Learning to Read - doing 'research', please help

[JaneS]

Hi everyone,

I'm a PhD student studying literacy (including psychology of reading), though not in a modern context. I am dyslexic myself and learnt to read quite oddly because of that and some vision disturbances, so it's difficult for me to use my own experiences as a blueprint.

I would really like to know when you (if you know) and your DCs learned to read, age-wise. And did they have any problems? What did they make of phonics - did they struggle to understand that letters represent sounds, or did this seem to come naturally? Any memories of things they did/said about books and reading that seem strange/quirky to you as an adult?

Would love to hear from you if you have a moment.

Thanks,

LRD.

pooka, about learning letter-names, how did that work exactly? My dad says that when he learnt to read, he would say C-A-T (ie., 'see -ay - tee') and then come out with 'cat'. That is, he was taught to sound out the letter names and expected to produce the sound of the word from that. Was that how you did it? And if so ... did it strike you as illogical, or am I missing something?

Hmm. Interesting question!

I think that I learned to read cat before I learned to spell cat, as in C-A-T (letter names).

So I knew that see-ay-tee became (cat) c-a-t, without breaking down the word into individual sounds. Is really hard to describe. But for example, when teaching us my mother had a book that had "the fox is in a box" and "the cat is on the mat", and then if she showed my brothers the word pat or the name cox, they would know the rule about cat/pat/sat/mat/hat or fox/box/cox (and so on - not the best example to pick!).

And then, going on to being able to spell cat, I suppose my brain would process the instruction missing out the actual -c-a-t- phonic bit. I'm not really explaining myself very well - golly it's hard to describe how you do something that has become second nature

That's useful to know, pooka. Actually, it makes a lot of sense. Lots of people (even strong phonetic learners) have something of a sight-vocabulary - which works a bit like pictograms. But in terms of the impact on cognitive processing, learning to associate letter shapes with sounds is really important - it impacts on all sorts of other types of understanding and reasoning.

It is really hard describing second-nature stuff - I love trying to do it though!

Littlereddragon - have you read this about parallel letter regognition

bruffin, thanks, I'd not seen that article, though I've read about what I guess is the same model of reading a while back.

Some of the early stuff about bouma shapes is quite easy to pick holes in, isn't it!

I learned to read when I was 3 - have been asking my mum about it recently and I said I wanted to learn how to read, she got Peter and Jane books and I learned. I don't know exactly how, but I think I was probably more of a whole words reader with a very good sight memory. By the time I was 4 I could read fluently and when I started school at 5 (September birthday) I could read most things.

School didn't believe I could read at first but quickly realised and I had reading books at the right sort of level.

My sister wasn't interested in learning to read before she went to school so didn't . She learned more gradually possibly with more phonics (she started school in 1988 whereas I started in 1980).

My DS is 6 and started in a mixed nursery/reception class in January 2008. He knew about 3 letter sounds before starting there at 4.1. They do Jolly Phonics but then use ORT. He is now Year 1 and reads very well - he seems quite similar to me in that he has a good sight vocabulary although is able to sound out unfamiliar words as well where necessary. His reading came on a lot towards the end of Reception.

DD is 4 and in the mixed nursery/reception class which she started in January. She did know all her letter sounds when she started (possibly due to the influence of an older brother) and has learned to read since then. She is more phonics based in her reading although her sight vocab is growing a lot. She is "ahead" of where DS was at this stage although not in any way fluent yet.

I am finding this thread very interesting thank you .

I have a great problem in spelling a word if I can't write it down. I think it's not so much the shape of the word as the mechanics in writing it (although I'm not sure how that works with typing )

Muscle memory, Noah?

I am really glad I started this thread, btw!

Noah spelling and computers
came across this very old article the other day. It's actually dc's school, but that teacher no longer there. DS definitely spells better using a pc.

DD had a pen and piece of paper in her hand from about 20 months old and was recognising words and letters from a very young age. She didnt properly learn how to read until she started school. Mainly because I didnt know how to teach a child to read and was reluctant to try teach her one way if the school was going to teach her another.

DS1 and 2 found learning to read very difficult. DS2 had Reading Recovery in Y2 which was an intensive 1-1 course for 16 weeks. It did help a lot, but once it finnished, he stopped improving and was still behind his peers.

We now use a system called Easyread Here which is an internet based site which gives daily lessons and offers lots of support. It differs from other reading systems by showing what sounds the letters are making above the word in the form of a variety of charactors.

For example the word HOP would have a horse, octopus and pig above it

But HOPE would have a horse, oak tree and pig above it. So children can instantly recognise that the "O" has different sound and the "E" has no sound.

In six months both DCs have improved tremendously with their reading. They are half way through the course.

teamcullen, how did you find out about that system? If I'd heard of it I'd have said it sounded gimmicky but clearly it works - interesting. So they don't get confused and read 'hop' as 'horse'? Or do they associate the pictures with sounds - can they read alphabetic words without the pictures there?

Sounds really interesting - I ought to check that out and see what it's doing.

Thanks!

Little red dragon, I found it while looking for ways to help DSs with their reading and writing. I was really concerned about DS1 who was struggling a lot in school. I felt he needed to go right back to basics, and although the school was excellent, I wanted to do more at home but didnt know how to help. The website came up on a search when I was reserching sites which help children with Dyslexia.

The website offered a wealth of information on reasons my DSs found reading hard, other systems and how the work and how they are similar and differ from the Easyread system. They also let you access the first lesson as a free trial so I could see if it was something that my DSs would be happy doing. It is expensive, but they offer a 100% moneyback promise if you are not happy with the results.

They send the DCs regular prizes for doing the lessons, which keeps them on track. They have received things like secret message pens, calculator rulers, torchs etc, all the little gimicky things boys of this age like.

The first two weeks of the course, they were introduced to the charactors through a variety of games. For example the first charactor was called "ants in pink pants" You would click on the ant with pink pants when you heard the phonetic "a" sound, or saw the letter "a" and so on.

After you were familar with the phonetic sounds, other letter blends were introduced. We had "The oak in a cloak" for, O, oa, oh sounds and the "Zooto from pluto" for OO sounds. There are about 40 chaactors all in all.

After they were familiar with the charactors, they moved on to reading stories. At first, they would read 4 pages per day. The last two pages are repeated the next day to help reinforce the previous day's lesson. Then they play a game which improves there skills further. I find that they use the pictures to decode words they dont know, otherwise they read the words. As they have improved their skills, they use the pictures less and the words they are using them for are difficult or have funny spellings.

Along with the improvments to reading, both DSs spelling has also improved beyond measure, it is not yet perfect, but at the end of Y5, I could hardly understand anything DS1 had written, now at least it is readable and he is using letter blends, something he never did before this course.

Interesting thread, thanks for posting. My DS is dyslexic and I read about this interesting theory that dylexic children may have overdeveloped their visual processing skills in infancy inorder to make better sense of their environment. The idea is that babies who perhaps didn't crawl and move about as much found a better way of visually processing things that worked so well that their brains overdevelop this skill and then when they are older and try to master the relatively simple decoding task of reading they continue to use this disorientation method which makes a nonsense of what should be a simple sequencing exercise. This could explain why many dyslexic children read better upside down because they can then use this more complex processing to make sense of what they are reading. It is also true that many dyslexics, once they have learnt how to spell a word, can spell words backwards just as easily as forwards. I think it was in 'The Gift of Dyslexia' by Ron Davis. I borrowed the book so may not have remembered it that accurately but it was an interesting theory if you wanted to read more about it. Could also be the reason why dyslexic's make such great architects. Observing my son (8) I have noticed that when he looks at a page of text, for him, every time he just sees a mass of words / letters that have to be decoded one by one rather than the instant recognition that my non dyslexic DD (6) has of words she's learnt when she sees a page of text. So it could be the lack of short term memory and maybe this overdeveloped visual processing that makes reading so much harder for him. He is definately a much more complex thinker and much more creative in his vision and ideas compared to my daughter who excels academically but is much more pedestrian in her approach to problem solving etc. When you think about it spelling is really only a secreterial, lower order thinking skill and probably not atall indicative of the presence of the higher order cognitive skills.

Thanks, teamcullen, that's really useful. Will check out that teaching method.

ernie - yes, I think I've heard that theory. I hope people do more research on it. There's a very dominant theory about at the moment that dyslexia is essentially a disorder of phonological processing - ie., not visual at all. I really don't think it's as simple as this. Personally, I'm dyslexic and my visual IQ is incredibly bad, bad enough that I shouldn't have learned to read. But I also seem to get visual overstimulation easily - it's very easy to make me faint in bright lights, for example. So I've often wondered if some dyslexics are very sensitive to visual stimuli.

I'll definitely check out the book, thanks. It'll be interesting to see how your son gets on with text when he's older - he sounds very like my dyslexic brother was when he was 8-10: words were just a mass, needing to be decoded.

My oldest who is slightly dyslexic but bright and didn't really need extra help read relatively late although I remember buying her some of those baby flash cards many years ago not that they worked. Our mother taught us to read I think before we went to school - she was a teacher. My second daughter who was quieter and most studious read the earliest of all the children. She was 3. She just sat still and soaked things up but their very good A level results are virtually identical. In fact at 4 they couldn't find a book she couldn't read at an asssessment at Habs. school where her sister was . but she didn't get in. Went to North London Collegiate. Their first brother was about 4 or 5. The twins were much the same.

They all find it easier to build up words - cat spells cat so they have a tool to work out what something means I think. Their sister who has made a very good start in her first job has to spell check very careful ( slightly dyslexic) and even the other week joked she had left out her shopping list so her school age siblings could laugh at how she spells "lettice" etc

I think a lot of us have different brains and find our own ways to work around any limitations in there.

One of my dd has down's syndrome and she has a very strong visual memory so we started with simple books using key words and photos eg I see Mummy, I see Daddy, I see Granny.

Xenia - yes, I agree: there are lots of different brains and ways of working. It's really interesting seeing how people work around limitations - I don't focus on it to complain or say 'look how hard it is', but because the differences are so fascinating in themselves.

ginger - I am very ignorant about Down's syndrome. I know there are varying levels of severity - do you know if strong visual memory is particularly characteristic?

readall could you explain how your phonics system is different from other phonic teaching?

readall, you have to pay to advertise on this forum.

Also, if you had read the thread, you would know that I'm not asking for teaching programmes (gimmicky or not), just for anecdotes about the experiences of reading people have had.

LittleRedDragon - are you still collecting stories? I have an early reader like Devexity and Liopleurodon and happy to tell you what I can about how she went about acquiring this fascinating skill.

Sorry, haven't read all posts.

I was an early reader - not sure, but I think I started at around 3. I do remember my mother expressing surprise when she "discovered"! I have no recollection of precisely how I learned, though I do recall my older sister telling me to sound out the letters a-n-d, and then telling me to say it quickly. She obviously wasn't a terribly good phonics teacher, as I think my response rhymed with Canada!

My dd knew all of her letters by around 13/14 months, and somewhere between the ages of 2 and 3, she was able to blend sounds and read simple words. I don't really know how this happened - we didn't set out to teach her, we just gradually became aware that she could do it. However, she showed no interest in reading real books for herself until just before her fourth birthday. When she did start, she took off very quickly, and now, at five and a quarter, she can read anything and everything, and constantly has her nose in a book.

As nobody really taught her to read, it's hard to say how she learned, but it is my impression that she built on a combination of phonic knowledge and "look and say" - she would frequently look over my shoulder when I was reading to her, and I think it all just started to come together.

With regard to reading in other languages, I think it is relatively straightforward in languages that use the Roman script, especially as many of them tend to be quite phonetic - so once you have learned what sound each letter (or combination of letters) makes, it is relatively easy. Unlike English, with its weird "ough" combinations!

I have also learned to read in languages which use other scripts - specifically Russian, Hindi and Japanese. Russian and Hindi were relatively straightforward again, as they are essentially phonetic. Japanese was a different kettle of fish altogether, as it uses a combination of phonetic syllabaries and borrowed Chinese characters or pictograms. The same character would frequently have two or more pronunciations, depending on how it was combined with other words and/or the phonetic characters. I would often find myself in the odd situation of knowing the meaning of a word without having the faintest idea of the sounds that were contained in it. Difficult but fascinating!

Oops. Just seen how old this thread is!!

My daughters reception class teacher gave parents and kids free access to her Biff and chip collection. Everyone was so enthusiastic. By the end of reception most children were towards the end of the reading scheme with two having finished it and on to free reading. They were a very bright class though and they sort of egged each other on. The phonics thing worked wonderfully and they also had about 40 or so sight words to learn. My own daughter has always been a book worm and loved words. Even as a two year old she would spend an hour (plus)on my lap having cuddles and listening to non stop stories. As a 7 year old the highlight to her week is spelling tests.

My own experiance is totally different and quite negative. I am dyslexic and had to learn words by sight - not ideal. I think the phonics method would have suited me much more.