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.

Go for it! I think the phonics thing is a whole load of rubbish anyway (I speak as a professional in that regard). Starting with whole word recognition will do no damage and she can still learn using Jolly Phonics when she starts Reception--again it does no harm. Well done for having such a clever clogs! My 3 year old (also autumn birth) is no where near showing signs of readiness to read (or write actually ).

In my experience, too many teachers see the teaching of phonics as an end in itself, rather thah a means to an end.

My 5-year-old was "taught phonics" at school in the sense that he learned the jolly phonics letters and actions. But it seemed he was never taught that the point of it all was in blending sounds together - his school still sent (sends) home lists of words to be learnt by sight. There was lots of encouragement to look at the pictures and guess - he was even told at one point "you don't need to look at the words"! His teachers also seemed to confuse memorising books with reading them - they only believed that he was memorising when I demonstrated that he could read his books equally well, even when all the words were covered up.

It was only when I decided to teach him myself that he started to make progress - I bought Mona McNee's "Step by Step" ( a phonics approach) and took it from there. His progress since I started has been phenomenal - 6 reading levels in the past half term.

bonsoir

"If a child understands a word when spoken it will understand it when it is read."

Actually, this statement is an oversimplication. When children are still learning to read, the neurological effort required to sound out a word using synthetic phonics (and then another word, and another...) is so great that the meaning of words that a child recognises and understands in normal spoken conversation can be lost. It is only when the reading process is mastered and automated that the above claim holds true.

This is a theory only, for which I have never seen any research evidence (though someone might be able to point me at some...). It appears to be based on the theory that the brain has a finite processing capacity and therefore if it is occupied with one task it cannot handle a second. I suspect that it may hold true for people who have problems with short term memory, but, speaking from experience only, I have known pupils to haltingly decode every word in a sentence yet laugh at the joke it contains as soon as they have 'read' it.

If it is a short term memory problem it will affect only a relatively small percentage of children; most will have no difficulty.

LRD says:

I would really like to know more about the roles of working memory and processing speed in all this - I wonder if perhaps children/parents gravitate towards the system that seems to them to cut down the demands on those

Ultimately it is whole word learning which places the greatest demand on memory of any kind because of the sheer volume of individual items which have to be learned (thousands!) As for 'processing'., I'm not exactly sure how a 'whole word' is processed if not by the decoding & blending route at an automatic and unconscious level- can anybody enlighten me?

bradbourne,

What is so interesting about these threads on reading is the way they illuminate what actually goes on in schools in regards to 'phonics' teaching!

Of course there is no value in learning letter/sound correspondences if that knowledge is not immediately put to use in learning to decode and blend words. Further, there is no point in learning to decode and blend words if that skill is not put to use in the context of meaningful text. Not to do these things is bad practice and, frankly, gives phonics teaching a bad name. Poor practice is rightly picked on by criticsof phonics teaching though it iscynically used by anti-phonics critics to exemplify all phonics teaching.

maizieD - I have read very interesting work by Stanislas Dehaene, a very eminent French psychologist in this area, that explains this. If I come across something in English (which I am sure must exist) I will point you in its direction.

"I'm not exactly sure how a 'whole word' is processed if not by the decoding & blending route at an automatic and unconscious level- can anybody enlighten me?"

You are right - very fast automated decoding and blending is how it works. But it is so fast that for a quite a long time people thought that readers saw the whole word, not individual phoneme/grapheme correspondences - hence the (erroneous) development and promotion of whole word reading pedagogy...

Fairenuff
There are a few different points there I think. The first is about research evidence in education when not done in a controlled environment. My understanding is that one can still look at converging evidence as demonstrated in metaanalytical studies. However what is most persuasive is the research into how children actually read. The whole 'fad' for whole word reading was based on assumptions about how children read which have subsequently been disproved. You might dispute evidence of the success of phonics in schools by saying its impossibe to ever prove the success of an educational approach. However, there is as close to a consesnsus as its possibe to get in the research community that children DO NOT read in the ways whole words advocates presumed when the whole word approach became popular. Phonics teaches readers to read in the way researchers now know is most successful. It is irrational to cling to a method of teaching reading when the whole premise on which that method was based has been disproven.

The other point is about not knowing how much teachers are using phonics. Because systematic synthetic phonics requires a child to read all the way through the word - if a teacher advocates mixed methodes in any significant way they quite dramatically negate the effect of any phonics teaching they do attempt. If you are telling a child to guess from pictures or initial letter sounds you CANNOT be telling them to read through the word. People often think phonics advocates are unreasonable not to support mixing methods. But thats becasue you can't. Once you mix methods the child will inevitably use other strategies before they think of sounding out through the word. Mixed methods in practice means a whole word approach.

Stanislas Dehaene has published in English. I have considered buying his book from time to time. I must put it on my Amazon wish List

You are right - very fast automated decoding and blending is how it works. But it is so fast that for a quite a long time people thought that readers saw the whole word, not individual phoneme/grapheme correspondences - hence the (erroneous) development and promotion of whole word reading pedagogy...

You're agreeing with me

If this is the case, how do people expect teaching whole words with flash cards to produce fast, automated decoding and blending? It defies logic...

Bonsoir whole word recognition often involves children being asked to look at the shape of the word (often as a blacked out silhouette - looking like a part of a crossword puzzle) so they aren't even looking at letters.

What sort of professional banana87? Hopefully not one who teaches young children!

Banana87
You don't need to be a clever clogs to learn to read with phonics, thats kind of the point. If you learn to read using whole words you must

1. Engage in an enormous feat of memory for the shapes of a myriad of words
2. Be able to infer phonological rules for yourself, without being told any of them directly.

If you learn to read with phonics you are directly taught what you need to know to decode words without enormous feats of memory. That doesn't make whole word teaching superior just needlessly difficult and sometimes dangerously misleading.

This is why teachers of systematic phonics never really talk much about 'readiness', its just not relevant. Whole word teaching is a bit like presenting a child with a set of stairs to climb and the first step is really high.

My ds is 3 (summer born) and has shown no signs whatsoever of being a clever clogs (to any neutral observer anyway) but he is reading first level phonics books and making lovely progress. As he has been looking at letter sounds in books since he was two he knows most and a few digraphs like th and after a bit of demontrating blending away he went. He does sometimes recognise whole words now but yes there is no way he would have been 'ready' to learn reading that way for some time...

There is no harm in trying-either she will be ready or she won't. She can get the phonics later.

"Bonsoir whole word recognition often involves children being asked to look at the shape of the word (often as a blacked out silhouette - looking like a part of a crossword puzzle) so they aren't even looking at letters."

Yes, I know . Which is about as much use as throwing a whole load of words into a cauldron with a few mouse tails and dragons teeth and making the children drink the resulting brew in helping them learn to read...

Would processing speed, in the context of whole word reading, not refer to how quickly you could retrieve a word from your memory?

IndigoBell - my understanding is that whole word recognition reading schemes do not in fact change the underlying process of reading in the brain, which always ends up as phonics-based. However, children take longer to work out phonics for themselves than if they are taught phonics systematically by an adult.

If this is the case, how do people expect teaching whole words with flash cards to produce fast, automated decoding and blending? It defies logic...

I am not sure that they do. Would it not simply be teaching children to recognise the words that are flashed. Those words and no others, so no fast automated decoding and blending necessary.

I am not sure why whole word methods caught on, but for producers of reading books, it meant that they could use any words they liked, so they didn't have to keep thinking 'no I can't use that yet, the children won't have covered it'. They wouldn't have to come up with sentences like 'the doc tells Sam he has the pox' which was in a decodable that was linked to upthread. Also you can't control children's writing in quite the same way as you can control their reading, so they would have to learn some words, including their names, before they learn the necessary correspondences.

Bonsoir whole word recognition often involves children being asked to look at the shape of the word (often as a blacked out silhouette - looking like a part of a crossword puzzle) so they aren't even looking at letters.

Obviously this is nonsense (not what you have written, but that anyone might think that that is in any way a worthwhile activity.)

I think it may have stemmed from referring whole word reading as recognising word shape. In this case shape means pattern - not the geometrical shape.

There was, a few decades ago, a lot of talk about "whole language" and "real books" and all sorts of ideas floated around about learning to read being similar to learning to talk ie you didn't get taught all sorts of rules when you learned to talk but just picked it up, and reading should be the same ie you could learn to read from just doing a lot of it.

I do know some parents who almost kill themselves reading to their children every morning and evening on the misguided notion that it will help their children learn to read. That's an idea left over from the whole language days.

IndigoBell - my understanding is that whole word recognition reading schemes do not in fact change the underlying process of reading in the brain, which always ends up as phonics-based. However, children take longer to work out phonics for themselves than if they are taught phonics systematically by an adult.

But whole word recognition schemes introduce simple reading books before any phonics is taught. They generally repeat the same words over and over so they become familiar.

'As for 'processing'., I'm not exactly sure how a 'whole word' is processed if not by the decoding & blending route at an automatic and unconscious level- can anybody enlighten me?'

Isn't this the dual-route theory? Mental lexicon versus decoding-and-blending?

CecilyP - whole word reading schemes may believe and claim that they are introducing whole words and building up a word bank in the brain but brains don't actually store written words as a bank in that way. At least, that is my understanding of what neurological research has shown - that all brains store words as phonics. Phonics is a body of knowledge about how language/reading works in the brain that has resulted from sophisticated neurological research, as opposed to vague hypothesis/wishful thinking!

Bonsoir, there is also the idea that reading to your children is a 'good thing'. And I am sure most parents who enjoy books will do this because they enjoy it. Then researchers to the somewhat obvious conclusion that children who are read to generally do better at reading than those who are not. But of course it is possible to take it to the most ridiculous extremes.

LRD - I assume that your "mental lexicon" is the same thing as my "word bank in the brain"?

CecilyP - reading to your children is a good thing, obviously, but it does not follow that the more you read to them, the better at reading they become.

In fact, some children I know are not really as good at reading as they should be because their parents insist on reading difficult books to them rather than insisting that their children read easier books out loud to them.

bonsoir - I don't know. I'm just using the term as it is the one I've heard (I don't know who invented it).

I was thinking of the research that demonstrates that we respond to both visual and phonetic components of words (the priming tests), but I don't know how you'd prove something was remembered purely visually.

I do think that working memory/processing speed are quite interesting, but that is only because I know I score very badly on these and very well on other things, so I have a natural bias towards wanting to know more - not scientific at all!