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Learning to read

What is the process of reading? What aids the process of learning to read? How can a computer system help?

Reading is not something that comes naturally like learning to talk (though learning to talk doesn't come naturally either, for a congenitally deaf person). The writing system is an artificial system, which was developed, initially as hieroglyphics. In the Indo-European languages we have an alphabetic notation. It is basically phonetic, as compared to Chinese where each symbol has a meaning.

One of the first phonetic notations (Phoenician) was for consonants only, and vowels were added later, see [1] page 60. English has the five vowels corresponding to the five vowel sounds of Latin. Because English is a hybrid of many languages, it has more phonemes than letters of the alphabet (around 44 versus 26). There is a mapping of each phoneme to a possible letter or group of letters, allowing a few exceptions (such as /i/ to "o" in "women"). Because of all the possibilities, learning to spell is difficult. The reverse mapping has far fewer possibilities for each letter and cluster of letters. So reading should be relatively easy. The child should be taught to decode the letters into possible sounds (phonemes), and thence construct the sound of each word as a whole. This is sometimes called the "phonics" method. (There is a counter argument that the child should be first taught to decode sounds into letters, see [2] page 76. However this is not how the phonics method is usually taught.)

The astounding fact is that this mapping is not taught in every school. Many teachers believe that pupils learn to read by recognising whole words - i.e. the pattern or shape of each word. This is indeed what a Chinese child has to do. They believe that by reading a book to a child, and getting the child to "read and speak", each word will become familiar, and the context of the word will enable the child to guess at less familiar words. Yet it is the less familiar words that are often key to the core semantics of a piece of text. And when a child comes to such a word, there is no systematic way to deal with the word.

This misguided approach to the teaching of reading has had disastrous consequences in the UK, see [2] pages 11-14. There has been a decline in reading standards. By 1996, Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) found that nearly 80% of 7-year-olds had a reading level below their chronological age, with 25% unable to read after their first two years of primary school. And the results for the workforce are frightening: it has been estimated that about 12% of the adult population of the UK are illiterate.

The frustration of not being able to read takes a terrible toll among boys, so that many take to crime, and around half the prison population are dyslexic, as compared to around 4% in the general population. In the US, a 1993 survey showed that 85% of minors entering the juvenile justice system could not read.

There is clear evidence that the "code emphasis" or "phonics instruction" method is the best approach for teaching of reading. Research has enabled us to "define quite precisely what is the optimum programme for teaching children how to read" [2] page 14. Yet the scientific evidence has been largely ignored. It is clearly the inadequacy in the teaching of reading that is to blame for reading failure. And many of the "authoritative" books used to train teachers are misguided.

The research finds that a code-emphasis method is best for teaching. But common teaching methods are at variance with this, see [2] page 85:

• whole-word, look-and-say, sight word learning approaches, which involve the memorisation of words as whole visual units;
• language experience, integrated reading/writing approaches, which involve the memorisation of personal sets of words used in individualised writing activities;
• shared book reading, paired reading, apprenticeship and whole-language methods, which involve the memorisation of whole books.

The research shows that guessing from context is not how skilful readers read. Yet many teachers will get pupils to guess a word from the accompanying picture or the rest of the sentence, [2] page 93. The "content" words in a sentence convey most of the meaning, yet are least predictable. It is critical for the reader to decode these words. And the sentence must be read quickly enough for comprehension as a whole. "Fluent, fast, word recognition, unassisted by context, facilitates reading comprehension" [2] page 94.

Rapid reading techniques may thus increase comprehension for individual sentences. One such technique, based on computer technology, employs a word-at-a-time display. Each word is displayed on the screen for a time related to the length of the word. The reader can have their eyes focused at one point on the screen. (The very longest words should be split up if necessary.) There can be minimum distractions. The pupil can go at their own speed, then pause and step through individual words. Or they can step back and reread sentences, just as they might when reading from the printed page.

The addition of a speech synthesiser opens up further possibilities to help the pupil. For example the pupil could read without the synthesiser, then stop for individual words to be spoken by a speech synthesiser as confirmation. A whole passage might be read aloud by the synthesiser before the pupil tries reading it without speech to hear each word with their inner ear.

A common approach in schools is to employ numerous illustrations, giving clues or cues as the meaning of the text, [2] page 95. "Experiments have demonstrated that young children learn to read in the very beginning stages much more easily in the absence of accompanying illustrations." Illustrations hinder the young reader's attempts to deal with print. Furthermore picture processing is a right-brain activity, whereas language processing is a left-brain. Boys are particularly susceptible to this danger. The better overall exam results of older girls can be explained by their better reading skills at an earlier age, which gives them an advantage in all subjects.

There is a common misconception that reading can be learnt by copying adults, and that children will learn by a kind of osmosis, making informed guesses as to what the text means, as a 'natural' learning process (as opposed to the 'unnatural' learning through phonics methods), see [2] page 99. It falsely assumed that adults are whole word readers. And the reliance on an adult means that half of children don't like reading by themselves, [2] page 102. They don't have the phonological awareness and letter-sound knowledge to work out pronunciations for themselves, so they ask the adult, or become frustrated.

But with computer assistance, the child need not involve the adult at all, except where the meaning of a sentence as a whole is not clear.

Dyslexics do differ from ordinary backward readers [2] page 121, though both suffer from phonological processing difficulties. For dyslexics, there is evidence that right-hand brain activity cannot be transferred successfully to the left-hand side, where language processing should normally occur. This may the cause of weakness in three areas: phonological awareness, naming (linking visual information with phonological information) and verbal memory. Dyslexics find it particularly difficult to perform one task if asked to perform another at the same time. This is especially so for boys. Phonics instruction in their area of weakness has been shown to provide superior reading performance [2] page 123. Absence of distractions is crucial to these children, and computer assistance can help, especially when it allows the child to relate spoken words to written words, and to have time to absorb the meaning of each sentence.

One of the side-effects of the "child-centred" approach to teaching is that a burden falls on the parent. And with the focus still on the whole-word method, parents are expected to encourage their children "to view words as symbols of meaning rather than symbols for sounds" [2] page 131. The advocates say that failure of some children is considered inevitable. Parents blame local authorities for not "statementing" these children. Schools are blamed for not providing specialist teachers. Yet with proper (phonics-based or code-emphasis) teaching, most children can read at age 5, and almost all children, including those with dyslexia, can learn to read eventually [2] page 133. Clearly it is the teaching, and the politics and ethos behind it, which is to blame for low reading skills in this country today. The same may be true in USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand [2] page 169.

Whether the approach is based on phonics or on whole-word recognition, computer assisted reading, as described above, can directly support the approach, and, with appropriately graded reading material, give concerned parents and teachers a chance to help children to practice at their own pace and in their own home.

[1] "Why Our Children Can't Read", Diane McGuinness, Penguin Books, 1998
[2] "Why Schoolchildren Can't Read", Bonnie Macmillan, IEA Education and Training Unit, 1997

Permission to copy this paper is granted subject to the condition that the entire paper, including this requirement, is copied.

P.S. Since writing the above article, John Nissen is more and more convinced by the effectiveness of the "synthetic phonics" approach, see for example this article on dyslexia from the Observer and the paper entitled synthetic phonics on this web site.. The author claims that, given the right teaching, dyslexics can be taught to read successfully.

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