Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Reading vs Memorizing for little kids

Just curious what threshold folks use to determine if their kids are "reading". My guy recognizes some words - but not all (but I have been reading for decades and I still have trouble with super long dinosaur names and just found out I have been pronouncing some wrong for years).

Just curious ...

If your DC is decoding almost everything they encounter (not just a few words in their favorite books), I would call that making the jump to starting to read.

But it DID start with a few words...and progressed from there.

Novel material. If your son is decoding books he's never seen, that's a sure sign that he's reading.

I'm hesitant to say that seeing him read often is a requirement, especially for children on the young side. I have a stealthy little guy who will read in his head and occasionally come out with a full sentence out loud. He's done this ever since he first started reading about a year ago and, to the casual observer, it would seem like he can't read.

I didn't really care that he was mostly using memorized words - when DS could read a whole paragraph and answer simple questions about it, I considered that reading. He had clearly picked up some basic phonics, but in the beginning it was mostly whole word and fairly choppy to listen to.

That was about a year ago (somewhere between 2.5 and 2.75 years). Now he can decode unfamiliar words more easily & his fluency has greatly improved.

Prior to this stage, he mainly just pointed out different words. For example, he pointed to a sign in the grocery store and said, "There's no milk on aisle 3!" (It's where the powdered milk is.) But I wouldn't really say he was "reading" at this point. Maybe "pre-reading" ?

how important is phonics to determining if a child is reading? I get the sense DS is picking up sight words and reading words he recognizes in novel situations at times, but I can not tell if he is phonetically sounding words out or just recognizing them by sight.

I definitely never learned to read phonetically (and I think of languages like Chinese, which has absolutely no phonetic basis, and yet kids can start learning to read Chinese at the same age as English, which really makes me question all the emphasis on a child must having solid phonics background to be considered a reader)

Decoding vs whole-word reading? Either way, reading is reading.

Decoding provides its greatest benefits in STEM disciplines later on, when the words all have phonetic roots from Latin or Greek. It has limited utility for early readers, because most of our basic words are phonetic train wrecks.

I blame the Normans.

Actually, I need to point out that decades of research on phonological awareness (of which phonics is a component) in reading has pretty clearly established that all fluent readers of phonetic languages use phonological skills in reading. Development is slightly different in transparent or near-transparent (translucent?) languages, such as Finnish or Spanish, than in creoles like English, but the general principles appear to generalize across phonetic languages.

The critical difference is that ~70-75% of kids pick up the necessary phonological processing skills regardless of the type or presence of reading instruction they receive. Even if you think you don't read phonetically, you use phonological processes to read; they just aren't routinely exposed unless you encounter novel vocabulary. The remaining 25-30% of people need explicit instruction in at least some component of phonological processing to become fluent readers (some need only a few extra exposures, which is why practice helps).

And, as a side note, it is not true that written Chinese has absolutely no phonetic basis. While it is true that the language is primarily ideographic/pictographic in nature, some of the radicals are sound radicals, or can be used as sound radicals, which give some indication of the phonemes to be used in pronouncing the characters. There is also a native phonetic system (bopomofo) used in a number of Chinese-speaking (by which I mean Mandarin) regions of the world (but mostly Taiwan, ROC) to cue young children as they are learning to read. The romanized pinyin system is used somewhat similarly in the PRC.

And when as a child, half of the sounds sound the same, phonetic sounding of words make no sense - phonics is not the way to go. I definitely struggled in phonic classes and hating reading for so much of elementary school because of that emphasis on phonics... when I still just guessed as to which "sound" the teacher is using, and hoped that I was making the correct sounds while reading out loud (which half of the time, I was not). Once I ended up in a class where doing all that phonetic stuff was not required, I took off in reading and the teacher told my mother to just leave me alone regarding reading - I was enjoying it finally, and she said I would fill in the gaps myself much more readily if I enjoyed reading. If I was all over the map in what I was reading, who cared? (according to my mother, that is basically what my teacher told her)

Yes, there is probably some phonetic awareness now, although I know way more words in their written form than spoken and struggle still at times connecting the spoken words to their written form.

Hence I wonder about all the emphasis on requirement of understanding phonics for kindergarten/first grade. It seems like it is often used as a criteria to be accepted to a private kindergarten or to move into first grade.

As for Chinese and sound radicals, I am curious... I will ask my mother about her experiences in learning to read Chinese. I recall watching her look up characters in a Chinese dictionary and asking her how in the world does she narrow down to where to even look, and I remember her explaining they go by the number of strokes in a character.

My dc started with the alphabet but progressed to whole words by 18 months. He seemed to intuit phonics via the "A" is for apple-type books.

I can still remember (OK, I was a first-time parent, so how naive was I) telling an acquaintance that dc knew the alphabet at 15 months. She snapped back something to the effect that dc probably could sing the ABC song but **certainly** didn't know the alphabet. Without missing a beat, dc pointed from the stroller at a stop sign and read, S-T-O-P. :-) He had been reading license plates with fascination for a month by then.

I remember telling my MIL that DS was recognizing letters around 17 months. She told me that her daughter knew the alphabet before 2. I had to clarify - "Not the song. We never sing he song. He is identifying letters!"

... "Oh! Well you really should be singing the alphabet song. He'll need to know that!"

I called it reading when my kids were able to take an unfamiliar book (K level picture books included) and read it from beginning to end.

Good points! It seems that many kids here can intuit these principles, or only require minimal instruction. But this is not the case for most kids. It's really amazing to see DS "just know" how to read, when for years I've watched NT kids muddle through the "process" in the classroom.

notnafnaf, you probably would have done better with some true phonemic awareness training as a precursor, instead of just phonics, so that the distinguishing-the-sounds part of reading would make more sense. The sounds should not sound the same, unless there is some underlying phonological processing issue. This is part of what Lindamood is supposed to remediate.

And on phonics and Chinese: I did once see a student who appeared to have a language-based learning disability (of which dyslexia is the most familiar example), compounded by a very complex language environment (multiple dialects of Chinese at home, but no English, and multiple languages in school, including English, a middle eastern language, and an eastern European language). In the team meeting, I was struck by how similar the presentation of one of the parents was to the child, in contrast to their high professional achievement level. I remember wondering to myself if the low-phonetic nature of written Chinese might have allowed this parent to progress through the Chinese educational and professional academic system without any obstacles from hidden dyslexic tendencies, up until becoming a visiting scholar in the USA forced them to confront their language weaknesses in the form of English. Not that the individual was acknowledging the weakness, as the English-poor, professional parent kept insisting that the other parent didn't speak much English, although it was patently clear from a brief conversation with both of them that the reverse was true.

This long anecdote just to explain why I started observing hidden family histories of reading disabilities in the immigrant parents of children with possible reading disabilities, and hypothesizing that our view of RD as a disability is significantly an outgrowth of our phonetic language. (No real data, but someone could make a nice little PhD dissertation out of it, I expect.) I suspect that if we could experimentally raise dyslexics in low-phonetic language societies, quite a few of them would not appear disabled.

Well yes, in the larger sense, dyslexia is entirely a culture-specific phenomenon. Our brains did not evolve for reading -- it is an extremely recent cultural invention. It should be no surprise that brains are imperfectly adapted to this artificial activity, and that some brains aren't very good at it. There is nothing "wrong" with those brains in a biological sense, and before the invention of literacy there would have been no conception of them having a "disability."

http://www.drru-research.org/data/resources/42/Paulesu-et-al-2001.pdf

It's an old article but it drives home the point that perhaps, it's not our brain that is the problem.

So my guy asked me to stop doing the parent introductions on the little beginning reader books we have. Then he started reading the introductory paragraph (got this idea from someone on some other thread (thanks!) and was surprised he was able to read them).

He still does not like decoding - not sure if this is just a fear of failure thing or maybe he's tired or what. But we have fun with our books and that is what we try to focus on.

My little guy started reading product descriptions aloud in restaurant menus to make sure that what went into his pizza or sandwich or pasta was what he liked to eat! It was at that point that I realized that he could read any new material without previous instruction.
So, I suggest that you put something that your child has never read before in front of him and see he can handle it.

That is indeed a wonderful moment to share with your little guy!

DD could read a long list of words (her favorite things and names of favorite people, which she asked me to write out for her) somewhere when she was one (she could read the words in any context/order), but I say she really read at two when she could read a whole little book (probably a combo of sight words and phonics; we always said letter sounds rather than names and would help her figure out words with a quick note about like sh or silent k etc). When I was curious about if she was reading or memorizing I'd just find a new book (like a different Suess or Gerald and Piggy book) and listen in (but these early readers can switch to silent reading really fast so keep that in mind! She fooled her kindy teacher at first because of that).

My first and third boys both memorised favourite book passages/books just before starting to read.

They both used the memorisation to work out which word was which from what we can tell.

Aiden struggled with phonics in reading, but the letter sounds made sense to him (possibly something to do with the school making him re-learn things he already knew ages ago?). I could say "c-a-t" and he would just repeat "c-a-t" he didn't know how to blend the sounds. If I showed him the word - he knew it was cat. The forced phonic lessons at school totally killed his delight and love of reading, and his displayed ability to read declined drastically while at pre-school/K. He figured out the phonetic sounds on his own only recently and it has helped his confidence in new material greatly.

Dylan (child #3) reads easy readers and loves demanding we write out lists of names and words he knows. Phonic sounds make sense to him, he blends and can sound out words and heard the sounds and make the word. He has recently discovered word families and is delighted at same sounding/looking words. I think he is still an emerging reader as to me, a reader is a child who can take a book and read it.

Child 2 - Nathan is a whole other kettle of fish. I have no idea of the process he used to start reading. As with everything else, he asked me to teach him, I sat down with a simple book and he read it to me and then asked for a trickier one, which he then read as well. Shortly thereafter he was reading whatever took his fancy. He is 5 now and prefers juicy story with interesting pictures. It's getting harder to find books that meet this criteria but that's another story for another thread.

We have an adorable video of DS at 2.5 "reading" the little engine that could to his stuffed animals. No one believed he was reading, it seemed memorized, but by that point he was whole word reading. We were also playing with star fall at the time. So he memorized chunks of words and started seeing them elsewhere. We went into target right before valentines day and he pointed up and said "ox, mommy" there were hearts and xo xo hanging from the ceiling!!! Exit, open and closed were also early words. Exit because of the highway signs. He was reading, really reading and figuring out words by 3.10, but he was never a sound outer. It lead to hilarious exchanges trying to figure out what word he is saying that he has only read. In our experience the decoding and phonics issue was never relevant. He just did. But he has a phenomenal memory so we wonder if it allowed him to skip that step.

DeHe

DeHe - exit was an early one here for all our kids - because of "EXIT" on computer games. LOL