Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion small errors when reading aloud

DS7, at 5, made those small revisions while reading his home reading books (from school) aloud. It took me a few examples to realize he was correcting grammar, syntax or improving the fluidity of the text. Once I clued in, the next time it happened I told him that his revision was correct and that I was impressed he caught the mistake. Then I explained that even if the text could benefit from improvements, he still had to read it the way it was written for his teachers. Which left him both pleased with himself and reasonably happy to comply. Plus now he revels in catching me in the same revisions!

I think fluent readers do this instinctively - including in their heads while reading silently. I was actually delighted when I realized what DS was doing (after I made him read the text as written and saw that he could, of course!).

OMG us too, LOL! As I have posted before, my DS does have vision issues (convergence issues) and much has improved with VT but we still have the issues of skipping words and adding words. And we have this 'Gertrude/Gunther' problem too... Almost always with names, I think. It's nice to have some company in chaos ...

He does not do the thing with holding onto a mispronunciation. One thing he does do a little of is lose his place. He will very quickly read much of a long sentence, pause, and repeat a couple of words--I think while he scans ahead. "Corduroy was a bear who was involved in covert secret ops missions in department stores under top-secret government mandate, but feared being caught by special forces--so one night, when he...when he unexpectedly came upon a CIA agent, he..."

(uh, not an actual excerpt)

Have you ever seen that trick where a common phase is laid out on two or three lines, and a word repeats, but right at the line break: ie,
Can you
you spot the
mistake?

Here is a link to a better one: http://www.marcofolio.net/other/15_cool_word_illusions.html

When things don't read as well as we would expect, sometimes our brains just naturally substitute what "ought" to be there. I think it is just a sign of knowing the language very well. I do it, my son does it, and this is what makes proof-reading your own papers after a long day of working on them not very fool-proof. It really is a cool aspect of how our brains work! I also like the one where you can only have the first and last letter of a word in the right order, and still read it just as fluently.

LOL-- DD still holds on to mispronunciations.


Sometimes this is hilarious-- because she'll "fix" the pronunciation in her head through silently reading it and gathering the meaning contextually or something, and then it becomes darned near impossible to remediate without making a big deal out of it.

Disciple, for example. Who in their right mind would assume a long vowel pair in that word?? But the two short-i vowels sure sounds... hmm... ODD in conversation.

Lately, I have been correcting her by pointing out that if she calls it Bran-DEEZ, they probably won't let her go there for college. LOL.

DD total reads like this, and insists on her own name pronunciations sometimes. I think it's because they read drinking up big chunks with their eyes--that's how I read, and my mom, but her best friend insists she reads through every single word, and I imagine many beginning readers do as well. I did remind her to read carefully a bit while reading to her teacher. It's cool to hear about these similar readers!

This is why I tell my college students to read aloud their final version - when you read silently you skip and substitute what you think it says. But more often than not the read aloud will catch the mistakes. I think because its a different part of the brain than was doing the writing. But that's just a guess.

DeHe

I read each and every word and sub-vocalize each one. Though I often forget to reread stuff I write and type past words, I always see the extra the or you or whatnot. But I think my approach is how I learned to fix and cope with the floating text vision issues; if I read with only my rght eye it floats all over the text in little loopy loops, and if I at the same time try to read without saying words it takes many times longer and word recognition is much harder with words longer than around seven letters. Now I'm wondering about coaching ds with sub-vocalizing or hope he discovers his own way.