When people have learned to read, they have not
learned just a single skill. Instead, they have learned a number of
skills, which include:
• the ability to recognise letters
• the ability to recognise single words as wholes, quickly and automatically
• knowledge of the relationships between letters and their sounds
• the ability to go from a printed word to its meaning
No one is a good reader unless they are good at
all four of these things. So a child learning to read needs to learn
all four of these skills. If any one of these four is difficult for
the child to learn, then that child will have difficulty in learning
to read.
What this means is that not all children who are
having difficulty learning to read will be having the same kind of
difficulty. One child's problem may be particularly with the visual
aspects of reading. Another child may be having special difficulties
in learning the relationships between letters and their sounds. A
third child may have mastered these relationships but be struggling
to develop the ability to recognise single words as wholes, quickly
and automatically. And the problem for yet another child may be in
learning how to get to the meanings of printed words. And of course
there will be children who are having difficulties with learning two
or even more of these skills.
If this is so, it seems very unlikely that there
will be one single method for helping all children with reading difficulties.
The method a particular child needs will depend upon which particular
reading skill the child is having difficulty learning.
In addition, if learning to read means learning
a number of different skills, any classroom method for teaching children
to read which focuses on just one of the skills is not going to be
very effective. Phonics is very important, but if that is all children
are being taught in the classroom, how will they learn to recognise
words quickly and automatically without sounding them out? Using flash
cards to try to teach children to recognise whole words rapidly is
important too, but if that is all children are being taught in the
classroom, how will they learn about the relationships between letters
and sounds? So both of these things need to be taught.
The typical stages of learning to read.
Research on reading has discovered a great deal
about the stages children typically go through from kindergarten or
Grade One up to when they are perhaps 10 years old. In schools where
reading is being taught well, there are three of these stages through
which most children pass, as follows.
At the very beginning, in kindergarten or Grade
One, children are often taught to read just a rather small number
of words, their 'reading words'. Even though such children can do
very little reading, studying how they read can be very interesting.
Here is the kind of thing one can observe.
You show the child the word rhinoceros
, and say " Can you read that?"
The child says "yes".
"What word is it?" you say.
The child says "television".
“Why is it television?” you say.
“Because it's the long one” says the child.
Another example: You show the child the word
yellow , and say " Can you read that?"
The child says "yes".
"What word is it?" you say.
The child says balloon".
"Why is it balloon?" you say.
"Because it's got two sticks" says the child, referring
to the two letters l in the middle of the word.
You can see what's happening here. There is only
a small number of words that this child is expected to be able to
read aloud. These words might even be pasted up on the walls of the
classroom. Only one of these words is a long one - it is the word
television . So the child has learned to recognise
this word not in terms of its letters but just because it is long.
And the word yellow is not recognised in terms of
its letters either but just because it has two vertical lines in the
middle of it.
This is hardly a permanent solution to how to read.
Reading all long words as "television" and all words with
two lls in them as "yellow" is not going to get you very
far. But it is a good start. Children at this first stage of learning
to read have understood that words can be written down, and they aren't
just for speaking.
Once children get that idea, then they can move
on to the next stage.
The second stage depends upon a fact which is probably
the most important fact to understand about learning to read. It is
this. By the time they are in Grade 2, children will have learned
to understand in speech at least 10,000 words. But the number of words
they can recognise in print will still be very small - perhaps only
a hundred or so. That means that it will happen over and over again
that children at this age will come across printed words which they
have never seen before, but which they have often heard, and can understand
when they are heard. If only there were some way in which children
could turn the printed words into speech – sound them out - then that
would tell them what the words were. They could make use of the fact
that they can recognise very many words in speech to help them recognise
printed words they've never seen before. It would be as if the children
are teaching themselves to read. But for this to happen, the children
must learn how to turn unfamiliar printed words into familiar spoken
words - and that can only be done if the children learn the rules
relating letters to their sounds. This is why phonics is so important.
So the second stage is learning about phonics - learning how to pronounce
a word even though you've never seen it before, so you can say it
to yourself and recognise it that way. This isn't easy and very few
children would be capable of learning it by themselves; they have
to be taught it.
A child who has moved from the first stage to the
second stage will no longer make the mistake of reading rhinoceros
as "television". That child will know that this
word can't be "television" because it begins with an "r"
sound and “television” doesn't.
This second stage, the sounding out stage, is very
important because it allows the child to use a secret weapon - the
child's extensive knowledge of spoken words - to learn about printed
word. But even this stage is not enough. The child can't stop here,
for several reasons. Firstly, this is a very slow way to read; sounding
out is slow and takes a lot of effort. It doesn't allow reading to
be quick and automatic, which is what skilled reading has to be. Secondly,
in English many words disobey the rules relating letters to sounds
- words like yacht or aunt , for
example - and these words cannot be correctly sounded out by the rules,
which means this way of trying to understand them won't work. So a
child who's going to be a skilled reader has to move on from this
second stage, the sounding out stage, to the final stage.
In this third stage, the child builds up a large
sight vocabulary. This means that the number of printed words which
the child can recognise immediately, without having to sound them
up first, gets larger and larger through practice. Eventually very
few words cannot be recognised very quickly in this way. When the
sight vocabulary has grown big enough, the child has become a skilled
reader.
Different kinds of reading difficulties
Some children with reading difficulties have problems
at the second stage: they find it very hard indeed to learn phonics
- that is, to learn what the rules are about which sounds go with
which letters. So they are unable to use the secret weapon - they
can't take advantage of the fact that they know many words in speech,
because they can't translate unfamiliar printed words to speech. The
technical term for this kind of difficulty in learning to read is
"phonological dyslexia". Children like this are very bad
at reading aloud words they haven't seen before. Being bad at reading
aloud nonsense words like delk or pite is
the sign of not having learned phonics.
Other children with reading difficulties have problems
at the third stage - they may have mastered the second stage, but
then can't move on to the third. So they remain as sounding-out readers,
with all the problems that this brings: they are very slow, reading
is hard work, and they will have special difficulties with the words
which disobey the letter sound rules. The technical term for this
kind of difficulty in learning to read is "surface dyslexia".
Children like this have special difficulties in reading aloud words
that disobey the rules. They will read yacht as "yatched",
or aunt as "ornt", and not recognise or
understand these words when they see them, even though they may be
very good at reading aloud nonsense words such as delk or
pite.
These two kinds of difficulties
in learning to read have nothing to do with the children's eyesight
or how they see. Both kinds of child can have perfectly normal vision.
But there does seem to be a third kind of reading difficulty that
really does have something to do with seeing. This third kind of child
will often complain that it is uncomfortable to try to read, that
words seem to move around on the page, that the printed page is too
glaring, or that they get headaches from reading.
How do I know which kind of
difficulty in learning to read my child has?
At the end of this document is a little reading
test that you can use to get some idea of what kind of reading difficulty
your child might have. This test consists of 30 nonsense words and
30 real words which disobey the spelling-to-sound rules of English
(these are called “irregular words”). A child's knowledge of these
rules can be tested by seeing how good he or she is at reading the
nonsense words (because the only way to get these right is to use
the rules correctly). A child's ability to recognize whole words can
be tested by seeing how many irregular words he or she can read aloud
correctly.
| IRREGULAR WORDS |
|
NONWORDS |
good |
|
norf |
friend |
|
rint |
give |
|
delk |
eye |
|
aspy |
head |
|
baft |
wolf |
|
spatch |
work |
|
drick |
pretty |
|
hest |
shoe |
|
brinth |
come |
|
framp |
blood |
|
gop |
island |
|
bick |
break |
|
peef |
bowl |
|
grenty |
sure |
|
stendle |
iron |
|
tapple |
soul |
|
farl |
ceiling |
|
pite |
lose |
|
seldent |
choir |
|
borp |
cough |
|
brennet |
yacht |
|
gurve |
routine |
|
crat |
brooch |
|
boril |
tomb |
|
bleaner |
bouquet |
|
ganten |
gauge |
|
trope |
meringue |
|
pofe |
colonel |
|
doash |
pint |
|
peng |
To administer this test: print each of the 60 items
legibly on an index card in lower case. Each time you use this deck
of 60 cards, shuffle the cards into a random order. Tell the child
that some of the items will be real words and some will be made-up
words that he or she will never have seen before. Children have to
try to read each item aloud correctly, taking as long as they like.
What counts as normal performance with these materials
depends upon the child's age, since normally children get better and
better at reading as they get older. The minimum number of items a
child should get right as a function of age is shown in this table:
Age
|
Nonsense
words |
Irregular
words |
7
|
6
|
7
|
8
|
8
|
12
|
9
|
12
|
13
|
10
|
18
|
18
|
11
|
18
|
19
|
12
|
22
|
20
|
If a child correctly reads considerably fewer nonsense
words than they should for their age as indicated in this table, then
that suggests that they don't know enough about letter-sound rules
i.e. phonics. If a child correctly reads considerably fewer irregular
words than they should for their age as indicated in this table, then
that suggests that they don't have a big enough sight vocabulary i.e.
they can't quickly and automatically recognize as many words as they
should be able to. Some children may have both of these problems:
they will score below their age level on both the nonsense words and
the irregular words.
And if a child complains that reading is uncomfortable,
that the words move around or shimmer on the page, or that reading
gives them a headache, that suggests a third kind of difficulty: that
there is a visual difficulty affecting their reading.
What can I do about this?
If your child has any problem in knowledge about
letter-sound rules, the child needs phonics teaching. There are a
number of good teaching programmes for phonics available. For very
young children I recommend the Jolly Phonics program because it has
been scientifically evaluated and has been shown to be effective
in improving children's phonics knowledge. The Jolly Phonics web
site is at http://www.jollylearning.co.uk
Also worth considering is THRASS, which is used
quite a lot in Australia . Information for parents about THRASS is
at http://www.thrass.com.au/.
Ideally primary schools should be using programs
like these but if they are not it is quite possible for parents to
use them (not cheap, though).
If your child has built up a good knowledge of
phonics but seems to have trouble moving on from there - seems to
have a problem in whole-word recognition (i.e. scores well below the
age level in reading aloud the irregular words), then the focus needs
to be in practicing the ability to recognise what a word is quickly,
without having to do much sounding out. The THRASS materials can help
here.
And if your child instead has some kind of visual problem with reading ? The child might say that reading is uncomfortable or produces headaches or tiredness, or the printed page looks peculiar, with words simmering or moving around on ithe page? Some people believe that you should consider consulting someone who can provide transparent colour overlays or spectacle lenses (sometimes known as Irlen lenses) for viewing the printed page. Evidence suggesting that this actually does help children with this particular type of reading difficulty is beginning to accumulate.
What to beware of.
Around the world there are many organizations claiming
to provide effective treatment programmes for children who are having
difficulty learning to read. Many of these programmes are very expensive.
Most of them are offering treatments which have never had scientific
evaluations of them published in the scientific literature. It is
difficult for parents without the relevant scientific background to
decide whether any such programme is likely to be effective or not.
But it can be done. If you are speaking to someone who is offering
any such programme, here are the questions to ask.
Firstly, ask this person whether they agree that
there are several different kinds of difficulties in learning to read,
rather than just one single cause. If they don't agree, then forget
about them. As I have described above, there definitely are different
kinds.
If this person agrees that there are different
kinds, ask them whether their programme uses exactly the same method
for all children regardless of the kind of difficulty in learning
to read a child has. If the answer is Yes, you need to consider how
likely it is that the same method will help regardless of what kind
of problem in reading the child has. If the answer is No, ask how
a decision is made as to whether the programme is or isn't suitable
for a particular child.
Finally, ask whether there have been any scientific
studies which have tested whether the programme actually does improve
children's reading, and in which scientific journal were these results
published. If there have been no such studies, is it appropriate that
the programme is being marketed when its effectiveness has not been
proven?
A discussion like this can help you make informed
decisions.
I am happy to discuss any of the material in this
document, preferably by email: my email address is max@maccs.mq.edu.au
