can someone explain what constitutes reading, as opposed to pattern recognition?

[668neighbour]

DS (21 months) has been able to read a few favourite words for a while. He was pointing out the relevant letters in an alphabet, referring back to Peepo (a favourite book, read every night) at about 16-17 months. At 18-19 months ish I realised that if I wrote out words from his favourite books, he knew what they were.

A few weeks ago - so 20 months - I mentioned to a nursery teacher that he could read a few favourite words. I said I knew this didn't mean much other than that he can recognize patterns, and they are words he sees many times a day and he seems OK at pattern recognition generally.

Her response was along the lines of "oh come on, don't be ridiculous, he's just reciting stuff and I bet he can't talk that well anyway at htat age". I showed her that he could indeed do it and she said "well that's not reading, is it. It's just looking at the shape of the word and guessing. Proper reading is sounding out the letters to work out what the word is."

Well I don't know about her, but personally I don't sound out letters once I know a word... and i learnt most words by knowing what the word looked like - i.e. by pattern recognition. Isn't that reading of words?

Obviously at this age DS has neither the depth of understanding nor the breadth of vocabulary to read a new word and work out what it is or what it means. But that depth and breadth and inference are built on a base of recognizable words that can be read, aren't they?

Or have I completely missed something here?

Sight reading is a method of reading but it's not how children are generally taught, they usually start with phonics. A child properly reading should be able to make a guess at any word even if they don't know the meaning by sounding out the letters. For example my DDs can phonetically read Arabic but have no idea what the words mean, so it shouldn't matter if the child has ever heard of the word if they can truly read. I suppose it's a bit like someone saying their child can 'count to 10' when they are just reciting it. However at 21m it is still incredibly impressive that your son is able to recognise the words so I don't think the nursery worker should have reacted like that as he is obviously an incredibly clever little boy!

Thanks for the props. I think he's OK at pattern recognition, though the fact he's doing it with words is not quite as impressive as it might be given the amount of time we've spent reading in the last 6 months!

I completely agree that this kind of pattern recognition isn't sounding words out.

But I never sounded words out when I didn't know what they were, I just looked at the whole word and it was always something I'd heard before. I vaguely remember thinking "oh, so that's how that word is spelled" a few times, on a word I'd just seen for the first time, but never going the other way, from spelling/phonemes/roots to whole word. At least not until I was an adult and had enough grasp of other languages to try to work out what a word might be based on its constituent parts. Is that really that unusual? I don't remember people being taught using phonics when I was a kid (I am pretty old though).

You've really never seen a word that you've not heard of before?

I think that shows I had fairly restricted reading taste as a child: much more Noel Streatfield than anything with a word in that I wouldn't otherwise have encountered. Also I was read to a lot so had a lot of practice hearing words as a finger went along under the words.

Shools with a lot of resources and a small pupil:teacher ratio teach a mix of word recognition and phonics, and teachers in those schools say the kids form a continuous distribution from those who learn exclusively using phonics, through most kids who use a mix, to those who learn exclusively using word recognition. So I guess I just was a word recognizer.

Obviously as a teenager learning foreign languages I encountered new words many times a day for years. I was pretty hopeless at remembering vocab until I went to one of the countries and heard all the words all the time. It's probably related to how I learnt to speak/read initially.

Well I have never heard of someone reading only by recognition before. I remember seeing other toddlers on the birth group I was on doing word recognition with similar ages children so it is not unheard of (the parents tended to be teachers actually) but I don't think they would have counted it as true reading and I think they would still take till they were 3-4 till they were properly able to read, which is early but still within the normal range I think. However you may want to look up the gifted children part of the forum as perhaps others could give you ideas on how you could progress your DS's learning as he is obviously very interested in trying to learn.