The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators (New York: Touchstone, 1994), pp. 82–84. The Census Bureau reintroduced questions about literacy in 1970 at the insistence of the military.
In the 1970 census the only question asked about literacy
Literacy
Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
was on grade completion. The Census Bureau considered those with fifth-grade completion or higher to be literate. A little more than 5 percent reported less than a fifth-grade education. For some reason, the Census Bureau decided that 80 percent of these could read, so they reported 99 percent literacy.
In 1980 the Census Bureau mailed out forms and based most of their calculations upon written responses to questions about grade completion. In addition they used a small sample of home visits and telephone interviews. They asked people what grade they had completed. If the answer was “Less than fifth grade,” they asked if the person could read and write. As explained in Jonathan Kozol’s book Illiterate America
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, this technique of determining literacy is almost certain to underestimate illiteracy.U.S. Census Bureau methods of determining illiteracy is almost certain to underestimate the level of illiteracy for the following reasons:
- Illiterates would not respond to written forms, and their family members—-likely also to be illiterate-—would not either.
- The underprivileged poor, and especially illiterates, may feel they are being singled out like criminals. They therefore have cause to distrust salespersons, bill collectors, or strangers knocking on their door seeking information—-especially if the answers to the questions would be embarrassing. Home visits by Census Bureau officials who are not known by the person answering the door cannot be expected to yield accurate information under such circumstances.
- Grade-level completion does NOT equal grade-level competence.
- Those who have no permanent address, no phone number, no post office box, or no regular job—-a condition shared by almost six million people, most of whom are illiterate-—often are not counted. They can’t be found by the Census Bureau in time for the census.
Because U.S. schools since the 1930s have mostly taught by the whole word method (or the whole language method) and due to new time-consuming pleasurable activities and negative influences explained below, roughly 46 to 51 percent of U.S. adults are now functionally illiterate. See Irwin S. Kirsch, et al., Adult Literacy in America http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf. pp. xvi, 63, 65, and 66 and http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF. Few if any non-English speaking nations use the whole word teaching method.They do not have to; phonics works for their language because it follows the alphabetic principle: the words are almost entirely spelled as they sound.
- dozens of scholars for the last 250 years have recommended solving the problem of English spelling—rather than merely fighting the symptoms of the problem-—by making the spelling phonetic.
- Several nations both smaller and larger than the U.S. have simplified their spelling systems.
- A simple, logical phonemic spelling system has been proven effective for teaching students students to read in less than three months in 300 or more alphabetic languages.
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.Children who are exposed to large amounts of print often have more success in reading and have a larger vocabulary to draw from than children who see less print. 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
Matthew effect
The Matthew effect may refer to:* Matthew effect , the phenomenon in sociology where "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer"* Matthew effect , the phenomenon in education that has been observed in research on how new readers acquire the skills to read...
.
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
Book flood
Book flood describes the recent theory, tested in a number of countries, that being exposed to literature will help students learn English as a second language more quickly and effectively than more traditional methods....
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.
Other linguistic models of English spelling
Attempts to make English spelling behave phonetically have given rise to various campaigns for spelling reformSpelling reform
Many languages have undergone spelling reform, where a deliberate, often officially sanctioned or mandated, change to spelling takes place. Proposals for such reform are also common....
; 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. Several distinguished scholars, however, have thoroughly disproven all reasonable objections to spelling reform, including this objection. See, for example, Dictionary of Simplified American Spelling. Thomas Lounsbury, LL.D., L.H.D., emeritus professor of English, Yale University, presented a devastating rebuttal to all reasonable objections to spelling reform in his book English Spelling and Spelling Reform as far back as 1909, particularly the last chapter, pages 331 to 341. A shorter rebuttal of all the reasonable objections to spelling reform is available on pages 166 to 170 of Let's End Our Literacy Crisis published in 2005, ISBN 1-58982-230-7, available at http://www.pdbookstore.com/comfiles/pages/category7.shtml.
Linguists documenting the sounds of speech use various special symbols, of which the International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
is the most widely known. Linguistics makes a distinction between a phone and phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
, and between phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
and phonetics
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
. The study of words and their structure is morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
, and the smallest units of meaning are morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s. The study of the relationship between words present in the language at one time is synchronic etymology
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
, part of descriptive linguistics
Descriptive linguistics
In the study of language, description, or descriptive linguistics, is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is spoken by a group of people in a speech community...
, and the study of word origins and evolution is diachronic etymology
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
, part of historical linguistics
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
.
English orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one 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, its relationship to other words, and its language or origin. 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
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
uses a 26 letter Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
, but the number of graphemes is expanded by several digraphs
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
, trigraphs
Trigraph (orthography)
A trigraph is a group of three letters used to represent a single sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters combined. For example, in the word schilling, the trigraph sch represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative , rather than the consonant cluster...
, and tetragraph
Tetragraph
A tetragraph is a sequence of four letters used to represent a single sound , or a combination of sounds, that do not necessarily correspond to the individual values of the letters. In German, for example, the tetragraph tsch represents the sound of the English digraph ch...
s, 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
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
and location in the word. Likewise each phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
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
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
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.
Practical application
In practice, 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 comprehensionReading comprehension
Reading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a text. This understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are written and how they trigger knowledge outside the text. ....
. 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
Speed reading
Speed reading is a collection of reading methods which attempt to increase rates of reading without greatly reducing comprehension or retention. Methods include chunking and eliminating subvocalization...
continues where basic education stops. Usually after some practice, many students' reading speed can be significantly increased. 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
Readability
Readability is the ease in which text can be read and understood. Various factors to measure readability have been used, such as "speed of perception," "perceptibility at a distance," "perceptibility in peripheral vision," "visibility," "the reflex blink technique," "rate of work" , "eye...
indicates the ease of understanding or comprehension due to the style of writing. Reading recovery
Reading Recovery
Reading Recovery is a school-based, short-term intervention designed for children aged five or six, who are the lowest literacy achievers after their first year of school. These children are often not able to read the simplest of books or even write their own name before the intervention...
is a method for helping students learn to read.
See also
- Accessible publishingAccessible publishingAccessible publishing is an approach to publishing and reading whereby books and other texts aren't only available in one standard format. Other formats that have been developed to aid different people to read include varieties of larger fonts, specialised fonts for certain kinds of reading...
- Dolch Word ListDolch word listThe Dolch Word List is a list of frequently used words compiled by Edward William Dolch, PhD. The list was prepared in 1936. The list was originally published in his book Problems in Reading in 1948. Under the copyright laws in effect during the time of publication, the Dolch word list is out of...
- Speaking word processor supports reading education (Gio-Key-Board)Gio-Key-BoardGio-Key-Board or GioKeyBoard is a multimedia literacy "Initial-Sound-Keyboard" with integrated word processor for children. The freeware is useful for pupils in improving primary reading and writing skills .Gio-Key-Board is multilingual and language-independent...
- Whole LanguageWhole languageWhole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from whole language...