The Conceptual Basis for Ending the Great Debate over Reading Methods. William E. Tunmer Massey University New Zealand

Transcription

1 The Conceptual Basis for Ending the Great Debate over Reading Methods William E. Tunmer Massey University New Zealand

2 Tunmer & Nicholson (in press) : Tunmer, W.E., & Nicholson, T. (in press). The development and teaching of word recognition skill. In M.L. Kamil, P.D. Pearson, E.B. Moje, & P. Afflerbach (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research (Vol.4). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

3 Two conceptually distinct questions: i. How do children learn to read? ii. How should children be taught to read?

4 Division of Labour Continuum for Acts of Learning 100% 100% 0 0

5 Objections to whole language: i. How do we learn to read? Is learning to read natural? ii. How do we read? Do we rely on multiple cueing systems?

6 Division of Labour Continuum for Acts of Learning 100% 100% 0 0

7 Objections to whole language: i. How do we learn to read? Is learning to read natural? ii. How do we read? Do we rely on multiple cueing systems?

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9 Clay (1998): Beginning readers need to use their knowledge of how the world works; the possible meaning of the text; the sentence structure; the importance of order of ideas, or words, or of letters; the size of words or letters; special features of sounds, shape and layout; and special knowledge from past literary experiences before they resort to left to right sounding out of chunks or letter clusters or, in the last resort, single letters. (p.9, italics added)

10 Pressley (2006): The scientific evidence is simply overwhelming that letter sound cues are more important in recognising words than either semantic or syntactic cues (p.21), and that teaching children to decode by giving primacy to semantic contextual and syntacticcontextual cues over graphemic phonemic cues is equivalent to teaching them to read the way weak readers read (p.164).

11 Importance of Phonological Skills Semantic Representation Orthographic Representation Phonological Representation Print Speech

12 Measures of Decoding Ability and Word specific Knowledge Pseudowords jit med thut brop mide sone clave drime zoin woaf thrain fleach Exception Words stomach blind shoe touch castle sword scissors soup chorus ocean island tongue

13 Scatterplot of Pseudoword Naming and Exception Word Naming

14 Scatterplot of Pseudoword Naming and Ability to Use Context

15 Identifying the word stomach in text: stomach stow match (regularised pronunciation) i. The football hit him in the stow match. ii. The football hit him in the statch.

16 Objections to traditional phonics programmes: i. Assumption that learning to read is largely environmental dependent. ii. Lack of attention to development of phonological awareness. iii. Use of teacher centred instruction and lock step curricula.

17 Division of Labour Continuum for Acts of Learning 100% 100% 0 0

18 Cipher knowledge: i. Correspondences between single letters or digraphs (e.g., sh, oa) and single phonemes; ii. Correspondences between groups of letters (e.g., tion) and groups of phonemes (e.g., /shun/); iii. Polyphonic spelling patterns (e.g., ear as in bear and hear); iv. Conditional rules that depend on position specific constraints or the presence of marker letters; and v. Morphophonemic spelling patterns.

19 Gough (1996): I think [whole language proponents] are partly right, that the child must do a major part of reading acquisition by himself The main engine of reading acquisition, beyond its beginning, is reading itself As I see it, there are too many spelling sound correspondences to be taught; we can only teach a small subset of them. The child must induce the rest on her own. (p.7)

20 Division of Labour Continuum for Acts of Learning 100% 100% 0 0

21 Differences between phonics rules and cipher rules: i. Rules of phonics are explicit, whereas rules of cipher are implicit; ii. Rules taught in phonics are relatively few, whereas cipher rules number in the hundreds; iii. Phonics rules are slow and laborious to apply, whereas cipher rules operate very quickly and (seemingly) effortlessly; and iv. Phonics rules are largely context free, whereas cipher rules are mostly context sensitive.

22 George Bernard Shaw: ghoti = fish gh = /f/, as in rough and tough o = [i], as in women ti = /sh/, as in action and patient But, gh = /g/ in ghost, gherkin, and ghoul ti =/sh/ in tion or tient, not tee as in spaghetti

23 Induced Sublexical Relations (ISRs): For letter y: i. y in baby, happy ii. y in yes, you iii. y in by, my

24 Objections to traditional phonics programmes: i. Assumption that learning to read is largely environmental dependent. ii. Lack of attention to development of phonological awareness. iii. Use of teacher centred instruction and lock step curricula.

25 Stanovich s (1996) Model of Developmental Dyslexia Impaired Language Segmentation Abilities Difficulties in Phonological Coding Poor Word Recognition Processes Limited Reading Comprehension Ability

26 Objections to traditional phonics programmes: i. Assumption that learning to read is largely environmental dependent. ii. Lack of attention to development of phonological awareness. iii. Use of teacher centred instruction and lock step curricula.

27 Phases of Sight Word Learning (Ehri, 2005) Pre Alphabetic Phase Partial Alphabetic Phase Full Alphabetic Phase Consolidated Alphabetic Phase Automatic Phase

28 Cognitive entry abilities: i. Oral language skills; ii. Familiarity with book language; iii. Basic understanding of concepts and conventions of printed language; iv. Knowledge of letter names and sounds; v. Preconventional spelling ability; vi. Sensitivity to subcomponents of spoken words; and vii. Sensitivity to semantic and syntactic constraints of sentence contexts.

29 Division of Labour Continuum for Acts of Learning 100% 100% 0 0

30 Conclusions: i. Exposure to explicit instruction in phonological awareness and alphabet coding skills, and the use of inductive/constructivist processes are both important in learning to read; ii. Processes of learning to recognise words are initially environment dependent but necessarily become increasingly learner dependent; and iii. Most effective approach used with any given child depends on where the child is located on the division of labour continuum at school entry.

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