Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school What's considered reading?

That's the often unrecognized bias of the alphabetic/syllabic language readers. The whole "breaking the code" as the ultimate key to reading thing...

So what do you think about the whole word reading debate?

I've always had people who were older than I tell me that I was lucky to have learned to read with phonics.  Now I see mothers online saying that whole word readers comprehend a text without ever having to go back and re-read a sentence or paragraph that they sped through like phonetic readers sometimes do.  Hmm.., I do that somedays but not on others.  

My choice wasn't really that well thought out.  It was decided by what was happening when the reading started.  At the time my son was recognizing a few sight words (erm., ahem- well, like spongebob on the tv guide channel, and his dad's name) J.C. Penny's had boxes of Hooked on Phonics on sale for $11/each.  We made the little word families sat, mat, cat.  He learned "fat" thanks to this and told me in a store, "That man is fat".  Thanks Hooked on Phonics.

HelloBaby I am also curious what you think of the whole word debate. I tried to check on google scholar what non alphabetic languages do for reading.. did not find anything of as yet. DD reads by whole word and is repulsed by phonics. She has well over 100 "sight" words and she picks them up or is showing them to us daily. She is obsessed with Dick and Jane and loves that there is a little girl Sally that is around her age in the books. I do think she may have used a bit of phonics when she was deciphering the difference between there and here. She knows all the sounds the letters makes but does not hear the word when she puts them together. I am one of the whole language readers and was never taught phonics and though I wish I knew it for sounding out words in those few times of reading publicly, I am not sure that I am missing much. I do think DD will get enough of it when she starts school and so I am considering her reading even though she is not doing it the phonics way.

Having had this discussion in various forms over the years, I have come to agree that all readers use phonics to some extent. Otherwise we could never even attempt a proper name we'd never seen, or scientific names. Some people may be faster at sounding out, but as fluent English readers, we all do it, by necessity. I think the whole-word vs. phonics thing is very relevant when learning, though. My DD didn't seem to do much via phonics at all and suddenly started reading quite fluently at almost 5--she went from her first book read to me ever, The Cat in the Hat (rapid, barely missed a word) to easy chapter books in a few months. If she didn't know a word, she would often skip it or guess. DS has been much more phonics-based and went through the phase of sloooowlyy...sssound-ing...o...ut eachhhh w...or...duh, which DD never did. But he learned earlier--it clicked for him faster (he is probably able to decode on a 2nd grade level now, at 4). Maybe DD was storing up sight words all that time.

Attempt is the word here.

Phonics are of use as long as your spoken/heard vocabulary bank exceeds your read vocabulary bank. I think that after a while most people in modern societies end up learning most vocabulary through the written medium, making phonics... less useful as they gain experience?.

I have been told repeatedly that I am a highly atypical sample of one, but I do believe that most people might sound out new words for use in spoken conversation (I don't) but retain the shape of the word along with the pronunciation, and that experienced readers do shape recognition rather than sounding out. All those viral emails/posts going round with the letters shuffled around or replaced with numbers, right?

My mother tongue uses a rather idiosyncratic alphabetic writing system -- not as bad as English (http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j17/caos.php#caos for anybody who believes there is any solid logic to English phonics), but much less straightforward than, say, modern Spanish or the Japanese syllabic system. I was never taught English phonics, and muddling through on my own I managed to acquire a large amount of vocabulary I can use in writing but cannot pronounce properly -- and you wouldn't believe how rarely some of those words come up in daily conversation, even after living in the US for over 10 years.

From the link above, my opinion on the (complete lack of) logic of English spelling:

I remember when DS started to recognize some words I got really interested in the what-is-reading discussion. I found in Exceptionally Gifted Children, a Miraca Gross book, a discussion of this. She says,

"...let me explain what I mean by 'reading'. A young child who is shown the picture of a cat with 'cat' written underneath, and responds by saying the word, is not necessarily reading. She may be responding to the pictorial clue, rather than decoding the word. It is only when the child is able to recognize and pronounce the word 'cat' in another conext, with no pictorial clue to assist her, that we can be sure that she is responding to, and analysing, the collection of printed symbols which make up the word 'cat' rather than the picture of an animal with which she is well familiar. Therefore, for the purposes of this study, reading is defined as the ability to decode and comprehend more than five words from a a printed sournce without the use of pictures as textual clues."

Gross goes on to say that her definition is "more cautious" than that used by many in studies of early readers.

Her definition is more inclusive than I would have guessed myself, I would have thought a typical definition would be reading and understanding a short emergent reader type book with perhaps a short sentence per page.

Her description is the only definition I've seen given in print by anyone studying gifted kids, curious if others have come across other well known gifted experts' definitions.

Polly

Question:

DD(26 months) keeps pointing to words when I am reading asking "what is that word? That one?". I tell her and later when reading another book she will get excited and say "mom that is ____!!!".
So my concern... Is this teaching her how to read? Will this screw her up for phonics? She does know every letter sound, but has yet to attempt to sound out a word.
Thoughts??

It is IMO always OK to teach as much as they want to learn. She'll probably learn phonics later when she takes up spelling. Only from what I've read (I don't know) I think teachers nowadays prefer to teach reading by the whole word method but to teach spelling by the "sound it out" rather than memorize that way they can see which phenomes the kids are hearing.

I wouldn't call Gross' definition reading. My DD had over 20 sight words when she was under two (some of which I taught her because she was into it for a while). But she couldn't read. A small collection of sight words (5??? 5 is nothing!) is not reading, in my book.

I wanted to address GHS's question. To me, your daughter is asking and you're answering her which you should definitely do (I always did this with my DD but I didn't put her through a program). And of course that's teaching but more like facilitating since your DD is in the lead.

My DD learned to read in huge leaps and bounds and my mother was always concerned about phonics (for a couple of years she'd always said "but she'll have gaps...you have to watch for gaps...) so she got me the type of workbooks you can grab at B&N or where ever. (You can look at all the brands and types and see what you like. Every time she'd come to visit my mother picked out ones that were organized by the sound blends etc. She taught my older sister to read back in the day and my whole family are those breathe-it-in type readers and all have super vocabularies so I guess I trust them.

For the most part my DD seemed to magically know all this stuff and when I'd periodically "check her for gaps" with the books she didn't realy seem to have any. It certainly wouldn't hurt to think about this in the future for your child, and if she gets a teacher that starts telling you she couldn't know this and couldn't know that, you will have alot of confidence to advocate.

A side note...there are lots of online and DVD things but my mother isn't from that generation so that's not what she picked out. Anyway I didn't like my DD with too much electronic time back then because it seemed to make her a bit hyper.

This is all my opinion and advice looking back, and if you have concerns this is a nice low-pressure way to make sure there aren't any gaps.