Learning to Read and Spell Words

Abstract

Learning to read and spell words is a central part of becoming literate. During text reading, most words are processed, and skilled readers are able to do this effortlessly. How they become skilled at processing graphic cues has been the focus of our research. Findings indicate that prereaders do not acquire graphic skill by learning to read signs and labels in their environment. Rather, mastery of letters is required. Whereas prereaders use visual or context cues to identify words, as soon as children move into reading they shift to letter-sound cues. Initially, words are read by accessing remembered associations between a few letters in spellings and sounds in pronunciations. Later, when decoding skill matures, complete spellings are analyzed as phonemic symbols for pronunciations and are stored in memory. Various studies indicate that having a visual picture of speech in memory is an important part of a person's information-processing equipment. Spellings may influence how words are pronounced, what sounds people think are in words, how quickly people judge spoken word rhymes, how rapidly pronunciations change over time.Although the great debate about methods of teaching reading may be over, it is not true that all the mysteries of beginning reading instruction have been solved. There are plenty inviting attention. We know that code emphasis programs produce better beginning readers than meaning emphasis programs (Chall, 1967). However, we do not yet understand how or exactly why. There are many ways to structure phonics instruction. Sounding out and blending may or may not be taught. Segmenting words into phonemes may or may not receive attention.

Efficient Learning for the Poor: Insights from the Frontier of Cognitive Neuroscience

“…Countries teaching through phonics (for example, in Cuba) tend to emphasize reading first, with the expectation that students will write more easily once they know basic decoding. However U.S. and Latin American educators emphasize "primitive writing" as a means to learning reading (Ehri 1987(Ehri , 1995Ferreiro et al 2004). This method may help with English but its value in phonetically simple languages is unclear.…”

Changing relations between phonological processing abilities and word-level reading as children develop from beginning to skilled readers: A 5-year longitudinal study.

“…The second view is that individual differences in reading skill influence the development of subsequent individual differences in phonological processing abilities (Ehri, 1984(Ehri, , 1987Foorman et al, 1991;Morais, Alegria, & Content, 1987). Support for this view comes from poor performance on phonological tasks that has been shown by adult illiterates (Morais, Cary, Ale-gria, & Bertelson, 1979), prereaders (Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974;, and readers whose written language is nonalphabetic (Mann, 1986;Read, Zhang, Nie, & Ding, 1986).…”

Phonological Awareness: A Bridge Between Language and Literacy

“…There is, however, some inconsistency about what logographic reading is. We owe to the work of Ehri (see, e.g., Ehri, 1987) and to Stuart and Coltheart (1988) both a clear-sighted criticism of this concept and relevant evidence against the notion that children begin reading in a non phonological way. The term logographic reading has been used to cover two forms of written word recognition.…”

“…More exactly, they associate some letters, often the initial and final consonants, with sounds heard in the word's pronunciation. These associations are retrieved the next time the word is seen (see, e.g., Ehri, 1987). Ehri (1989) reports that most of the misspellings collected early in first grade include only one letter corresponding to a sound of the target word.…”