How should children be taught to read?

Word count: 1848

In today’s world reading is a form of communication almost as

important as speaking. Pupils who attain higher competency in

reading are then able to access a wider curriculum which in turn will

give them more options in their education, career and life

(MacDonald, 2010). Acquiring literacy is a crucial step in a child’s

early education as the gap between children with poor grades and the

more advanced readers is still visible in spite of years of further

education (Rayner, Foorman, Pefretti, Pesetsky, Seidenberg, 2001).

Given the importance of reading, teachers should be aware of the

best methods to teach children to read. This paper will discuss two of

these methods, the phonics approach and the whole-word teaching

method. Whether one method is superior to the other or should they

be used together, or perhaps even include other methods, will be

discussed as well. The paper will conclude with final

recommendations based on the evidence discussed.

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 The debate among specialists involves the phonic approach

(any form of it) and the whole word or look-and-say approach as the

most efficient method to teaching to read.

Opponents to the phonic approach argue frequently that due to

its irregularity, it is difficult to teach English through phonics therefore

the best method to teach it would be through the whole word

approach. One major advantage of this approach is that encourages

children to read for meaning. New words are introduced and learned

within the text context (MacDonald, 2010) which then helps children

to see the bigger picture (MacDonald, 2010). In an experiment Rozin,

Poritsky and Sotsky, (1971; as cited in Harrigan, 1976) helped

children with reading disabilities to read English material using 30

Chinese characters - ideographs - within a short period of a few hours

only. Neurological evidence showed that Chinese ideographs map

directly to the meaning as opposed to the abstract character of the

phonemes and syllables (Harrigan, 1976). However, an obvious

shortage of this method was acknowledged in terms of visual

discrimination and memorization: it is not easy to remember and

recognize words merely by their shape (Harringan, 1976); in addition,

the large number of characters to be remembered seems to be such

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a difficult task that serious calls were made for a phonetic system to

be adopted to either supplement or replace ideographs (Harrigan,

1976).

Following the recent discovery that the human brain continues

to develop until we reach 20-25 years (white cortical matter develops

up to the age of 20-Nature America, 1999; frontal lobes can take up

to 25 years-Kempe, 2012) and that it is subject to synaptic pruning

we can infer some interesting things. Also, the fact that children

undergo through a stage in which they posses no object permanence

will have its importance in the next argument.

Giedd et.al (in press) have proposed that the letter coding

process might be subject to developmental changes. They cite a

study done by Castles, Davis, Cavalot and Forster (in press) which

has revealed that the magnitude of the priming effect declines with

age and this in turn will influence the visual discrimination process.

This is known as brain plasticity and has also shown that infants are

born with the capacity of discriminating between sounds in different

languages (Kempe, 2012), capacity that is lost during the first year of

life. According to Piaget’s developmental theory (1954) object

permanence is an acquired feature of humans and therefore it can be

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inferred that the process of assigning locations to this objects is also

a developmental feature, subjected to various changes. If this is the

case assigning location to letters (as objects) might be not be a

straightforward process, especially for the beginning readers (Giedd

et al., in press). This finding implies that learning to read through

synthetic phonic approach might be against the natural way of the

brain processing reading as opposed to the whole-word approach.

Further more, evidence provided by other studies (e.g. O’Connor &

Forster, 1981; as cited in Giedd et al, in press) have shown that letter

position and letter identity are not integrated on the same perceptual

same dimension which will result in further confusion if using the

synthetics phonics approach. The fact that non-words such as

“UNIVESRITY” are easily confused with their base word shows that

once we have achieved literacy letters are processed once again as

whole-words. Nevertheless, due to the brain pruning the capacity of

acquiring words as a whole will decline, the memory’s capacity will

become full with a certain number of items, and most importantly it

will be very difficult or even impossible to read novel and unfamiliar

words. In short, the whole-word approach is a method that should

have its own place and use, but never as a primary method. The

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basic needs should come first, and that is learning the building blocks

of the alphabet, a skill that will stay with children for their whole life,

and this can be best achieved through systematic synthetic phonics.

Before getting to the actual teaching of phonics, children should

acquire what is the essential prerequisite to phonetically reading, and

that is the phonological awareness. This includes the ability to attend

to sounds within a word, the general understanding that a letter

corresponds to a sound or that the alphabet is based on rules, not on

arbitrary coincidences. For example, children should understand that

the initial sound P is the same sound at the onset of both these

words: Pet and Pat, and that is why it is written in the same way in

both circumstances (adapted from Bowey, 2006). Another example of

children’s developing phonological awareness comes from Berthoud-

Papandropoulou (1978; as cited in Ashbrook, 2010). This study

showed that it is typical of children belonging to different age groups

not to understand how many words are in a spoken sentence. When

questioned how many words are in the French sentence “Le garcon

lave le camion” four year olds said it contained one word, five year

olds said that there were 2 words and six year olds said that the

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sentences had three words. This example shows that children are

developing an awareness concerning the prosody. Understanding the

pauses between words, changes in speech rate and intonation raises

children’s phonic awareness so that he can gradually understand the

difference between a question and a statement or the number of

words in a sentence. Children also posses what is called the

categorical perception which is an innate feature of the mammalian

auditory system. This system allows children to perceive category

boundaries; for example infants can perceive the difference between

the sound p and b, due to the difference in the onset amplitude of

these letters (Kempe, pers. comm., 2012).

Children also need pre-reading skills. It is known that children

can have difficulties understanding concepts such as: “before/after”

“inside/outside” (La Roy, pers. comm., 2012) or “up”, “down”

“forwards” “backwards” (Gardner, 1980; as cited in Smith, Cowie &

Blades, 1998) and therefore it is useful for a child to know these

concepts as part of the pre-reading preparation. Visual discrimination,

which will help the child to discriminate between letters and words

can be achieved through a games and includes: jigsaws, picture

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matching games, ordering objects by their shape and color etc.

(Smith, Cowie & Blades, 1998).

Once the child has reached a certain level of phonic

awareness, educators can precede with the Phonics instructions:

teaching the children to match the letter (the graphic part) with the

meaning (the sound). In a way, this is similar to translating symbols

from one language into another language but in this case the symbols

are translated from one dimension - the visual one - to the auditory

dimension.

Phonics can be taught synthetically (progressing from letter to

word) or analytically (the word is presented as a whole and then

broken down into its phonemes). However, it is only through the

synthetic phonics that children can learn how to blend sounds

together and read novel words. When assessing which method is

better, the available data showed mixed findings. Some studies have

shown that synthetic phonetic approach yields better results than the

analytical phonetic approach (e.g. Bowey, 2006). However, different

data (The National Reading Panel, 2000 as cited in Cunningham and

Cunningham, 2002) showed no difference between various types of

phonics instructions as long as they are systematic.

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 Advocates for the phonics instructions also argue that by

teaching children to associate the sound with the letter they will

develop a “self teaching device” or word attack skills (Share, 1995). It

is through this method that skilled readers can recode any printed

word into sound, no matter how unfamiliar or difficult the word.

Yet another major advantage of this method is that children

progress from sound to meaning so that they get to understand what

they are reading, as opposed to the whole word recognition, which is

a mechanical process. Through phonological recoding children can

read and learn any new words, an ability that was observed even in

silent reading. Furthermore, after few exposures only children can

recognize new words without being fully exposed to them any longer,

which means that their attention can be used for other types of

processing (Bowey, 2006) including comprehension. This is the

reason why advocates for this method recommend that phonics

should not be taught in isolation but in a meaningful and fun way

(Bowey, 2006).

Although some researchers argue that English is an irregular

language and therefore not appropriate to be taught through the

phonics (MacDonald, 2010) other researchers suggest the opposite:

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English is regular in proportion of 80%. Moreover, the phonics

approach can be used to read unpredictable and unfamiliar words

(e.g. Share, 1999; 2004). However, small grammatical words, such

as prepositions and conjunctions are learned best by the look-and-

say method, as these are invariably abstract words and therefore

difficult for a child to assign them meaning.

Although the phonics approach does not involve teaching

children to read non-words empirical evidence (e.g. Baron, 1979; as

cited in Share, 1995) shows that pseudo word reading, which is the

standard measure of phonological recoding, correlates substantially

with irregular words reading. This means that children who perform

well in one task perform well in the other task too. It also means that

through this method that all written words in any language (alphabets)

can actually be translated and read using the International Phonetic

Alphabet (Bowey, 2006).

A common critique of the phonics approach is that reading

phonetically can be initially confusing for the children as they focus

their attention on sounds rather than meaning, which in turn can

result in mechanical reading. However, this can be easily overcomed

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by dedicated teachers who make use of interesting and meaningful

books and who provide their pupils with careful guidance.

Although the reading process is a highly complex one and

because it is still an under researched topic there are many

unanswered questions about it. However, considering the evidences

discussed above, both methods, the whole word approach and the

phonics approach have their own roles and place and the best way to

teach children to read would be a combination of these methods.

References

Ashbrook, J. (2010). Learning a 'new language' - the objective approach

to early literacy in English. Educational Psychology In Practice, 26(3), 219-

238. Retrieved from EBSCO

Bowey, J. A. (2006). Need for systematic synthetic phonics teaching

within the early reading curriculum. Australian Psychologist, 41(2), 79-84.

Retrieved from EBSCO

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Giedd, Blumenthal, Jeffries, Castellanos, Hong Liu, Zijdenbos, Paus,

Evans, Rapoport.1999. Nature America [online]

Harrigan, J. E. (1976). Initial Reading Instruction: Phonemes, Syllables, or

Ideographs? Journal Of Learning Disabilities, 9(2). Retrieved from EBSCO

MACDONALD, P. (2010). Paired reading: a structured approach to raising

attainment in literacy.Support For Learning, 25(1), 15-23. Retrieved from

EBSCO

Smith, Cowie, Blades (1998). Understading children’s development.

Blackwell publishers, Oxford.

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