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!"