Raising Kids Who Read Page 3
Because writing uses visual symbols that signify sound, children who are learning to read must master three things. First, they must be able to distinguish letters. They must notice that “j” has a little tail that distinguishes it from “i.” (I’ll put letters and words in quotation marks when emphasizing what they look like on the page.) Second, they must learn the mapping between these visual symbols and their auditory counterparts—for example, that the letter “o” sometimes goes with one sound (as in the word TONE) but at other times goes with another sound (as in TON). (I’ll put letters and words in small capital letters when emphasizing their sound.)
There’s a third thing to be learned, and this is the least intuitive for us to appreciate; learning the mapping is not quite what you think. We think that the sound that goes with “t” is TEE, but that’s actually two sounds, a consonant and vowel sound. Children must be able to hear that TEE is two sounds; they must be able to hear individual speech sounds. To read, children must be able to know what T sounds like in isolation, because that’s the sound that goes with the letter “t.” That turns out to be especially hard for kids. Let’s start with the easier tasks and work our way to this tougher one.
The Visual Task in Learning to Read
Most kids find distinguishing one letter from another relatively easy. Sure, some letters are confusable because they have similar shapes (e.g., B, D, P, R) or are the mirror image of another letter (e.g., M/W, b/d). And beginning readers do indeed mix up letters that look similar, a phenomenon also observed in languages other than English. But we shouldn’t think this problem is worse than it is. The fortunate fact is that there aren’t that many letters to learn, so with some practice, kids get it (figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1. Confusable letters. Even experienced readers occasionally mistake one letter for another, a problem that can be made more likely by unusual fonts. Overall, however, distinguishing one letter from another is not the most common obstacle to learning to decode.
Source: © Jason Covich.
Learning Letter-to-Sound Mappings
Learning which sound goes with which letter seems rather obviously more challenging. As I noted, some letters do double-duty for sounds: “o” represents one sound in ton and another in tone. There are actually forty-four speech sounds used in English, so such doubling up is inevitable given that we have twenty-six letters. Worse yet, it’s not just that two sounds go with a single letter. Sometimes a single sound goes with either of two letters. For example “y” in the middle of words often sounds like “i” as in RHYME.
If you were creating an alphabet for English from scratch, it would be sensible to create forty-four letters and match each speech sound with one letter. But written English, alas, was not created from scratch. Our language is a mongrel: Germanic origins, heavily influenced by Scandinavian (Norman) and French invasions, and later by the adoption of Latinate and Greek words. That’s a problem because when we borrowed words, we frequently retained the spelling conventions of the original language.
In consequence, our letter-to-sound mapping is messy. That has caused misery among generations of school children, although it has provided fodder for light rhymers:
When the English tongue we speak.
Why is break not rhymed with freak?
Will you tell me why it’s true
We say sew but likewise few?
And the maker of the verse,
Cannot rhyme his horse with worse?
Beard is not the same as heard
Cord is different from word.
Cow is cow but low is low
Shoe is never rhymed with foe.
Think of hose, dose, and lose And think of goose and yet with choose
Think of comb, tomb and bomb,
Doll and roll or home and some.
Since pay is rhymed with say
Why not paid with said I pray?
Think of blood, food and good.
Mould is not pronounced like could.
Wherefore done, but gone and lone—
Is there any reason known?
To sum up all, it seems to me
Sound and letters don’t agree
And yet things are not as bad as you might first think. English pronunciation looks more consistent when we take context into account. A well-known example of the anything-goes character of English spelling is the invented word “ghoti,” to be pronounced FISH—provided one pronounces GH as in the word “enough,” O as in the word “women,” and TI as in the word “motion.” Cute, but there’s a reason most would pronounce “ghoti” as GOATEE. The context of each letter matters. When “gh” appears at the start of a word, it’s pronounced as a hard g (e.g., GHASTLY, GHOST). In the middle of a word, it’s silent (e.g., DAUGHTER, TAUGHT). It’s pronounced as F only at the end of a word (LAUGH, TOUGH).
In fact, researchers have found that consonants at the start or end of single-syllable words are pronounced consistently about 90 percent of the time. Vowels in the middle of single-syllable words are pronounced consistently only 60 percent of the time, but when the vowel is an exception, the final consonant frequently helps to determine the pronunciation. So, for example, the vowel string “oo” is usually pronounced as in the word BOOT, but sometimes it’s pronounced as in the word BOOK. It turns out that “oo” has the latter pronunciation only when it’s followed by “k” or “r” (BOOK, BROOK, CROOK, SHOOK, POOR, DOOR, FLOOR).
There’s another reason to take heart about the seemingly crazy pronunciation of English words. Many words that break pronunciation rules are very common. “Gone,” “give,” are,” “were,” and “done” all break a rule: when a word ends with “e,” the vowel sound is long. (Hence, “give” should rhyme with HIVE.) Although these words break the rule, they appear so commonly they are good candidates simply to be memorized as exceptions.
So there’s no doubt that learning the mapping between letters and sounds is a challenge, but that’s not the aspect of learning to read that most often gives kids trouble. The sticking point is the hearing of the speech sounds. Let’s look at why that’s so hard.
Learning to Hear Speech Sounds
What sound do you associate with the letter “p”? You might think of it as PUH—that’s what parents often tell children—but that’s two sounds: the sound of the letter “p” and then a vowel sound after it, UH. The sound associated with the letter “p” is actually just a plosion of air—your vocal chords don’t vibrate at all. In fact, that’s the same plosion of air you make for the letter “b.” The only difference is that when you say BEE, your vocal chords vibrate to make the vowel sound at the same time you make the plosion of air, whereas when you say PEE, the vocal chords start to vibrate only about .04 seconds after the plosion. Yup. The difference between “p” and “b” hinges on this .04 second difference. So asking, “What sound does the letter ‘p’ make?” is nonsensical. The very definition of the sound depends on its relationship to neighboring sounds. It’s actually impossible to say P in isolation.
This problem—the difficulty of isolating speech sounds—is even worse than that. Individual speech sounds also vary depending on the surrounding context. Try this. Put your hand in front of your mouth and say POT. You feel the puff of air when you say the P. Now do the same thing saying SPOT. The puff is stronger for POT than SPOT. So we talk about “the sound the letter ‘p’ makes” as if there is one sound associated with “p,” but that’s an abstraction, an ideal.
We’re not done yet. Understanding where one word ends and another begins is important for reading—you need to know which sounds are supposed to clump together to form a word. But kids don’t hear individual words as well as adults do. In a standard test of this ability, you give the child a short sentence to keep in mind—say, “I like yellow bananas.” You give him a small basket of blocks and ask him to arrange a line of them, one block for each word in the sentence. There’s no guarantee that the child will pick four blocks for the sentence. It might be three, or five, or seve
n. He is just not sure where words begin and end (figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2. Visual representation of a sentence. The author is saying, “We’re having bacon for breakfast.” Time moves left to right, and the vertical axis shows sound intensity. When people speak, there are not clean breaks between each word, which is probably why children have trouble knowing where words begin and end.
Source: © Daniel Willingham.
Children’s ability to hear individual speech sounds can be tested in different ways. They might be asked to name the sound at the beginning of a word. They might be asked if two words begin with the same sound or end with the same sound. In more challenging tasks, they might be asked to change a word by adding, removing, or manipulating sounds, for example, “If I took the word TOP and added a SSSS at the beginning, what word would it make?”
If reading is a code between written symbols and speech sounds, it’s going to be hard to learn the code if you can’t hear those sounds. Lots of research indicates that this reasonable supposition is right. Children who have trouble learning to read often have difficulty hearing individual speech sounds. At the other end of the spectrum, children who more or less teach themselves to read turn out to hear them easily. This relationship between the ability to hear speech sounds and reading is not unique to learning to read English—you see it across languages.
So we have our first clue about how we can help kids become good readers: help them with this auditory challenge.
The Role of Knowledge in Comprehension
So far, I have discussed decoding and reading as though they were synonyms, but obviously there’s more to reading than sounding out words. A child might read aloud, “the farmer in the dell,” and perhaps recognize the phrase from the song, but if he doesn’t know that a dell is a small valley, he’s not fully understanding the meaning of what he’s read. It’s equally obvious that in order to understand, a reader must use syntactic rules that relate words to one another. Syntactic rules determine the difference in meaning between, “Dan wished he had sung better,” and, “He wished Dan had sung better”—same words, slightly different order, quite different meanings.
We’ll skip discussing the mental processes that allow us to understand the meaning of individual words like “farmer” and “in,” as well as the mental processes that assign syntactic roles to individual words so that they are connected into a sentence. Fascinating as these processes are, they usually pose few problems to young readers, or when they do, it’s for easily appreciated reasons. For example, a reader won’t understand a text that uses unfamiliar vocabulary (“This class needs realia”) or syntax so complex it’s hard to unravel (e.g. “The dog that the man whom the cat saw kicked yelped”). When the former happens, you look the word up. When the latter happens, you complain of poor writing.
Building Meaning across Sentences
Processes of reading comprehension that go beyond the individual word and sentence are less obvious. There must be some way that we can make meaning across sentences—something akin to the way syntax connects meaning across words. For example, consider these two sentences: “The octogenarian scientist approached the podium to collect his Nobel prize, head down, embarrassed by the applause. He chuckled softly to himself.” To understand this brief text, we must recognize that “he” in the second sentence and “the octogenarian scientist” from the first sentence refer to the same person. We must also understand that the chuckling in the second sentence is directly related to the information provided in the first sentence; the information explains why he was chuckling. How do we connect ideas from the sentence we’re currently reading to something we read earlier?
The answer rests on a distinction between given and new information. Given information is stuff that you have already been told in the text. New information is stuff you haven’t. Most writing alternates between the two: you are reminded of something you were already told, and then you’re told something new. Then something old again, then something new.
For example, suppose you read, “Some beer is in the car trunk. The beer is warm.” In the second sentence, the reference to “the beer” is the given information. The given information directs your attention to an idea from an earlier sentence. Ah, you think, we’re talking about the beer again. Once you’ve focused on that idea, the new information in the sentence provides something to add, and you connect it to the given information. So you will connect “warm” in the second sentence to “the beer” from the first sentence (figure 1.3).
Figure 1.3. How sentences are connected. At left is a cartoon version of the formal way that a psychologist would diagram your understanding of the two sentences in the text. When you read “the beer is warm,” you look for some overlap between this sentence and the ideas in the one you had already read. When you find the overlap (the reference to “beer”), that tells you it’s a way to connect the two sentences. The connection is shown at right.
Source: © Daniel Willingham.
This given-new principle is powerful enough that it’s jarring to read prose that violates it. For example, suppose you read: “Some beer is in the car trunk. The beer is warm. The beer is not cold.” The third sentence has given information (the beer) that doesn’t add anything new; if you know it’s warm, obviously it’s not cold. That’s so odd that you might struggle to find a way to interpret the third sentence so that it does tell you something new. (Perhaps the repetition is meant to signal that the beer was supposed to be cold.) Likewise, it sounds very strange to read a sentence that doesn’t mention any given information, as in this example: “Some beer is in the car trunk. Deciduous trees lose their leaves in the fall.” You have no way to connect the second sentence to what you’ve read so far. That’s what makes it a non sequitur.
This type of connection is important but pretty limited. I tell you something about beer; then I tell you another fact about the beer. That’s fine as far as it goes; sometimes I want to tell you several things about beer (or whatever else), so the beer is the given, and I keep telling you new things about it.
More common, however, are causal connections. For example, consider these two sentences: “Trisha spilled her coffee. Dan jumped from his chair to get a rag.” I’m sure the second sentence did not feel like a non sequitur to you; you easily connected them. But wait a minute. If connections happen when there is given and new information, where is the “given” information in the second sentence? Where did I repeat something I already told you?
The given information is not really in the text. It’s in your head. You inferred it. You know that spilled coffee makes a mess. You know that when a mess is made, people usually clean it, and often do so immediately. You know that rags are often used to clean messes.
Now the writer could have included all of this information in the text. He could have written, “Trisha spilled her coffee. The coffee made a mess on the floor. Dan wanted to clean the mess. Dan had rags in the kitchen that he used for cleaning. Dan jumped from his chair to get a rag.” In this version, the given information is made explicit, but the reason that writers (and speakers) omit information is plain: if you didn’t omit stuff that the reader knows anyway, simple communication would be terribly boring.
The author can’t include every last bit of information that’s needed to make her writing comprehensible lest she tell the reader things he already knows. But then again, every time she elects to leave out some information, she’s gambling. She’s assuming that the reader has the omitted information in memory. What if the writer is wrong? Then the reader will not be able to connect the sentences and comprehension will fail. That’s what happens when you start to read an article on some unfamiliar technical subject: it’s written for an audience with a lot of knowledge you lack.
But comprehension doesn’t always fail. Sometimes you can deduce the missing information from the context. Reading researcher Walter Kintsch offered this example: “Connors used Kevlar sails because he expected little wind.” All I know about Kevlar
is that it’s some sort of fabric. I sure didn’t know that it is used for sails, but that’s easy to infer from the context, right? So what’s the problem with reading this sentence? (See figure 1.4.) No problem. In fact, that’s one of the great pleasures of reading. You learn new things, for example, that sails can be made of Kevlar. But figuring things out in this way amounts to problem solving and solving problems takes time and mental effort. It’s not just that you have to think about what “Kevlar” might mean; it’s also that figuring that out interrupts the flow of the text in which you find it. You may lose the thread of the argument or story. A bit of this sort of problem solving is satisfying, even fun. Too much of it makes reading slow and difficult.
Figure 1.4. Context resolves ambiguity. This sign assumes a certain amount of background knowledge that is left unstated. For what are you to check your zipper? Should I check all zippers on my person, even the zipper on my briefcase? The ambiguity is resolved by the context: this sign appeared on the exit door of a men’s bathroom.
Source: © Daniel Willingham.
Just how much unknown stuff can a text have in it before a reader will declare, “Mental overload!” and call it quits? That surely varies depending on the reader’s attitude toward reading and motivation to understand that particular text. Still, studies have measured readers’ tolerance of unfamiliar vocabulary and have estimated that readers need to know about 98 percent of the words for comfortable comprehension. That may sound high, but bear in mind that the paragraph you’re reading now has about seventy-five unique words. So 98 percent familiarity means that this and every other paragraph like it would have one or two words you don’t know. That’s a lot.