Parenting Articles

Learning to Read

There is no mystery in teaching children to read - no magic and no hocus pocus - just a set of skills that must be taught sequentially to help children become independent readers. Some methods of instruction work better for some children and other methods work better for others. Exclusive emphasis on one method can lead to reading failure in children.

The benefits of reading well by a child are that they will be confident with their school work, they will better understand and they will study better, hopefully achieving more.

If a child is a slow reader they don't learn as quickly as their peers and day by day they can fall further behind. Their confidence in their schoolwork plummets as does their self confidence. Their behaviour can become disruptive in the classroom and intolerable at home - all because of frustration that is the inevitable consequence of a reading problem.

Few children, if any, set out to ruin your day by reading poorly. Most children with reading problems are desperately trying to read accurately and please those who are listening. Many have problems in areas that contribute to reading difficulties - poor visual and auditory perception, ADD or poor self confidence - and they may be unwilling to try in case they make mistakes. The job of parents and teachers is to find ways of improving the situation.

The first thing to remember is that, when it comes to teaching reading there is no single infallible way of doing things. The prevalent method of reading instruction for the past twenty years has flatly stated that all children learn to read by 'sight' or 'whole word' methods. It doesn't matter where you had been in that time, this method has predominated to the exclusion of others.

The 'whole language' method, with the benefit of hindsight, is directly responsible for reading problems of a generation of school children. Whole language asks children to read words as complete units. Think of the word 'could'. Close your eyes and you can see it blinking on and off like a neon sign. That is your visual memory at work. The theory goes like this - if a child can learn to recognize 'could' and retain it, the child will then be able to recognize the similar words, 'would and should'. That sounds fine in theory and many children learn to read quite happily this way. In reality, however, over one-third of seven year olds lack visual memory to enable them to learn using whole language methods.

Poor visual memory explains why a child can read a word on one page and forget it on the next. The reliance on visual memory is the reason why whole language causes so many children to be unsuccessful in their early reading experiences.

Whole language encourages children to guess at words. If children do not know a word, they are told to look at the picture relating to it and guess at it. Older children are told to try to read the word using contextual clues from the other words around it. If they come across an unfamiliar word they are told to skip over it and come back to it later. If the word is an integral component of the sentence then their understanding of the sentence is doomed to failure.

When it comes to spelling, children are encouraged to 'invent' words. Whole language believes that children will learn to spell naturally over the years and does not bother correcting spelling mistakes. A recipe for disaster. You don't have to think too long to see that this is not a satisfactory way of teaching a simple set of skills. Whole language is at best a 'hit and miss' method that works well for those it hits and not at all that it misses. At worst it is a recipe for disaster for children with poor visual memory skills. For those who prefer a systematic approach to learning, it gives no reliable core of knowledge to fall back on when they are asked to read and spell unfamiliar words. Children cannot be taught to read effectively by guesswork. Whole language puts the cart before the horse.

Children learn to read by using their knowledge of the spoken language and applying it to the written word. They use language from their environment to develop their reading, writing and spelling ability. By contrast, the phonics method teaches children to read from the bottom up. It teaches children to 'sound out' words from the knowledge of the sounds that letters make. It gives them a set of skills to use when they encounter unknown words.

Whole language advocates say that it is a waste of time to give children the mechanical ability to sound out words and that children learn to read by reading. This approach makes as much sense, the phonics people say, as throwing a child in the deep end of a pool and saying, 'Learn to swim by swimming'.

The evidence is now overwhelming that children learn to read best if they are given systematic instruction in phonics. The phonic method teaches children to assign sound values to written symbols. In plain language they say a sound when they see a letter. They are taught to blend sounds into meaningful words and they go on to learn rules of generalizations and more difficult letter-sound patterns. Finally, they are shown how to divide words into syllables and into prefixes and suffixes.

Children also need to be taught a core of basic sight vocabulary words - words they must recognize immediately. There are a number of these lists. They contain over two-thirds of words used in beginning readers and over one-half of the words in adult reading material. Children learn sight vocabulary to improve fluency and to give them more time to concentrate on unfamiliar words.

The whole language method has a lot to answer for. A widespread introduction of phonics methods does not mean reading problems will magically disappear. Children will continue to have reading problems and will continue to need remedial instruction. With a balanced and common sense approach to the teaching of reading, the problems may not be so severe and the numbers not so large.

Read more about the Letterland program

At Clockwork Learning Centers we pride ourselves on our focus on literacy foundations for children. We believe that children need a total approach to learning to read, with a strong emphasis on phonics.