Interesting take on whole word veruses phonics

[patreiche]

This is based on research from a university.

    I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.  The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it denos't mtater in waht oredr the ltetres in a wrod are, the olny iprnoatmt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig, huh?  I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt.

We can choose to read for letter sounds or word meaning, but not both (Greenberg 1988).  Deliberately training anyone (child or adult) to attend primarily to the letter sounds can potentially cripple their ability to read well.  If you've been stuck with reading letter sounds, you'll probably experience the troubles described by a flyer I recently found stuck to the posts of the campus' main bus stop:

    Are you using the same reading method you learned in elementary school to read college-level materials?
    Have you ever finished reading a sentence or paragraph and not remembered a single thing?
    Do you subvocalize or fixate?

http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/research/phase13.htm here is the whole article if you would like to read it.

According to this teaching phonics can cause you to have problems reading later and slow down your reading.

[carpe vestri vita]

While an interesting phenomena, I think someone who reads well could read that passage regardless of how they learned to read. I think the concerning part is that many children (and therefore young adults) do not improve their reading skills beyond the basics. I think a small child who has just learned to read using whole words may have as much difficulty as one who learned to read using phonics. I can't be sure because I do not have access to anyone to test the theory on.

I can say however that none of my cousin's children, aged 10 to 14, have the reading skills to understand a passage like that. They all learned to read via phonics. The oldest could not read the word "there" at 8 years old because he could not sound it out!

[luckylucy]

I tested my nieces and nephews.  One is a 14, one is 12, one is 10, one is 7. 

They all learned by phonics in school.   The 14, 12, and 10 year old read it fine.  They thought it was really funny. 

The 7 year could only read some words.  Although I can't really expect him to read anything too complicated since he's only in 2nd grade and he's still at a very basic level.

But even though the older ones learned by phonics, most words they have memorized at this point from reading so much in school etc, so they're site reading too like we I guess we all do eventually.

[patreiche]

Yes, I think that is the point of the paragraph. All this argument over phonics versus sight reading and how sight reading is harmful, when we all eventually sight read. But the article also suggested that people who were taught by sight reading versus phonics would be better readers when they are older, that the phonics method of teaching would slow them down and prohibit them from being speed readers. This is what I gathered from the article. Rather it is true or not I don't know.

I am sure we all become sight readers no matter how we were taught. But whether the method you are taught slows down your reading and comprehension later in life I am not sure or whether this is influenced by other factors. I would have to think that the rate at which you read and your comprehension level is influenced by several factors and not only how you were taught to read, but I am not sure. Would make for an interesting discussion if anyone has researched this. The point is if you read ever word silently to yourself in your mind that you will be a slower reader and that phonics teaching method encourages this type of reading and thus produces a slower reader.

I know I was taught by phonics and I am a slow reader because I read silently in my head. When I was in eight grade they tried to teach us speed reading. I was not successful in learning to speed read. I am not sure if anyone in my school learned and we were all taught by the same methods from first grade through high school. Some of my friends were more successful with reading then I was and I would attribute this to the amount of reading they did.
 
I have a feeling that reading is like anything else the more you practice the better you get! Also the better instruction you have (being taught speed reading) and I am sure genes play a role too just like in everything else.

I think that teaching both methods of reading is the way to go. Proper teaching of phonics helps you to spell better and being able to sound out the occasional new word can't hurt. It sounds to me though that we should also be teaching speed reading at a young age too, so they do not develop the bad habit of reading aloud to themselves.

Here is an article on teaching speed reading. Yet another thing you have to teach your child at a young age because it is near impossible to learn later in life. The author suggest the child should learn before the age of 12. This is an important skill for them to learn because it will help them excel in all other areas.
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/stancliffe59.html

[carpe vestri vita]

I think this is the most important part of the phonics vs whole words debate, ultimately we all use both: We sight read familiar words and sound out unfamiliar ones. The better the reader the fewer words need to be sounded out and the faster their reading speed.*

I agree with Patreiche that the best way to teach reading should be a blended method. That's how we read in the end anyway. There is very little reason, in my opinion, to teach common or short words phonetically, and in fact many of them do not follow the phonetic rules. But at a certain point a child will be exposed to words which are phonetic but too rare to be sight words initially. The child will sound them out the first few times and then they will be assimilated as another sight word. If they are not exposed to the word frequently enough, they never develop it as a sight word. That is where the effect of practice is the most blatant, but also the effects of phonics. A child taught to read using sight words will be able to add words to their reading vocabulary easier than someone taught via phonics. The whole-word learner uses words as a unit, when they learn a new word it's a new word. A phonics learner learns a new word as a new series of familiar sounds/letters and to store it as a sight word they need to convert printed word --> letters/sounds --> mental word. The whole-word learner may see a word twice and remember it forever. For a phonics learner the more sounds it has the harder it will be to convert and store and the more exposure is required to remember it.


* To a certain point of course. Once the reader's vocabulary is sufficiently large, improving reading speed is a matter of making the reading unit larger and larger. Phonics teaches that the letter is the unit; the whole word method, the word; speed reading, the whole page. There are many gradients between using the word as the unit, and the page as the unit as well, and that's why most adults have varying reading speeds.

Being able to read quickly takes the drudgery out of reading boring texts (something that happens in schools and workplaces worldwide) so that the reader still has some interest in reading when they're finished. To have a lifelong love of reading, I think a certain reading speed is required. I don't know exactly what the minimum speed is, and it probably is different for every person, but I don't think that there is a maximum. Although, being able to read 12,000 words per minute seems slightly unnecessary, it would almost take more time to open the book to a new page than to read it. The article mentions 4000 words per minute as the average attained by a high school english class. This is encouraging for two reasons: first, speed reading can be taught to high school age students, and second that 4000 is AVERAGE.

I don't think someone who could read 4000 words per minute would be discouraged by a boring text. Even 1000 words per minute would reduce War and Peace from 1600 minutes (at a college level reading speed, which is more than 26 continuous hours of reading) to 560 minutes (or 9 hours 20 minutes). At 4000 words per minute it's less than 2 and a half hours, and at the remarkable speed of 12,000 it's a breeze at 47 minutes.

In case there are any Tolstoy lovers out there: I'm not saying that War and Peace is a "boring text", it's just an incredibly long one that I was required to read in high school. I don't think I read anything for pleasure for months after having to read it. How much happier I would have been if it had only taken a couple hours!

[patreiche]

Hi guest,

Love your insight and input. We could use you around here. Please register or are registered under guest?

[carpe vestri vita]

Hi guest,

Love your insight and input. We could use you around here. Please register or are registered under guest?

There is (was?) a flaw in the guest forum, in that unregistered people cannot post. Thinking I would just ask my one question, and then likely not come back (or register under a real name, depending on the answers I received) I registered as "Guest"

I've obviously since started replying to other topics and now I think I'm stuck with the name.

[luckylucy]

If one doesn't learn phonics along with site reading, then how do they decode a word they come across that they don't know?  Even as an adult, knowing how to sound out and decode words is very helpful when you come across one your not familiar with.  Phonics is an invaluable tool that I'm sure every one is grateful for.

I think when humans enter the world of reading they learn both phonics and site reading by osmosis. 

[Frukc]

teaching phonics can cause you to have problems reading later and slow down your reading

If you would present this to Latvian, Finnish, Swedish etc audience, they will say: "well, this can work only with English language because there written words differ so much from spoken words. They have different approach to reading. But with our language it will never work because here where spoken word consists from characters which do not change and influence each other!". (This is what our preschool education spacialists say about the whole word reading.)

of course, you do not need to convince me. My brother was tought with whole word reading and I was tought with single characters. we both are similarly crazy book-eaters.

[Nikolett]

teaching phonics can cause you to have problems reading later and slow down your reading

If you would present this to Latvian, Finnish, Swedish etc audience, they will say: "well, this can work only with English language because there written words differ so much from spoken words. They have different approach to reading. But with our language it will never work because here where spoken word consists from characters which do not change and influence each other!". (This is what our preschool education spacialists say about the whole word reading.)

of course, you do not need to convince me. My brother was tought with whole word reading and I was tought with single characters. we both are similarly crazy book-eaters.

This is similar to Russian plus the book font they use in all books makes all the letters look about the same as they all are the same height, so I was doubtful of sight reading Russian. Well, it's my kids' 3rd language and we took it up a year ago. I've taught them the alphabet and then just concentrated on flash card ppts. Now a year later I can see they sight read the words they have seen often and use their letter knowledge if I ask them to write something (which I do rarely). I think in any language we sight read eventually.

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