It amazes me that there is still a debate about the "way" in which children learn to read. I should think that after so many years of failing to prove the supremacy of one over the other, that it would be obvious that different children develop in different ways.
I know that my own children have certainlydeveloped as readers in different ways.
DD9 was fascinated by sound-symbol relationships by the time she was two. Other than referring to letters by sound instead of name, we didn't do explicit instruction or phonics programs. However, she learned to spell before she learned to read and LOVED to try and spell short words. By the time she entered K (at a very young 5 due to late summer b-day), she was reading at a 3rd grade level. By the 3rd quarter of that year she had exhausted the elementary reading assessment. This was pre-SRI, an assessment used for the first time this year (she has not exhausted that assessment--she is "only" at a 12th grade level
). When she was learning to read she relied almost exclusively on context and sound-symbol. She enjoyed books with pictures, but did not focus much on them, and was ready to abandon them fairly early, although happily she has rediscovered the richness of picture books this year (many of which are beautifully written short stories). She has always been an exceptional speller. Sound/symbol combinations make sense to her and she is quick to notice and appreciate the meaning of alternate spellings.
My DS7, on the other hand, was fascinated by picture at a very young age. He was in constant motion--unless a non-fiction video was playing, in which case he was transfixed. He also heard letters referred to by sound instead of name and loved books--but for him, pictures were great sources of information. He would pore over pictures picking out and pointing out details I never would have noticed. When he began to read, he seldom applied his sound/symbol knowledge when stuck--instead he would use context and picture based information to intuit out the words. It took him longer to love reading, I think because it took longer for his text reading to catch up with the depth of content he needed in order to be engaged (he was always more engaged by non-fiction than by fiction--hard to find books at early reading that had any unknown information). He began K at a late K reading level and finished at an early 3rd. Then by the end of 1st quarter of 1st grade, he too exhausted the elementary reading assessment (not SRI, which wasn't given to him). The difference in their route to reading shows in their approach to completely unfamiliar words--he is much more likely to mispronounce, especially if it is multi-syllabic (Amagamon instead of Agammemnon). Also, while he spells 1 1/2 to 2 years above level, he does not spell like DD.
By achievement level at least, they would both be considered gifted readers (we haven't done IQ testing). Yet they came at reading in completely different ways.
