How bad would it be if I taught my daughter to read...

[JeanBodel]

---using whole word recognition rather than phonics?

She's 3, she loves books, she wants to read them herself. She's an autumn birth so she won't go to school for another two years. I don't think either of us can wait that long for her to start reading independently.

I've got a whole set of Peter and Jane's (yes, the very set I learnt with 30 years ago). I really don't want to spend lots of money on Jolly Phonics when I know I can teach her with the books I already own.

I just dread getting into trouble with the reception teacher. I don't mean to criticise teachers or phonics in any way. I can see how annoying it would be to have a kid in your class who's shouting out the word without segmenting it.

All advice gratefully received.

sorry

I did assume when I first read that comment it was meant for me! Reading back I expressed myself really badly, too.

LRD,

Babies 'babble' in phonemes. They are able to discriminate individual phonemes because they need to be able to in order to learn to talk; if they couldn't they wouldn't be able tell the difference between 'cup' and 'cap'; either to understand what the word means or to be able to copy it in their speech.

Once they have learned to speak the skill becomes redundant. And it was never a 'conscious' skill in the first place. Learning to read, an entirely 'unnatural' act, requires that children 'relearn' phonemes; only they have to be conscious of them this time. Once they have learned to read well they once again don't have much more use for conscious knowledge of them; a skilled reader is able to work out a new word almost as rapidly and automatically as reading a familiar one, without really thinking about it phoneme by phoneme. So many adults find it quite difficult to identify the individual phonemes in words because they never really give any thought to how they work out unfamiliar words.

Those 'phoneme manipulation' exercises are fiendishly difficult unless the person doing them has had instruction in phonemic awareness...

That is fascinating! I shall have to listen out for this - my baby niece will be learning to speak soon, I'll keep an ear out.

I put it very clumsily (and I had no idea that anyone had seen babies doing this, though it is very exciting and makes total sense they would), but that's what I was asking about on the previous page, about how you could not know phonemes since we speak them. Do you know, do children with baby siblings find phonics at school easier at all? I mean, if they hear the baby babbling it might prompt them to remember?

Ooh ... also, do you know, is there any kind of correlation between how people learn to speak and how they learn to read? There's some variation isn't there, in how much babies babble and when/how they start on to whole words and setences?

LRD

'Dual Route theory operates after words have been 'learned'. It isn't a theory of acquiring word recognition, it's a theory of word recognition during the reading process. The authors' theory is that 'known' words are not decoded and blended (as in the unconscious, automatic decoding & blending of skilled readers that Bonsoir & I were talking about earlier) but recognised by 'meaning'. i.e you see the word on the page and go straight to its meaning, without any intervening stage. The other 'route' is the conventional decoding route, for unfamiliar words.

I think it is a dotty mistaken theory because it still doesn't explain how the word is recognised prior to its meaning being extracted... I think you've got to know what it 'says' before you can attach a meaning to it...

I don't follow. Is there a way to demonstrate whether or not people can recognize whole words as images before they've learned to read?

I don't follow it either, LRD. It doesn't make any sense at all to me. I have had correspondence with someone who knows one of the authors of the dual-route theory; I was interested to find out how the authors thought that words got into memory because the 'straight to meaning' bit sounded very similar to 'whole word' to me.

The author responded by saying (I think) that words got into memory via the ddecoding route, but once they were in memory they were accessed by the 'meaning' route. It still sounded very odd. However, it is a very much cited theory among reading research scientists and taken as 'gospel' by many people.

Yes, it sounded like whole word to me too. I'm not understanding any better for discussing it here but it's good to know that perhaps not just me!

I don't understand the distinction the author is making between 'meaning' and what I've been thinking of as visual memory. Someone explained it to me once that the image the word makes can be memorized, and I think that is sometimes true. But you're saying even in the cases where someone does do that when learning to read, it doesn't link up to dual-route theory, and in any case you reckon dual route theory is shaky?

Lrd/teacher, going back to what you were saying about Chinese earlier, just thought you might like to know that the Chinese language does now have a phonetic basis, it was introduced by Chairman Mao. I forget what it's called, but it acts as a bridge between the sounds of the words & the written characters & it was the introduction of this that bought literacy from 20% of the population to 80% today.

Thanks joyn - interesting statistics too.

Yes, it sounded like whole word to me too. I'm not understanding any better for discussing it here but it's good to know that perhaps not just me!

I didn't understand it any better when I read an explantion by one of its authors and I don't think that it was because I'm exceptionally thick

I don't understand the distinction the author is making between 'meaning' and what I've been thinking of as visual memory.

Well, you have to ascribe a 'meaning' to a written word else what you are reading would be gibberish (that is, so long as it is written in a language you can speak/understand). The dual-route theory seems to be saying that when you see a word you 'know' you don't process it in any way, you just extract its meaning. This would be completely different from 'visual memory' because visual memory of the word would be a 'recognition' process and the dual-route theory doesn't seem to account for any 'recognition', apart from recognising the word's meaning.

I am almost 100% convinced that when I read silently I still somehow 'say' or 'hear' the word in my head as I read it (i.e. subvocalise it). Meaning may well be accessed at the same time, or millisecs later, but I am sure that I identify the word first.

This is what a reading researcher, Prof. D. Share has to say about the Chinese orthographic system:

According to Gelb (1963), the Chinese writing system, like all the other ancient systems, was never a pure logography, but "word-syllabic" from its earliest beginnings. In fact, a strict logography has never existed (Gelb, 1963), because it would not be productive (see Liberman & Liberman, 1992; Mattingly, 1985) in the sense of incorporating a set of orthographic conventions by which new lexical items can be transcribed and deciphered.
The logographic learner is forced to rely on interminable memorization of thousands of symbols. The traditional process of learning Chinese characters extends over the entire period of schooling and beyond, consuming an estimated 30% of each school day (Ohara, 1978, cited in Taylor and Taylor, 1983). Perhaps because the phonetic in Chinese compounds fails to provide a reliable guide to sound, children in China today are first introduced to an alphabetic script-"pinyin". During their first few months at school, children are taught the symbol-sound correspondences of pinyin together with phonemic analysis (Liu, 1978). Pinyin is then used solely as a self-teaching mechanism to aid learning of the characters which appear with adjacent pinyin.

D.L. Share / Cognition 55 (1995) 151-218 199

Right, I follow you now!

Yes, I don't really see how the point about 'meaning' makes sense ... unless they mean guessing from context? (reaching here ....)

I'm pretty sure I don't consciously subvocalise or mentally 'hear' words, but then I wouldn't be conscious of it anyway.

FWIW, the explanation I got given (to me as an layperson, so very simple and obviously quite different from what you got from the author), was that when you are a competent reader, you build up a sight vocabulary of words you no longer need to decode phonologically, which you store in a memory bank. You retain (obviously) the ability to decode words phonologically and will do this for unfamiliar words. As you read, for each word your brain attempts to access the memory bank, and begins the process of phonetic decoding. Whichever process finishes first gets you the answer, but you attempt to do both processes.

This, btw, was Gerry Altmann, and I was asking about a very old book of his (In Defense of Babel), and so I am not even sure if it's meant to be a related theory. It sounded similar to me.

At the moment I am just shrugging - I appreciate you trying to explain and don't think it's due to you that I'm not quite getting it!

(I've just looked out my old notes from that meeting btw and it looks as if he was using 'meaning' and 'memory bank' interchangeably ... or I was writing them down interchangeably ...)

oooh, blimey - Gerry Altmann - that takes me back a bit

LRD - when you asked 'Is there a way to demonstrate whether or not people can recognize whole words as images before they've learned to read?' - did you mean just that? ie recognising the shape and pattern of words, with no decoding/reading/ascribing meaning?

if so, then yes. dd1 did just this, as part of a pre-reading programme (which in turn was part of a wider education programme). she has been 'playing around' with letters and words for far longer than she has been able to read (she has been able to read, slowly and haltingly, since the summer - she is 7.5 now; she has been recognising whole words since she was 4, but not initially with any meaning ascribed to them - just a pattern which she could discern. she was not able to even pick out single letters from the whole word - it was a single entity to her, not made up of letters (which she also knew well))

As I don't 'get it' either it's a bit like the blind leading the blind here

I can sort of understand the theory but I can't see how it translates to practice!

Modern research is pointing to a discovery that 'phonology' does have a role in 'silent' reading. Apparently the area of the brain which deals with phonology is activated even during silent reading. I did once find something on the web that said that this was being investigated for the possibility of it being exploited for communication between astronauts when space walking. Unfortunately I didn't bookmark the page and I have never been able to find it since

Here are the results of a google search on 'phonology+silent reading' if you want to have a deeper look at the topic:

www.google.co.uk/search?q=phonology%2Bsilent+reading&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a

silver - so how on earth did you work out that she was recognizing the words? I find this really interesting btw, no doubting or interrogating (I hope!), just very curious. I mean, I can understand a child recognizing a whole word as an image and not distinguishing the letters (I think I said before, but DH reckons Russian children do this a lot as you use cursive more in early teaching there). But I'd have thought unless some meaning was ascribed, it'd be hard to know the child did recognize the 'picture'?

(I'm going to be a horrible mum constantly experimenting on my child, aren't I?! )

Cross-post. Thanks maizie, will have a look at that link.

I think the book by Altmann has stuff about phonology and silent reading, but at the time when I was asking him about it, I was a bit more interested in reading aloud, unfortunately!

Btw, if you do ever come back to the astronauts research, would you start a thread? It'd be very exciting if they did something with thaat!

as part of her general programme, we worked on matching and sorting with dd1. she could accurately match written words (using the dreaded flashcards initially, but also hand written) before she was able to read. she had no recognition of what they said, and could match words that I knew she had no understanding of, given her severe language disorder. the reasons why we were even doing that exercise are many and varied, but part of the explanation was that it was the beginnings of teaching whole word recognition to her - as i said before, she has learned to read via mixed methods, and will continue to learn via mixed methods.

the one thing about dd1 is that we have to continually refine what and how we teach her. just about everything she has learned has been as a result of using several different methods of getting the information across to her, and she has gradually, tiny bit by tiny bit, come up to the mark by sheer determination. it is exhausting, but very rewarding.

Ah, I see.

I wonder if you use the same skills to spot visual correspondences as you do to identify a word on its own as 'that' word, the one you know? I mean, is matching words the same thing as recognizing the shape of a word when you've only one example?

It is really interesting that she could do that ... when you think how intricate the shape of even quite a simple word is, and how similar (relatively) all words are. You say 'sheer determination' but it also sounds like an interesting skillset to me (I should say I'm rubbish at any task like that so I'm gobsmacked at a child who can't yet read doing it).

Thanks for explaining btw.

LRD
This is a nice paper from that search:

[[http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0025782

Inner Speech during Silent Reading Reflects the Reader's Regional Accent]]

(I am covered with embarrassment because I've just posted this on the wrong thread. I've got the right one now..)

I live in fear of doing that whenever I've got serious and funny threads open at the same time.

That link isn't working for me, but if you can give me the author and source I can probably find it myself. I'm curious now given the title.

Ignore that ... got it ...