Early Reading (was no subject)

[Ronald Kephart]

On 8/9/08 9:53 AM, "Anthea Fraser Gupta" <A.F.Gupta at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:

> ...As the report indicates, many people have commented on the negative results
> of this approach to literacy.  I wish linguists could be heard on it too....

This is a subject I can rant on for days; don¹t get me started. Oops, too
late....

Spanish speaking children, if they are in a literate home envirinment,
usually learn to read before they enter school. But this is because Spanish
is relatively phonemic and consistent, so there are few ³rules² that they
have to learn. The spelling system itself taps into relevant aspects of
their ³knowledge of language.² And, contrary to the belief of some, they
develop holistic reading skills, i.e. as fluent readers they don¹t read
phoneme-by-phoneme.

English is a different beast. It has ³rules² like ³pronounce the letter <i>
as the diphthong /aj/ if it¹s followed by a consonant plus Œsilent e¹.² This
is a bullshit rule, pure and simple, and it definitely does not tap into or
correspond to anything going on in preschool kids¹s heads. Our own children
entered school, at age 5, already able to read some things. We did not,
however, use ³phonics² with them. We used whole-word recognition, from which
they were able to develop their own skills at top-down, rather than
bottom-up, processing. Our son at around four wrote brd and pinsl for bird
and pencil, showing that although we didn¹t explicitly teach him phonics, he
was developing phonemic awareness and was able to make some excellent stabs
at spelling; that they were ³wrong² was the fault of the English spelling
system, not of any lack on hos part.

My own feeling, and I¹ve done some homework on this as well as conducted an
applied project giving English Creole speaking kids access to litaercy
through their own language, is that English speaking children of all stripes
and colors would be best served if initial reading were taught using any one
of the phonemically based systems, like ITA or UNIFON. This is certainly
what the research points to. The thing is, some of this research is somewhat
old, dating from the 60s, but as far as I know the essential finding has not
been refuted: children can acquire reading more quickly in a phonemically
based spelling, and those same children can generalize their reading skill
to traditional English spelling, so easily that they very quickly surpass
the reading skills of kids who are exposed only to traditional spelling.

Ron
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