Friday 12 August 2011

The teaching of reading without the use of phonics

A few days ago, I wrote a little about the use of synthetic phonics in schools and suggested that it was a more or less perfect way of teaching reading. Some commented, apparently believing that I was saying that this was the only method which should be used. In particular, several people raised the problem of children with hearing difficulties; those with glue ear were mentioned. For these children, who may be unable properly to distinguish between speech sounds such as 'b' and 'p' or 'g' and 'k', other methods are needed. I have put below some of my own writing on this subject. I have written a good deal about this and so have just put a few pages here. If it is well received, I might put some more up tomorrow. If not, I shall simply drop the topic.


With the possible exception of walking and talking, it is the most vital skill that any child growing up in a modern, industrial society will ever acquire. The ability to read fluently is absolutely crucial to every aspect of future educational attainment. Sadly, a large proportion of children and young people never master reading. In Britain, 20% of children leave primary school at the age of eleven still remaining functionally illiterate after six years of full time education. Even worse than this, the reading ability of a sizable percentage of children actually declines during their time at secondary school. This is the case in over a third of our schools! Many leave school at sixteen less able to read than they were at the age of eleven. As adults, many of these children will struggle for the rest of their lives with decoding the printed word. This has a catastrophic effect upon their prospects. It need not be this way.

The problem is essentially that learning to read is being left too late. By the time that children start school at the age of four or five, their brains are already far less receptive to the learning of new skills than they would have been at two or three. The ideal age for picking up the art of reading is probably at the same time that they begin to speak; that is to say around twelve months or so. We shall see later why this should be. Another problem is that the method used to teach reading in British schools , synthetic phonics, makes the whole process vastly more complicated than it need be. In fact learning to read can and should be as easy and natural for a young child as learning to speak.

At this point, some readers are probably scratching their heads and saying, "But you have to teach reading. Nobody teaches babies to speak; it just happens!" Well, yes........and no. It is of course perfectly true that we do not sit our babies down for "Talking Lessons". Never the less, we are in fact teaching them and by the very same method that can be used in order to teach them to read.

Before we look at the teaching of reading, let us look for a moment at the "teaching" of talking. When we listen to people speaking in ordinary situations, it is all but impossible to tell where one word ends and another begins. People do not, for example, say, "I am going to go to the shop". They say instead, "I'mgonnergototheshop". Words are slurred together, cut off, mangled and abbreviated until they all run together in a string of sounds. How on earth can a baby make sense of this string of noises? The answer is that she doesn't. She does not have to.

There is a particular style of speaking to infants which has been called "Motherese". The pitch of the voice is raised, the tempo is slowed and key words are stressed slightly, emphasised so that they stand out from the rest. Something like this perhaps, "Can you see the dog? Look, the dog is sitting up. What a nice little dog." Any attempt on the baby's part to reproduce the sound of the emphasised word is met with immediate reward, praise is lavished upon her. She need only make the initial sound and say, "Duh" and her mother will smile broadly and say, "That's right" Clever girl. Yes it's a dog." In effect, the mother is teaching her child how to speak! She models the word she is teaching and then reinforces her child's efforts at saying it herself.

The printed word, like spoken language, is usually presented in a vast jumble of incomprehensible components, only instead of hearing a cacophony of weird noises, the baby sees a forest of black squiggles. Look at any page of a book or newspaper and you will soon see the problem. Just as with so-called "Motherese", the trick is to present individual words so that they may be learnt entire.

Parents are the best people to teach their children to talk, so too are they the best people by far to teach their own children to read. It is not a difficult task, far from it.
The Nature of Language

Before we look at the teaching of reading, it is probably worth stopping to think a little about what language actually is. Once we have done this, we shall be better placed to understand just what is happening when a child learns to read, because of course reading is really just a way of using language.

Broadly speaking, language is the ability to use and understand symbols for thinking and communicating. This covers everything from writing a birthday card to reading War and Peace, from reminding one's self about the important appointment that afternoon to formulating the theory of relativity. What do we mean by symbols? Nothing more than something which stands for or represents something else. Spoken words are symbols, as of course are letters and numbers printed on a page. Pictures are a kind of symbol too and so are toys. Acting or pretending are also symbolic. We shall see in a little while why this is important. For now, all we need to remember is that reading and speaking both entail using symbols; things that stand for other things.

We tend to take it for granted that children operate on the same level of symbolic understanding as we do, but it is not so. Just as they must learn to read words and decode their meaning, so too they have to learn to "read" pictures and toys.


Consider the simple case of a photograph of an orange. We of course see a splodge of orange printers ink on a page and identify it at once with the sweet, slightly tart citrus fruit that we have to peel. To a baby though, all this is nothing more than a patche of colour. It certainly doesn't represent anything. Similarly, we see a toy car and recognise at once its symbolic nature. Although it is small, light and garishly coloured, we know very well that it is meant to represent the large metal object that takes us to work. Again, this is far from obvious to babies.

It has been said that a child's play is his work. That being so, toys are the tools of his trade. Their importance in the development of the growing child's understanding of the concept of symbols cannot be overstated. It is only by such activities as the use of a toy car and the growing realisation that it in some strange way represents Mummy's big car that the baby becomes familiar with the whole idea of one thing standing for another. Since this peculiar notion underpins not only reading, but also speaking and listening, we must make sure that the baby acquires a sound background in the use of symbols. The reason for this is that the interpretation of two dimensional symbols, whether pictures, numbers or words, is the culmination of much mental effort on the child's part. To achieve this breakthrough in symbolic understanding requires a great deal of spadework beforehand. We shall look later at what this might entail.


Learning to read

Let's return now to the subject of reading. There are basically two ways to teach reading. There is the complicated way and the easy method. The complicated way involves studying a lot of strange words and alien ideas such as morphemes and phonemes, blending and sequencing, synthetic phonics and whole language teaching. No need to panic at this point, because we shall be using the easy, and incidentally far more effective, method.

Most traditional techniques for the teaching of reading involve breaking the word down into little pieces and then building it up again. Most of us have some vague idea that the alphabet is the basis of reading and that children must first learn this and try somehow to combine the letters into words. This is the difficult way and it is quite unnecessary. Consider the following sentence;

The little dog ran across the road to his owner.

When you read this sentence, did you laboriously sound out the letters and so decode the meaning of the words? When you read "dog", did you say to yourself, "Duh...oh...guh..spells dog"? I am guessing that nobody who read this did anything of the kind! Instead, we glance at the word as a whole and simply see "dog". We don't even need to know the letters of the alphabet in order to read the word, much less sound it out. It wouldn't really have helped you to do that any way with three of the words in that simple sentence. Look at "the" and try and sound it out. Tuh....huh..eh..spells the. Or how about howaboutruh...oh...ah...duh...spells road. Or even oh...wuh...ne..eh..ruh..spells owner.
I'm sure that you are getting the idea. We actually read words as wholes. We don't split them up into little pieces to decipher their meaning. We teach children to do this when they are learning to read so that they will have what teachers call "word attack" skills to decode unfamiliar words which they encounter. It is a good aim, but unfortunately it has the effect of making the whole business seem very hard for many small children. Most importantly of all, it is completely unnecessary..

So if we do not actually break words down into little bits when we read, what do we actually do? It is very simple; we look for familiar shapes. We really read by spotting the shapes of words, based largely upon the ascenders and descenders which they contain. This will be the only technical jargon used in the whole of this course and it really is impossible to avoid discussing ascenders and descenders. What are they? Simply the bits of letters which stick up above the rest of the word, in the case of ascenders or hang down below, on the case of descenders. For instance, in the word'

dog

there is an ascender in the letter "d" and a descender in the letter "g". These bits jutting out give words a characteristic shape or pattern. If we look at a few words in the light of this, we will soon see that they most of them have distinctive shapes;

ball, aeroplane, cat, it, and, the, tree

The individual letters which they contain need not concern us and there is certainly no reason at all to tax a small child with untangling these letters and then trying to remember their names, sounds or correct position in the word! How can we be sure that this is what we are doing when we read? Very easily as it happens. If we actually read by looking at the letters and then understanding the words, then the following lines should not be any more difficult to read than the ones which go before. ThE lEtTeRs ArE hErE fOr AlL tO sEe BuT tHE WoRdS tHeMsElVeS aRe NoT aLwAyS iMmEdIaTeLy ApPaReNt. I am pretty sure that even the most fluent readers will have had to slow down in order to make sense of the last sentence. This is purely and simply because the words do not have their usual and characteristic shapes. After all, they contain exactly the same letters as they normally do. Let's look at another example. Here is a passage which specifically leaves out all the letters without ascenders and descenders;

I thxxk thxt xxxt pxxplx xxll bx xblx tx xxxd thxx xlthxxgh x lxt xf lxttxxx xxx xxxxxxg.

Now compare the above sentence, still fairly easy to read because it includes all the ascenders and descenders which give the words their familiar pattern, with this;

xn xxis xassaxe axx xxe xexxers wxicx xux oux axove xxe xine or xexow ix xave xeen xefx oux, maxinx ix mucx xarxer xo reax.

(In this passage all the letters which jut out above the line or below it have been left out, making it much harder to read).

16 comments:

  1. Reading research shows that skilled readers use several methods when reading:

    We don't fixate on all the letters in a word, or even all the words in a text, we fixate on the points in a text that will convey most meaning most quickly;

    We use a combination of whole word recognition and spelling out;

    We use priming to disambiguate meanings.

    This doesn't mean that the best way to teach children to read is by mimicking the ad hoc approach used by expert readers.

    Synthetic phonics is a systematic method that makes explicit the way our writing system is constructed, so it's not surprising that it's most effective for most children. But once they are fluent, regardless of the method they used when learning to read, expert readers resort (unconsciously) to the range of techniques that result in optimal reading efficiency. All my family learned to read using ‘look and say’ but all of us also learned, as we went along, the letter-patterns written English uses to represent speech sounds.

    There are indeed parallels between walking, talking and reading; the reason reading generally requires more explicit instruction is because in neural processing terms it’s a more complex skill. However, it’s worth noting that, like all complex skills, walking and talking are not skills that you either have or don’t have. A significant number of people are not very good at walking, or at talking, and some can’t walk or talk at all. I predict that if you were to measure proficiency in reading, walking or talking across the population, you would end up with a normal distribution on all three measures.

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  2. 'I predict that if you were to measure proficiency in reading, walking or talking across the population, you would end up with a normal distribution on all three measures.'

    The difference being of course that although everybody without some underlying pathology walks and talks, it is quite possible for people not to be able to read.

    Simon.

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  3. That was interesting. The text with and without ascenders and descenders is a really powerful example.

    One of the things that has struck me about children taught to read at school - both children I observed when my daughter went to infant school and other children I have known - is the existence of a long stage when children can read but not fluently. This is something that simply never happened with either of my children. They both moved from simple word recognition (often using visual clues like font or location) and sounding out of cvc words, to being able to read anything you put in front of them, in a few months - or even weeks, perhaps? I find it rather mysterious how children seem to live for years with very limited reading ability that never 'takes off' in the way I saw with my children. I suspect it must be hugely frustrating and irritating and make it unlikely that those children will read for pleasure. Perhaps this explains the situation where there is actually a decline in reading ability over the course of a childhood.

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  4. 'The difference being of course that although everybody without some underlying pathology walks and talks, it is quite possible for people not to be able to read. '

    Agreed. It doesn't follow that people who don't read don't read only because no one has taught them to do so.

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  5. 'Some commented, apparently believing that I was saying that this was the only method which should be used. In particular, several people raised the problem of children with hearing difficulties; those with glue ear were mentioned.'

    I don't think that's what happened. I think someone just pointed out that the picking up of phonics skills can be difficult for children with extended periods hearing loss in early childhood.

    Also, it's not simply the fact that they miss out on hearing a few high-frequency sounds. That's looking at the issue too simplistically.

    Children who have frequent ear infections tend to miss quite bit of school with the recurrent ear infections, which can be very painful! (It wasn't until I had an ear infection as an adult, that I recognised just how painful they can be!) So, they miss critical periods of teaching.

    It also has a knock-on effect on their social relationships at school. If they can't hear terribly well, they tend not to get so involved in the same play activities and have reduced opportunities for practicing listening and speaking skills (broader language development. It can actually be quite a big deal for some kids.

    Anyway, pointing this out was not to say that SP isn't an excellent route in to reading. I used it (along with other things) with my kids, at age 3-4, and they both quickly became excellent readers, despite the fact that one of them had a borderline IQ and was on the autism spectrum. So, I am a believer! That doesn't mean, however, that there won't be children who find it difficult to learn to read this way.

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  6. 'the existence of a long stage when children can read but not fluently. This is something that simply never happened with either of my children. They both moved from simple word recognition (often using visual clues like font or location) and sounding out of cvc words, to being able to read anything you put in front of them, in a few months - or even weeks, perhaps?'

    Yes, mine took off very quickly to proper books etc. I think there may be several reasons for some children being stuck in a less mature stage of reading.

    One of them is the problem inherent in a class teaching situation. Children are kept back simply because of the mechanics of the classroom arrangements. There may be no adult available to 'get them onto the next stage' when they are ready and excited to do it.

    Another problem is that some children are taught to rely far too much on things like context clues. It's amazing how many secondary age poor readers I've encountered who will spend all their time scanning the page for pictorial and other clues as to what the word might be instead of looking at the word itself and employing phonic knowledge.

    Another problem is when reading is thought of by the child as something they perform for others, instead of something they use for themselves. A sort of performance anxiety starts to take over and inhibits them from reaching confidence and fluency.

    Just some thoughts.

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  7. 'Another problem is that some children are taught to rely far too much on things like context clues. '

    Also known as guessing! This is a direct consequence of some of the ideology going the rounds in the seventies and eighties, whereby the important thing was thought to be 'extracting' or 'creating' meaning from the text, rather than just reading the words written there. If a picture showed a boy jumping and the kid read a word as 'jumped', even though the printed word was 'sprang', teachers were told not to correct the child. He had after all correctly extracted meaning from the text! I need hardly add this this produced illiterate children who could just about struggle through Roger Red Hat and the Village with Three Corners, but who would be foxed by a newspaper article.

    Simon.

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  8. 'Another problem is that some children are taught to rely far too much on things like context clues.'

    The theory behind this idea was that fluent readers used contextual 'cues' (as distinct from clues) which activated some words and not others, if the words were spelled similarly. Again the underlying problem was that non-readers were being taught to mimic the way skilled readers read, without being skilled readers.

    In other words, the theory was correct; it was the application that was at fault.

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  9. But, what I find odd is that I was unaware of any 'next stage' between the initial moments of working out what words say and my children being able to just read everything. It really didn't take input at that stage (that I remember) as it was a sort of 'light the touchpaper' situation.

    I have wondered if part of what happened was the children's large spoken vocabulary was particularly significant at that moment. Once they recognised words in print, they found the whole, huge range of words they spoke and heard spoken around them. I remember daughter at about six reading the word overwhelmed (it surprised a grandparent, which is why I remember it) and I suspect this was possible because she already knew the word. Maybe the missing ingredient for reading fluency in a classroom situation is not enough talking?

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  10. ' I remember daughter at about six reading the word overwhelmed (it surprised a grandparent, which is why I remember it) and I suspect this was possible because she already knew the word. '

    Desite keeping obsessively detailed notes, recorded langauge samples and so on, I was never able to figure out the precise mechanism by which my daughter became a fluent reader. Sometimes, it seemed beyond all reason. I used to get her to read out headlines from the Telegraph and I have one in front of me now with the accompanying notes. It was February 10th, 1997, which meant that she was three and a half. The headline reads 'Nazi rocket uncovered at air museum'. Five of the words are reasonably common and the spelling is standard. The word 'Nazi' though, with a 'Z' in the middle, is not. yet she read it perfectly as 'Nart-see'. I have to this day absolutely no idea how this worked.

    Simon.

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  11. That is surprising! Maybe it was the word museum being there that alerted her to the fact that the weird word with the z in it must be 'Nart-see' (a word she had heard spoken.) If she had picked up that Nazis were from some period in history and that things to do with history could be found in museums? That is astonishing in a three year old but I think three year olds are pretty astonishing. Presumably she had been to a museum by three and had probably also seen the word out in the world a fair bit - especially if you were living in London at the time. Nazi is also a word that features a great deal in TV listing magazines. It's very interesting though and I don't suppose you'll ever really know she did it. But it must be related to all the talking you did with her, surely?

    I remember, with great fondness, the toddler years as being packed with hundreds of little miracles every day.

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  12. 'I remember, with great fondness, the toddler years as being packed with hundreds of little miracles every day.'

    Isn't that the truth! I am sure that a lot of exciting things also go on in the minds of fourteen year-olds, it is just that they have generally lost the habit of openess which small children have. I think that two and three are the most pleasurable age to be around children. (That last sentence does not sound completely right, but I dare say you know what I mean!)

    Simon.

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  13. "In particular, several people raised the problem of children with hearing difficulties;"

    Auditory Processing disorder was also mentioned, which of course is not a hearing difficulty, but the inability to process what is heard.

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  14. Very interesting post - definitely continue! You may have stumbled across this:

    "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

    Now I know this wasn't actually a research project at Cambridge (it did the rounds via the interweb) but never fails to amuse me!

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  15. That reads almost like a Peter Williams comment.

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  16. Keep on writing, great job!

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    ReplyDelete