TEACHER ZONE >> Articles and Research >> Learning to read takes... how long?
Learning to read takes...how long?
By Helena Rogers
Learning to read takes.... how long?
Masha Bell, author and literacy researcher, told a conference of English teachers recently that ‘A high number of "inconsistencies" in the way basic words are spelt makes it much harder for children to read and write at a young age,' and that ‘According to academics, children in Britain normally take three years to read to a decent standard.'
Over the years I have taught hundreds of reception and pre-reception children to read from no skill at all to a reading age of approximately seven years within six to ten weeks. In fact, it was only the less able children who took longer than ten weeks to reach a seven-year reading age, the majority were either fluent readers or nearly fluent within the one term.
I completely took for granted the consistent results I achieved with my young children, thinking that all other teachers were doing the same. Now I begin to wonder. But my methods were not today's methods.
My method is the fifty-year-old ‘Whole Word' method by which children are taught a basic number of whole words by sight (not by sounding them out letter by letter) and then are given a book which contains only those basic words. Consequently the children have no trouble in reading the book. Then, because each successive book contains the same words with just a few new words added, there is always a solid base of known words and the children have no trouble in learning a few more with each book. Then, hey presto! After a few more books, the children are reading.
Learning this way also means that the children get used to seeing how the words are spelt and have less trouble with spelling than if they are taught by the phonic method. With phonics, the children are taught to sound each letter to make a word and so expect all words to be built this way. But the English language doesn't work like this.
So why does the ‘Whole Word' method work so well? Because we are English. If we were Italian or from some other European countries, we could learn to read through the phonic method with no trouble, because these languages are phonic in nature. English is too irregular for a blanket phonic approach to be successful.
In their book "The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education", Uta Frith and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore discuss research showing that that a child's brain uses one part for learning sounds and another part for word recognition. Therefore, since babies learn about their world by matching one object to another, the child's brain is genetically more active on this ‘whole object' part. The English child, therefore, will far more easily learn to read by matching word to word - the ‘Whole Word' method, than if they are required to learn with sounds (phonics). Teaching phonics as a first method, means that the child has to use a part of the brain which is less active and so will find phonics more difficult to understand. Of course, once a basic level of reading has been achieved, then phonics make much more sense to the young child and s/he will learn them far more easily.
In the 1970s, the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA) sought to alter letters and groups of letters so that no two were the same in order to simplify our language. All these sounds had to be learned (both to speak and to write) before reading could take place. And then, of course, all the books had to be printed in this strange new alphabet. But once the children got through primary school, they were expected to change back to the ordinary alphabet so that they could read all other literature normally. It could never work! And it proved to be a disaster.
We don't have to mess about with the language. Reading is one of those almost instinctive activities, like speaking. Just go with the young child's propensity to learn by matching and they will soon learn to read. And it won't take three years either.