|
HOME |
Handwriting Practice |
Monitoring Handwriting |
Handwriting Books |
Are you equipped to teach a child or an adult basic reading skills?
Is it worth using phonics to teach reading when so many of the English sounds can be represented by a variety of spellings?
Two research projects conducted in 1966 focusing on American English suggest "yes":
1. Paul R. Hanna et al., Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences as Cues to Spelling Improvement (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office)
2. Richard L. Venezky and Ruth H. Weir. A Study of Selected Spelling-to-Sound Correspondence Patterns. (Cooperative Research Project No. 3090. Stanford University. Cal).
These studies established that American English orthography is alphabetically based at least eighty per cent of the time and that the unit phoneme-grapheme correspondences can be predicted upon sound bases alone about ninety per cent of the time.
Computational linguistics has grown of age since the above studies were conducted. It is not difficult now to do your own research, using either British or American English phonemes and spellings as given in either the "Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (17th Edition)" or the "Longman Pronunciation Dictionary". Both these dictionaries come with interactive CDs which allow 'wildcard searches for spellings', based on combinations of phonemes. You can test out any phoneme in any possible position in the word for variant spellings, and assess the difficulty of reading the target sound correctly.
Should the method of teaching reading be limited to phonics?
Clearly not, and authors of reading schemes such as "Oxford Reading Tree Songbirds Phonics" are far more eclectic in their methodology.
For example, the phonics focus of Stage 6: Songbirds: "Paula the Vet" is the sound as in the first syllable of the word "August". However, "Paula The Vet" includes practice of the sound using the variant spellings "or", "au", "aw", "ore", "oor" and "a".
Recognising 'whole words' visually (look and say methodology) plays a significant part in learning to read, especially as reading speed becomes greater. However, it remains the case, nearly always, that the phonetic and graphetic environments of 'single letters' or 'combinations of letters' making single sounds, provide excellent clues to the target sound.
What may go wrong educationally and socially if phonics is continued for too long?
Firstly, reading aloud is a very limited representation of the skill of reading. For the most part, reading is done silently. A 'sub-vocaliser' is usually going to be a slow and inefficient reader, and may prove to be an annoyance to peers who wish to read in silence.
Phonics is often practised with single words. If words connect to make a longer text, the latter is usually a story or something which allows a linear reading-style.
To read aloud well, a learner needs to be aware of the differences between the 'spoken' and 'written' channels. Spoken English involves features such as assimilation where the choice of phoneme used at the end of particular words depends on the phoneme beginning the next word. In these instances, phonics can badly mislead, resulting in stilted speech.
To read aloud well, also requires the use of syllable & sentence stress and intonation. Phonics may allow some success in reading aloud in a syllable-timed language such as Spanish. However, in the context of a stress-timed language such as English, phonics may result in disastrous pronunciation. Learners (e.g. adults) who may not have already spent the first five years of their lives immersed in the oral part of the target language, should not depend on phonics as a guide to how the language is spoken.
An efficient and flexible silent-reader looks beyond individual words and sentences and will be familiar with discourse markers and methods of topic development within paragraphs. Different reasons for reading affect anticipation and bring different reference skills into play. Reading 'a menu' or 'a bus timetable' differs considerably from the linear treatment given to a story text. Reading styles are several and need to be sensitive to purpose, content, text-type and layout.
Phonics may help a learner to decipher content in the very early part of the literacy programme. However, excessive focus on phonemes as components within words, especially if weak forms go unrecognised, has a very limited amount to do with 'the skill of reading' and provides a misleading and stilted model for oral production.
There are very good reasons to 'read aloud' to children. It is a step towards interesting them in books and 'radio & tv broadcasts with literary content'. Phonics has very little to do with the value of reading aloud. Adults reading to their children would do best to focus on the features of spoken English: sounds, weak forms, rhythms, contractions, sentence stress, placement of the tonic syllable, tunes etc. The actors who undertake audio-book recordings are usually able to adopt different voices for different characters. Those telling stories on children's TV can give plenty of play to gesture and facial expression, which also help to make a story.