The effects of sight-word reading and skipping unknown printed words

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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The effects of sight-word reading and skipping unknown printed words

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

It has always been of grave concern to me that so many people really don't seem to understand the wider damage of multi-cueing word-guessing that entails so much 'word skipping'. This skipping of printed words means that new printed words in texts cannot be added to spoken language without a pronunciation - and it is only 'phonics' application that will turn the new printed word into a pronunciation.

The 'meaning' of new printed words, however, can be deduced from the context of the text - indeed many of us have expanded our vocabulary through reading literature and not necessarily through speaking with others.

BUT, whilst it is very common for competent readers to deduce the meaning of new printed words through context when reading silently (privately), it is also common to take the lazy route and skip those longer, technical words that one cannot bother turning into a pronunciation. This does not compromise our understanding of the text (imagine reading a book about dinosaurs with many different, long dinosaur names that we're not familiar with).

The competent reader, however, could come up with a pronunciation if necessary or if reading aloud.

But what about the learner - the beginning reader, or the struggler? What happens when learners with weaker reading profiles and lack of phonics knowledge come to new printed words. Again, skipping over them when reading silently and privately may still leave the reader able to deduce the meaning in an age-appropriate text, but if such learners are not able to apply phonics to come up with a pronunciation, then the new printed words cannot increase their spoken language.

How many learners as they get older and go through the school system (and even college or university) hit a ceiling in their reading capacity because so many words in the literature are beyond their spoken language and may be beyond their technical knowledge and ability to give a pronunciation?

I suggest this is happening for many of our learners in our school system - even in England where phonics is commonplace but it is also common for teachers to be trained to teach children, or practising, multi-cueing word-guessing intentionally or by default (when children are sent home with reading books to read independently that are beyond their alphabetic code knowledge).

I raise this issue in all my talks and training but I've never heard anyone else raise worries about word-skipping potentially paralysing the ability to learn new words through reading.

So I am very grateful to Elizabeth Brown for alerting me, and others, to this post describing the effects and damage of whole-word learning and skipping new printed words:

https://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Rea ... erate.html
Why Johnny Doesn't Like to Read

According to dictionary.com, an aliterate is “a person who is able to read but rarely chooses to do so.” Aliteracy in America is increasing.

Don Potter commented about a 21 August 2007 AP article by Alan Fram titled One in Four Read No Books Last Year stating,

Should we be surprised that one in four Americans did not read a single book last year when we know that a majority of the American public is suffering from at least some degree of artificially induced whole-word dyslexia? The cognitive conflict caused by reading using the silent, right side of the brain makes reading a very unpleasant, tiring activity. No doubt the exquisite joy of reading poetry has been especially vulnerable since sound is of the essence in poetry.
According to Geraldine Rodgers, even most teachers are not aware of the extent of the problem right under their noses:

Yet most third grade teachers do not even know there is a real problem. If a child stumbles over a lower frequency word which has not already been taught, the teachers pronounce it and think the problem is solved, because most children can read their controlled-vocabulary sight-word reading books very well and score very well on the phony standardized “reading comprehension” tests given annually. That is, of course, because only l,000 words of the highest frequency compose about ninety per cent of most reading materials. Once children know those 1,000 highest-frequency words (which account for about 90 per cent of almost any material), they are automatically reading above the frustration level on most reading comprehension test materials. They are therefore able to guess the meaning of most of the unknown words in the remaining 10 per cent from the context of the selection, particularly if those words are already in their spoken vocabularies, and they can therefore guess the answers to the questions.

Their inability to read independently only shows up on oral word list tests which lack a written context from which to guess the words, or on demanding materials which contain difficult unknown, low-frequency words, well beyond the 10,000 commonest words.. Such reading disabled children (and most American elementary school children are reading-disabled) cannot pronounce, and therefore “hear,” low-frequency words because they are not already in their spoken vocabularies, even when they can guess the “meaning” of low-frequency words from the context of a selection.

The sounds of words are really only labels for the ideas being named. If the sound of a word cannot be resurrected from memory when it is needed, then the idea behind that word is rendered useless. When reading-disabled children encounter unknown low-frequency words, they may be able to guess their meanings, but the low-frequency words will lack a “sound” hook with which the children could have filed the word in their memories for future use, and with which hook they could have retrieved the word in the future. As a result, instead of accumulating their vocabulary through their reading, as healthy readers can do, reading disabled children cannot increase their vocabulary in a normal fashion, any more than badly taught deaf-mutes can. The stunted vocabularies of reading-disabled children are the real reason for the low so-called “reading comprehension” scores that show up so consistently today at the high school and college levels.
[9]

“Context guesses” for little sight-word readers with normal hearing can obviously only be made for words which are already in the little “readers'“ spoken vocabularies. These little sight-word readers lack enough phonic ability to sound out truly unknown words so that they can add them to their spoken vocabularies. For such readers, vocabulary knowledge therefore cannot be increased by reading, but only by listening to oral speech. By contrast, phonic readers can sound out an unknown word from all of its letters and figure out its meaning from the context. Phonic readers therefore add both the spelling and the meaning of a previously unknown printed word to their vocabularies. The effect, of course, is cumulative: phonically-trained readers reach high school with larger vocabularies, besides being able to spell better and to read automatically with ease instead of with conscious, unpleasant, “psycholinguistic,” “whole language” guessing.[10]
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: The effects of sight-word reading and skipping unknown printed words

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Here is information about the work of Geraldine Rodgers:


https://infogalactic.com/info/Geraldine_Rodgers
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