Thoughts on Reading: Unconcluded

My son, who just turned three, is currently very enthusiastic about learning his letters, which has prompted me to review everything I know and think about learning to read, and then do some more research on the internet.  Which led me to looking at several pages on the war between sight-reading and phonics.  (Of course it's a war.  This is the internet!)


If you have never dipped your toes into these controversial waters, these are the two principle methods of teaching people to read – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the two principle methods of reading.  Sight-reading (or whole language) is done by learning to recognise the words themselves – if you learned to read using flashcards, you learned with sight-reading.  The idea is that you don't learn the spoken word by putting sounds together, so why would you learn the written word that way? (Reading being analogous to listening not talking.)  Phonics is about learning the sounds of letters and letter combinations.  When encountering a word, the reader sounds out each letter to figure out what it is.

Put even more simply, sight-reading is visual, and phonics are auditory, just as their names suggest.  Most of us, even if taught via phonics, ultimately read by sight-reading, instantly recognising familiar words.  However, when we come across unfamiliar words, we tend to sound them out either aloud or in our heads, trying to correspond it with our oral vocabulary.


Learning how to process phonics is a skill that develops later, so you're unlikely to have success using the phonics method in a child under four, whereas babies can be taught to sight-read several words before their first birthday (according to the DVD ads).  If you want to teach your child to read very early, sight-reading is the way to go.  But, as the internet will tell you, teaching your child to read via sight-reading is setting him on the track to semi-literacy, giving him irrevocable bad habits.

I tend to be a little dubious of this since I learned to read by sight-reading, have always been far more comfortable with the written than the spoken word, am excellent at spelling and a dab hand at grammar (she says, blithely dooming herself to a post full of errors).  Of course, it's entirely likely that I am the exception rather than the rule, but when it comes to learning to read, my best experience is myself, and so....

The Case Study of Myself

I don't actually remember a time before I could read; I was three when I learned.  According to my parents, they were using flashcards with my older brother when I started calling out the answers.  Shortly after that, I started hauling the books off them when they tried to read to me (I also have no memory of my parents reading to me, thanks to this early independent streak).  I'm not a genius nor particularly intelligent.  I just happened to be precocious in this regard.

I do remember being dumbfounded when I was four or five and saw my classmates stumbling over simple words with the teacher's assistance.  I also remember that I was five or six when I read The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, because it surprised me that the opening chapter described the heroine as 'only seven'. (And that certainly wasn't the first novel I'd read.)  Reading was just never an issue to me.  I usually only had to look at a word once to memorise it, spelling and all, and comprehension was instantaneous.

That's not to say I was never taught the phonics.  I can't recall how my (British) primary school actually taught reading, because obviously they didn't have to teach me, but I do remember many lessons on the different letter combinations and sounds (and variations).  I loved these.  I still have nostalgia for the chain of words containing a different pronunciation of 'ough' (tough, trough, though, through, thorough).

When I was nine, my family moved to the States for the first time (this is a recurring event for us, apparently), and I did fourth and fifth grade there.  It wasn't until this happened that I realised all those 'alternate' spellings I came across in books, such as 'color' for 'colour' were actually American spellings.  This is my own personal proof that spelling can be learned by sight-reading, despite phonics proponents' protests to the contrary.  I made the switch fairly comfortably, winning the school spelling bee in fifth grade before moving back to the UK to start high school, at which point I reverted to British spellings with little difficulty.

These days, though I live in the US again, I mostly write British English, although I don't find it too hard to get into an American spelling mindset.  I have more trouble following American grammar rules by habit.

But why did things work out that way for me, when for some children at least, the sight-reading method is genuinely disastrous?

Well, for starters, I'm a visual learner, and I'm well aware that my auditory processing power is poor.  I excelled in languages at school, but the only ones I could pursue to degree level were Latin and (ancient) Greek, dead languages that you are taught to read, not to speak.  In modern languages, my greatest weakness was the oral and listening aspect.

When I started Italian, the teacher spent the first half of the first lesson teaching us orally.  She wanted us to learn the pronunciation of the words before the spelling, because Italian rules of pronunciation differ so hugely from English.  "Ciao!" is a perfect example.  If she started writing such alien letter combinations on the board, she risked intimidating us hopelessly.

However, I was completely lost with her oral methods.  I couldn't analyse the sounds of the words well enough to commit them to memory.  For me, if for nobody else in the class, it only started coming together when she started writing on the board, and I could match letters to the sounds she was making.  I don't know about anybody else, but whenever I say a word, I 'see' it written down in my mind's eye; when spelling aloud, I visualise the word, and read off the letters.

Obviously, this auditory failing could be a direct result of me being taught to sight-read.  I definitely suspect that my own focus on visual learning methods prevented me from developing my auditory processing power to its full potential.  How important is this?  After all, learning to read prevents us from developing our full powers of memorisation.  But as compensation, we have a far more effective way of recording information.  Had I learned to read by phonics, I might be better at listening comprehension, but there's no guarantee that the written word would mean as much to me.  Personally, I have no regrets, but it's not like there's a control in this particular experiment.

I should note, I'm not entirely brain-deaf.  Just as I 'see' a word when I hear it spoken, I 'hear' it when I see it written down.  I used to work as a secretary, and I was perfectly able to take dictation – but I was much faster at transcribing from written notes (much preferred that method too).  And it's safe to say that I'll always choose a blog over a podcast.

So, that's my experience with learning to read.... what about my experience teaching reading?

The Montessori Approach

Before my son came along, I was working at the Montessori school that he now attends.  I dealt with the two year old class mostly, but I also assisted in the Children's House (three to six year olds), so I know the basics of the Montessori method of reading.

Here's a summary, although please note that I am not a qualified teacher, and as such, I was never directly responsible for taking a child through reading, although I have assisted a child with each of the materials mentioned below.

• Lots of imprinting of the left to right order wherever it can possibly be applied.
• Practice breaking words into sounds using the I Spy box.  This is a box containing miniatures of real world objects (for preference use three-letter, phonetically-spelt words: fox, hat, net, cup, pig, etc).  These objects are lined up, and the teacher (or older child) says: "I spy with my little eye, something with a starting sound of [phoneme]."  To start with, the teacher will point to the item meant, and the child will identify it.  Gradually the child will correspond the sound with the initial sound of the word, and be able to identify without the pointing.  From there the clue progresses to the 'end sound' or the 'middle sound', until the child can successfully break down the spoken word into its phonemes.  In my experience, most children work this out by the age of four.
•  Learning letters / phonemes using 'sandpaper sounds'.  Tablets showing each letter of the alphabet in sandpaper (red tablets for consonants; blue for vowels).  The child learns the phoneme for the sound and practises tracing it with their fore finger.  This isn't done in any kind of order, but rather the sounds most likely to mean something to the child.  For example, the first sound presented to them might be the initial letter of their name, or m for mother, d for daddy...
• Writing with the moveable alphabet.  Plastic or wooden letters (again red for consonants and blue for vowels) that the child can lay out on a rug (sometimes along guiding lines) to create their own simple words (often prompted with the miniatures).  Spelling is not emphasised or corrected, and the activity is referred to as 'writing'.  As is common with the Montessori method, the child is given as active a role as possible, and therefore they are taught how to write their own words, rather than how to read the words of others.

So Montessori is essentially the phonics method.

Here's the catch: Maria Montessori was Italian.  Italian is a phonemic language.  'Ciao' might look like a bizarre contortion of vowels to the English-speaker, but it's entirely logical to a native.  'Ci' is always going to be  pronounced 'ch';  'ao' will always be 'ow'.  Once you're familiar with the rules of Italian pronunciation, you can pronounce any Italian word you see – and you should be able to spell any word you hear!

English is, of course, not a phonemic language.  Its spelling is more likely to reflect the etymology of the word and thus give a clue to its meaning.  For example, 'philosophy' keeps the Greek 'ph', so if you're familiar with Greek word-roots, you know that it's going to have something to do with loving wisdom.  The Italian word is 'filosofia.' Sounds very similar, but without the 'ph' clue to its origins, it could just as easily come from a Latin root and actually mean something about thread.

While I can see that Maria Montessori's Italian students would soon be able to self-correct their own spelling, this won't be the case for their English-speaking counterparts.  I never dealt with this myself in the classroom, so I've tried looking it up online, and it seems that there's no standard Montessori solution for teaching spelling, although most places default to spelling lists, and of course, they teach the various letter combinations.

Why Teaching Spelling Confuses Me

When I first heard about the phonics approach (in my teens), spelling always struck me as its greatest weakness.  If a child is taught to read by sounding words out, rather than remembering how they look, aren't they going to find it impossible to spell?  However, phonics proponents are always insistent that it's children who aren't taught by phonics who can't spell.  The prevalence of this view leads me to assume that there must be a study somewhere that proved or at least indicated this (but let's just bear in mind that I'm being educated by Professor Google).

I think the logic here is that children who learn via phonics are taught to break down words in the first place, and take note of the individual letters.  Which does make sense.  Also, phonics means extensive memorisation of all the letter combinations for different sounds, which will give you a vast bank of word elements to draw from.

On the flipside, the most common words are the ones most likely to break the rules, and you're going to have to teach children fairly early on that 'their' (for example) is just spelled that way.  Surely memorising such exceptions is ultimately using the visual part of their brain, and thus is sight-reading?  Phonics still requires spelling lists, just as children taught to sight-read still learn their alphabet.

I'm equating spelling lists with flashcards here, which might be inaccurate in the first place.  To me, either one is memorising a word.

One argument that I saw mentioned a few times in favour of phonics in my research is that phonics meant you had to learn every letter combination in the English language, but once you knew them all, you could read anything, whereas sight-reading would require somebody to read aloud to you every word in the English language.

This strikes me as a ludicrous thing to say, because there is no way in hell you can figure out the correct pronunciation of every word in the English language by phonics.  I can make a bloody good stab at saying any obscure word you show me, but I know there are plenty of words in my vocabulary that I've never actually heard spoken aloud and thus I have my own imagined pronunciation.

The second ridiculous thing about this is that even if you are incapable of sounding out a word to match it to your oral vocabulary, you could still learn to recognise that word in that context and thus make it part of your reading vocabulary.  It's clearly a very limited usage, but my point is, you can still read/comprehend a word you've never encountered before.

Back to spelling...  As I said above, English spelling is more indicative of meaning than pronunciation.  So as well as learning all the different sounds 'ough' can make, I remember being taught things like the suffix '-or' indicates a person who does something: doctor, professor, sculptor, actor... etc. etc.  (Obviously, this example doesn't cross over very well for Americans, who confused the issue when they simplified the spelling of 'harbour', 'favour' et al.  Or maybe they do still teach you that rule anyway?)

The point is that we are taught several common word elements by their meaning rather than by their sound, and that's essential to being able to spell English (learning some of the root languages helps too, but that's really not a preschool skill).  Therefore, even though phonics might indeed have a trend of producing better spellers, spelling in and of itself is not an auditory process, and therefore does not depend on auditory skill (luckily for me).

My conclusion is that phonics doesn't have exclusive rights to good spelling, but it does promote the skills required for good spelling (i.e. breaking down a word into its component parts).

In Which We Go Back to the Drawingboard

After all of that analysis, there's another line of research which shows that no matter what the method used, children learn to read better if they come from high literacy households.  In other words, my ability to read might not be due to those early flashcards nor my school's conscientious phoneme teaching, but to the fact that both my parents enjoyed reading and my mother kept my bookcase well-stocked.

This matches a lot of what I've gleaned about early literacy and pre-reading skills.  "Read to your child every day," is one of the most frequent pieces of professional advice I've been given since becoming a mother.  Other things include having books around, having books accessible, discussing the stories with your child (you don't get much literary critique out of a toddler, but he likes finding the details in the pictures).

Also, little things you might not otherwise think about. Like running your finger along the line of text as you read.  This helps them to make the connection between the spoken and written word, and it gets them used to the order in which words are laid out on the page.   Left to right; top to bottom.  One of the tips I've come across recently, which has produced interesting results, is to ask my son to point to where I should start reading.    It's obvious when you think about it that a toddler won't necessarily know....

So What's My Dilemma?

Although I've been challenging the arguments for the phonics method, I do think it's a very good way of teaching children to read, and would definitely encourage every parent to teach their child the phonic alphabet rather than the standard A B C (don't worry, they'll pick the names of the letters up as well).  I've always been impressed by how the Montessori method lays the foundation skills for reading and then pulls them all together.

Clearly, there's going to be a 'but'.  I didn't write all the above just to end with: "Phonics FTW!"  And that 'but' is that I'm a bookworm who learned to read early, that I don't remember a time before reading, so effectively, reading has always been an intrinsic part of who I am.  To me, illiteracy seems like an incredible handicap.  To not be able to read is to be denied access to a vast resource and shrinks your world immeasurably.

Because of this, I place a high priority on learning to read early.  I even considered those 'teach your baby to read' DVDs, although I ultimately decided I didn't want to start the TV watching habit so young no matter what the purported benefits were.  School-wise, it seems to be acceptable to have children reading around age five, but that just feels too late to me.  (I understand the Waldorf teaching method does reading at age eight which practically gives me panic attacks.)

Most of this is my neuroses and the always dangerous desire to treat my children as an extension of myself rather than their own people.  I certainly don't want to put my children under any pressure to read before they're ready for it, nor do I want to set myself up for Failure As A Mother by giving myself arbitrary deadlines that can't be met.

Still, considering how much of our society is dependent on the written word, I can't shake the feeling that the sooner children learn to read the better.  And with that regard, if my son is showing an interest in learning, then I want to capitalise on that, even if he's a year away from getting the phonics down.

Seeing as I've been drafting this post for almost a week now (family distractions not helping!), I'm going to post as is, even if I've not quite figured out my own conclusion.  Considering that I am in no way qualified, perhaps I shouldn't offer a conclusion anyway!

Research-wise, I've only scratched the surface of what's out there, but here are some of the webpages that discussed the topic without negative campaigning (I can't vouch for their accuracy):

• Montessori Reading at Montessori Mom
• Phonics vs Sight Reading: the most important piece of information you need to know
• The Reading Wars: Phonics versus Whole Language
• Phonics vs Sight Words at Learn for Your Life

And just look up 'spelling' on Wikipedia to kick off hours of info-surfing.

Draw and/or offer your own conclusion.  I'll probably post up mine once I've decided what it is.  And then a year or two from now, I'll post up another conclusion... in retrospect.