Reading in Early Childhood

The reading instruction experiment described in this report is based on the theory that, if a child learns to talk without formal instruction solely by being exposed to language and if written language is to be considered as an independent system, a child could learn to read at the same age and in the same way as he is learning to talk, solely by being exposed to written language. He would then attack the written material, forming hypotheses, building models, and discovering the code of the written language-7its morphemic, syntactic, and semantic systems. The author describes 14 months of work teaching a two-year old to read. Details of the procedures and the results are provided. After this period, the child is capable of storing, analyzing, and comparing written words and arrives at a knowledge of the grapho-phonemic correspondences that is a prerequisite for being able to decode any written message. (Authco:-/VM) Ragnhild Soderbergh: Reading in Childhood. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. EDUCATION & WELFARE OFFICE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED 00 NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDUCATION POSITION OR POLICY This paper is a summary of my book Readilig in Childhood. A Linguistic Study of a Swedish Preschool Child's Gradual Acquisition of Reading Ability (Stockholm 1371). I have closely stud,d a ehiLd learning to read from the age of two years and four months by the method accounted for by Glenn Doman in his book How to Teach Your Baby to Read (New York 1964). By this method the child learns whole words as entities. I have shown how the child, as it learns more and more words, gradually breaks down these words into smaller units: first morphemes, then graphemes. At last the child arrives at an of the correspondences between sound (phoneme) and letter (grapheme) and is able to read any new word through analysis and synthesis. In my experiment this stage is reached after 14 months of reading, i.e. when the child is three years and a half. The findings of this study have been viewed in the light of recent linguistic theorias as presented by research workers in child language inspired by Chomsky such as Brown, Bellugi and Lehneberg. Chapter One. Learning to read. Theories and methods confronted with different linguistic theories. In this chapter a short summary is given of the debate on reading in the USA in the 1950s. The authors main source here has been Jeanne Chall Learning-to Read. The Great Debate (New York 1967). According to Jeanne Chall there are-w theoretically two dominating methods in reading instruction, the phonics method and the reading-for-meaning method. In practice however there is often a mixture between the two. The pure phonics method implies that the pupil is taught the letters of the alphabet and the corresponding sounds. Then he is taught to read by sounding and blending, i.e. he sunds out the new words and then synthesizes the sounds so that the right word is produced. The sponsors of the reading-for-meaning method oppose this as they think unnatural and boring way of reading and instead teach whole words and sentences from the very beginning, thus giving their pupils at once the experiende of what are the ultimate goals of reading: comprehension, appreciation and finnally application. In the pure phonics method the child is presented with the code and taught how to use itt. In the extreme reading-for-meaning method the child is not taught the code. Jeanne Chall has summarized the resUlts of recent research in England and the USA on methods in beginning reading and arrives at the folloving conclusions: Early stress on code learning ... not only produces better word recognition and spelling, but also makes it easier for the child eventually to read with understanding (Chall, p. 83). Chall gains support for the view that an early acquisition of the code is necessary also from the theoretical considerations of linguists, particularly Leonard Bloomfield and Charles C. Fries. These linguists, however, both consider written language as secondary to and completely dependent on spoken language. Bloomfield is apt to disregard written language altogether, from a scientific, linguistic point of view: Writing is not language but merely a way of.recording language by means of visible marks (Language, p. 21). Bloomfield was the linguistic pioneer of his time, and his views dominate the opinions of many linguists during the 1940s and 1950s. R,.cently, however, the written language has been considered an object worthy of investigation independently of the corresponding spoken language. There has been a strong tendency among linguists towards stressing the differences between the two codes, differences not only on the phonemic-graphemic level but also as regards morphemics and syntax. Linguists have even claimed that written language should be considered as a more or less independent system. (See Sture All6n, W. Nelson Francis, H.A. Gleason and H.J. Uldall). The current trend in linguistics represented by Chomsky and his school has more or less revolutionized the ideas about language learning and language acquisition. According to Chomsky we have a biologically founded innate capacity for language. This means that when a child is exposed to language he does not just imitate but attacks the language he is being exposed to, observing it and constructing hypotheses about it. He builds his own model of the language, woking out his own linguistic system consisting of sets of rules which are gross apiroximations of the correct system. As he is exposed to more and more linguistic material and as he is able to test his model by actual use of the rules when speaking, these rules are continually reconstructed and modified until, finally, the model becomes identical with the normal adult model. Chomsky's theories have been partly verified by many studies on child language presented during the 1960s, by Robert Brown, Ursula Bellugi, Colin Fraser, Paula Menyuk and others. Belief in the biological foundations of language has been convincingly advocated also by Lenneberg in a book so titled which appeared in 1967. According to Lenneberg it is undisputable that the oniet of speech and of certain linguistic abilities such as babbling, speaking isolated words, producing two word sentences etc. are determined by maturational processes (Lenneberg p. 127 f.). The maturational processes and the innate capacity that cause children to start learning to speak at a certain age (18-28 months) without any form of instruction the only recuirement being that they are exposed to language should also explain why this highly complicated learning process is being completed so quickly: within a period of two years basic syntactic constructions of the language are mastered by the child. Now, if a child learns to talk at a certain age without formal instruction, solely by being exposed to language, and if written language is to be considered as an independent system, why cannot a child learn to read at the same age and in the same way as he is learning to talk, solely by being exposed to written language? He would then be supposed to attack the written material, forming hypotheses, building models,a1 1 by himselfdiscovering the code of the written language, of its morphematic, syntactic and semantic systems etc. That this is possible we know from the fact that some children learn to read all by themselves, i.e. just by observing a text while listening to other people reading it. In a talk given at the annual meeting of American reading specialists in Boston, in April 1968, professor Arthur I. Gates, one of the foremost reading specialists in the United States, said that a recently finished investigation in the USA has shown that 80% of the children beginning school in the USA can read a certain number of words. There are also facts revealed in this investigation that hint at the pOssibility that very soon children will learn to read exactly in the same way as they now learn to understand and express themselves in spoken language, i.e. by living a normally active and verbal lifa. That children can learn to read at an early age without real instruction is well known, but how children sueceed in doing so has not yet been systematically studied. The chief interest then when the child is learning to read a language written with an alphabet must be centered on the following question: how does the child on its own discover the relations between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes) Not until these correspondences are evident to the child, he can be said to have achieved full reading ability, i.e. to be able to read any word irrespectively of whether he has seen that word earlier or not

Developmental psychology · Linguistics · Reading (process) · Philosophy · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development · Social and Educational Sciences

• Reading acquisition of preschool children without systematic instruction

  Open Access•Ada Anbar•Early Childhood Research Quarterly•1986

  Add to list

• Children's knowledge of spelling in learning to read

  Open Access•Hazel Francis•First Language•1983

  Add to list

• The Biological Foundations of Language

  Eric H Lenneberg•Hospital Practice•1967

  Add to list

• Reading

  Janet Ross, Ronald Wardhaugh•TESOL Quarterly•1971

  Add to list

• A Course in Modern Linguistics

  Open Access•Charles F Hockett•Language Learning•1958

  Add to list