*sigh*
The Scorched-Earth war between Phonics people and Whole Word people has a lot of casualties among actual early readers and probably millions of pages have been expended in the battles, so why add a few more?
But I'm going to, because this particular study, which is often quoted, is deeply annoying to me.
The first thing to recognize, I think, is that there is no such thing as truly silent reading. All of us subvocalize -- as a matter of fact, reading fluency and comprehension go down significantly if you just hold your tongue while you read. Our subvocalizations are the same as speech; they're more like a kind of short-tongue (analogous to short-hand) that would sound like mumbo-jumbo if it were vocalized, but nonetheless, it's important to even the most literate people, and much more so to children who are just learning to read. It's not so much the sound of the letters, as the act of vocalizing them that makes a difference. In that respect, when we read the example paragraph, we're subvocalizing the words we *think* we're reading, rather than the "words" we're actually reading.
Second, is that that example is pretty misleading. If only the first and last letters matter, the following:
Aoiecrcng to reaecrsh* at an Esglnih ustvrniiey, it dnsoe't mteatr in waht oedrr the ltrtees in a wrod are
should be just as easy to read as the example. But as a matter of fact, it's definitely harder, because the words in the example aren't randomly scrambled. They're scrambled in such a way to leave important aspects of the word (double-letters, ending sounds) intact. The words in the example are badly spelled, but they're not just random, and that makes all the difference.
If the example proves anything, it proves that readers can disambiguate the meanings of many words by reference to context, which depends on neither whole words, nor on phonics directly. This is particularly true because conjunctions, pronouns etc. are generally short, and so we get all of our ifs, ands and buts unscrambled. But if the context isn't so clear, we might be in more trouble.
Like, can anyone tell me what this is, or read it anything like fluently?
Rrvttaeeeesnips and drciet Texas slahl be aootrineppd aonmg the sarveel Stteas wchih may be iuecnldd whtiin tihs Uionn, anodrcicg to tiher rivesecpte Nbrmeus, wichh slhal be drneieermtd by andidg to the wlohe Nuebmr of fere Porness, ildicnnug toshe bnuod to Scerive for a Trem of Yares, and encludixg Iiannds not txead, there fhftis of all ohetr Psneros.
When it comes down to it, easy reading is just that: easy. When we read some ridiculous study in a newspaper maybe a couple of letters mixed up isn't a big deal. After all, newspapers are made to be readable. Under those circumstances we probably employ the least number of resources available to us -- and probably make mistakes, such as substituting a word for its synonym or for a related word, which we cover up so well that we don't even notice (a problem for proofreaders everywhere).
It's what we do when the text is *difficult* for us that matters. It's resources we have at our disposal under those circumstances that should be of interest to teachers, because it is only by encountering difficult texts that students improve rather than merely prove their literacy.
Both whole-word and phonics-based programs have a place here, though to my mind, the importance of context is drastically understated. Probably that's because the only way of improving a student's ability to contextually understand reading material is to give him or her a lot of reading and writing assignments, which is neither "efficient" enough for overworked school systems and parents, nor profitable enough for today's educational companies.
What a crazy idea: maybe the best way to learn to read is...to read a lot.
Nah. It'll never fly.
-Dan
*Did anyone notice that the fourth word in the example is "researchch"?? Maybe adding extra letters doesn't matter either! Or maybe the study is bunk. Perhaps we should ask the researchchers at "an English university" (which one? The University of Made-Up-on-Avon?) to clarify.
[This message has been edited by Daniel Pereira (edited August 16, 2005).]
|