What is the best way to learn and teach reading? An article, "At a Loss for Words" by Emily Hanford in APM Reports, well summarizes three main reading instruction strategies and their evolution: phonics, whole word, and three-cueing. Briefly, phonics is based on associating individual letters with sounds; whole word consists of recognizing entire words without sounding them out phonetically; and three-cueing relies on some guessing based on semantics (sentence context), syntax (sentence structure), and graphics (visual appearance).
From all my own research as both a student and a teacher of reading, I’ve
concluded that are all useful. Here's why.
Phonics
Phonics
is good for matching the letters of certain base words with sounds, such a girl
and in, and the more sophisticated boy and out, which have
diphthongs. But more than 25% of English words cannot be learned phonetically
(e.g., though, tough). The famous example of the absurdity of
English is spelling fish as ghoti:
· gh as in tough
· o as in women
· ti as in nation
Whole
Word
So
the whole word approach is necessary to simply memorize words like the homophones bail
and bale, mail and male, pail and pale, and sail
and sale. At least there’s a pattern in those examples, but what about air
and heir vs. fair and fare, or one and won
vs. none and nun? What about poor vs. pour? And how
did the rhyming words bed, lead, and said get their
spelling? We likely recognize these whole words as young readers before
learning rules like “when two vowels go walking, the first one does the
talking,” which, by the way, does not work for seven of the example words in the
previous sentences.
Three-Cueing
The
three-cueing approach makes perfect sense, as in these examples:
- Graphically: If I’ve learned cat and man, I’d have a
good chance of learning mat and can based on the
similarities of their appearance in print.
- Syntactically: If I come across the sentence, I love Mother
and don’t know Mother, even at age six I can guess that I love
nouns, (i.e., people, places, or things), but it couldn’t possibly be that
I love verbs (go), adjectives (pretty), adverbs (happily),
prepositions (of), conjunctions (and) or interjections (wow).
I don’t need to know the definitions of parts of speech to figure that one
out. So if the story is about a girl and her mother, I could correctly
guess the word is mother. Of course, by purely guessing, I might
think the sentence says I love trains, an error similar to one that
children have made when reading to me.
- Semantically: If I read I walk from school all the way to my
house and knew every word but house, I could guess the word is
not jail, sea, or zoo because of the limitations of what my six-year-old self can own.
But
three-cueing was not so novel when Ken Goodman “created” it in 1967, as the article claims. In fact,
he just repackaged the whole word approach, which required us to see things graphically, and
syntactically, semantically.
One
more thing we do: we read backwards as well as forward. Look at this passage
from The Cat in the Hat:
“The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.”
If I’ve just learned wet and cold,
I’ll look back to their first sighting when I get to their second sighting.
As a Dr. Seuss book veteran, I would know how the author depends on rhyming. So by the time I get to day, I’m sure it
rhymes with play. And, if I’m really clever, I’ll know I sit in my house
when it was too wet to play. So guessing, yes, but comparing and
building on previous information too.
I’ll
always remember in my doctoral program, a student pronounced paradigm as paradeem,
not paradime, even though she heard the professor use the latter pronunciation in class.
I thought either she did not connect his correct pronunciation with the word
she came across in the assigned reading, or she wasn’t paying attention to his
lecture. Then my thoughts shifted to when I learned that word only a few years
earlier. I had never heard the word before until I read it in a book. The author was discussing Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, so I read that book next. Here’s the weird thing. I never had
heard the word in speech; I only saw it in print, but I somehow correctly
pronounced it in my head as paradime, dropping the g and giving
the i a long sound, even though I had no other word ending to compare it
with. So when my professor said paradigm, I knew how to spell it. I’d
bet that the woman who mispronounced it was not as experienced a reader as I
was. I think you get my point: we guess contextually more often than we
think as readers.
A regular dose of all these approaches works for most children. Some will learn faster than others, as in everything else in life. But the slower ones will still learn. Yet having the right attitude is essential. The most memorable sentence in the article is
the Molly Woodworth quote: “[Reading]
influences every aspect of your life." Let’s keep our eyes on the prize.
