Sight vocabulary

[jotham]

I am not convinced that memorising words is a daunting task for children unless they have some disability such as Irlen Syndrome or poor short term memory function. About 80% of children are competent readers by the age of 7 whether they have been formally taught phonics or not.

Well, you may be right about that — I'm not sure. Nevertheless, the problems usually get pronounced in about third grade, when reading becomes more complex and a greater number of words renders mere memorization inadequate. With whole-language, students might have 4,000 words in their reading lexicon, for example, and no more without formal exposure — but with phonics, some 25,000 words could be at their disposal without needing to be formally taught.
As regarding reading disabilities, Samuel Blumenthal and others believe that whole-language causes dyslexia and similar disabilities in otherwise bright children.
http://www.sntp.net/education/look_say_3.htm

[Stephen Jones]

The idea of teaching children to read by having them remember the shape of whole words, irrespective of their sound, is absurd. It's having all the disadvantages of the ideograph system with none of the advantages.

It would be nice to see some modern theoretical justification of the concept of sight vocabulary as eddie1 has described it. The modular theory of the brain's organization is now almost universally accepted, but I don't recollect reading any descriptions of there being a specific module for the memorization of written words.

Indeed I doubt if our ability to recognize a whole word when reading is the result of the whole shape being memorized.

[Sally Olsen]

It has been a long time since my Special Education in Reading courses but as I remember we learn to chunk together ideas or letters or numbers so that we can go more quickly. Thus the telephone numbers in groups of three and four.

We used to outline words for kids to show them the shape of words by making a box around the word in another colour from the background. The idea was to show them that some letters go up and others go down, some go left and some go right - i.e. b and d, q and p. Of course, it depends on the script you are using and we used to teach different types of script as well. I think that I remember a reading series that used this method.

We also traced letters in sand, or on sandpaper and then on paper in the Frostig method. This led to learning letters through your fingers and led naturally to learning to type or now to keyboard which helped a lot of children. As I remember it though, it was just the names of the letters, not the sounds.

Then there was the Orton=Gillingham method which is still popular in Vancouver. Lots and lots of phonics.

I found it hard to use most of these methods in other countries to teach English though because the students just don't know the names of things in English. If you are going to teach the sound of "a" and you want to use the word "apple" and a picture of an apple for a memory aid, then you have to teach them apple orally first. So it is an extra step for students who don't speak English or for me in learning, say Mongolian. Then of course, you have to deal with the four other sounds of "a" at least in English. I just never had the luxury of time to do that.

By the way, it was fourth grade where the difficulties came for me because the print in the books got smaller and they didn't have as many pictures which gave you good clues as to what the story was about. I could often guess what was going to happen from the pictures so could answer the comprehension questions my teacher asked. In grade four I just asked the other students about their ideas of what they read which of course got me in a lot of trouble for talking in class.

[Lorikeet]

It is my understanding that the pendulum for native-speaker reading instruction has swung back to phonics again. I base this on some articles I read in a national teachers' magazine. I remember when my kids (now 20 and 23) were in first grade and I was helping out the teacher. She took out some phonics books for me to use with some students who were having trouble decoding the system. She explained she had retrieved them from the garbage when the "whole language" thing went into effect, and she had to hide them whenever she was evaluated .

In the meantime, my kids learned how to read when they were three, because, as it turns out, I read to them a lot and played linguistic sound and word games without knowing what I was doing. I think recent research has shown that word games, rhyming, etc, are helpful in helping students learn how to read.

[eddie1]

Wheher you feel that 'phonics' or 'whole word' is the most appropriate strategy for teaching reading is reallyonly relevant where the initial teachig of reading is under discussion.

It is less important when discussing a remedial approach for older children or for esl children. A child learns to read initially in infancy when certain developmental factors are in play. A teenager who has failed to learn to read is concurrently dealing with other developmental issues whilst still trying to learn to read and different strategies are called for.

I am surprised that so many people find the notion of 'sight vocabulary' such a novel concept. Games, reading to children are as important now as they always were but they cannot ensure that a child will learn to read. These strategies will not overcome specific learning difficulties such as some of the dyslexic traits, Irlen Syndrome, Short Term Memory deficit etc

I take the view that if a child aged say 9+ has failed to learn to read and has none of the dyslexic traits but does have a significant short term memory deficit, his or her sight vocabulary can be proactively primed to ensure that it becomes a positive primary reading reference mechanism. Anyone who has difficulty with idea that they have a fund of words in their visual memory which allows them to read most words in a piece of text without letter by letter decoding will understandably reject this idea.


Eddie

[Stephen Jones]

I have difficulty with the idea that the shape of the word as a graphic is stored in memory. I believe what is stored in memory is the phonic combination. This may be of little importance as far as the methodology goes.

[Sally Olsen]

Then how do the Chinese learn to read? Don't they have to learn the shape of the character which has no reference to sound?

As I was trying to read some of Halliday which I find really hard, I was trying to figure out what made it hard for me. Abstract ideas have always been difficult for me, nominalizations and sentence structures which seems to put other ideas first. I have a hard time reading fluffyhamster's thoughts because he puts so many bracketed ideas in one sentence. This is not a criticizm by the way, just an observation of my difficulties with reading. I had to read eddie1's "sight vocabulary can be proactively primed to ensure that it becomes a positive primary reading reference mechanism" four times to understand. The alliteration of the "p's" distracted me the first two times. I had to break down each word into a picture before I could put them together. Then I turn that into something that is meaningful for me - if you teach older student who are having trouble reading to memorize words by themselves as pictures then they can use it effectively in their reading.

I think this method is basically what the Autoskills program on the computer does for students and is useful for beginners or people of any age who can't read.

There does come a point though that it would be useful to break down a new word into sounds, especially the long ones. Perhaps with enough sight words under your belt you could figure it out by comparing it to the sight words that you know.

[eddie1]

Stephen says 'I have difficulty with the idea that the shape of the word as a graphic is stored in memory. I believe what is stored in memory is the phonic combination. This may be of little importance as far as the methodology goes.'

Surely you must concede that we store images of millions of things with with no phonic combinations - I have no difficulty in accepting that there will be links between images in visual memory with auditory images in auditory memory but why should we not store discrete images of a number words which occur with very high frequency in the texts we read?
Do you really believe that we decode ever word we see, every time we see and no matter how often we see it. Does that not fly in the face of common sense? Surely our brains are much better organised than that belief would suggest.

Let me assure you that everyone (apart from esl teachers it would seem) in the field of special education with an interest in the reading process accepts the existence of a sight vocabulary. They also accept that it is limited in extent to words which occur with the highest frequencies. Not everone accepts its primacy as the reading mechanism which makes high levels of reading fluency possible. There are fundamentalists who do in act believe that every word is decoded serially,evey time it is encountered They usually offer as 'evidence' eye movement research which shows that words are scanned serially, letter by letter, but they are widely regarded as being 'on the lunatic fringe'

Eddie

[lolwhites]

Arcndocig to rcereash at an Eisglnh uiteisvrny, it deson't mttear waht oderr the ltrtees in a wrod are in; the olny irapnomtt tinhg is taht the fsirt and lsat lteerts be in the rhigt pacle. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can siltl raed it wouitht a pbelorm. Tihs is bsuceae we do not raed ervey ltteer by iletsf, but rethar the wrod as a wolhe.

Anyway, my primary teachers used phonics, but as I got older and my vocabulary widened, I stopped decoding individual letters. But I think that expecting kids to recognise words from their shape is expecting them to run before they can walk.

[Sally Olsen]

Actually, that is exactly what my second son did. He had to keep up to the first and I never saw him walking. It was straight from crawling backwards to running and falling of course.

Great example lol. Can I use it with my students?

It seems to me that there is no lunatic fringe here. Just strong intuition of how things work in your brain.

But different brains work in different ways. Just as what you might call blue, someone else might say is green, you might have learned to read by sounding out words and continue to do so very quickly.

I learned, I think, by making a picture of the object and the name that I knew orally match the shape of the letters on the page. The reason I think this now, because I didn't think it at 4 when I learned to read, is that is what I did when trying to learn the Japanese kangi characters. I saw the outside shape of them and didn't pay much attention to the middle. Some of my teachers showed me how the characters might have developed, like river and sun, and that helped me a lot. But I got into trouble when the outsides were almost the same and the insides were different. My name was a huge problem because I learned to write it on my own and didn't realize that it mattered which way you started to make the strokes. You have to write your name a lot for various documents and the bank and all those in charge kept rubbing it out and doing it "right" for me. No one could believe that I didn't know how to write my name and were too polite to show me and were concerned that a sensai would be doing it wrong.

It matters a lot for methodology because if you don't understand how complex this skill of reading is, then you will not be sympathetic when someone has difficulty doing it or provide alternative methods to learn to do it.

[Stephen Jones]

It's obvious that adults don't keep the shape of whole words as part of their sight vocabulary, and thus I am wary as to how it will be a useful intermediate strategy for children.

That adults when reading neither deconstruct each grapheme, nor have a picture of the shape of the whole word, can be seen by the fact you can add an extra letter in the middle of a word, or even repeat a short word, and the adult will read the sentence as if neither existed.

The importance of phonics can be seen in the fact that children advance much faster reading a mainly phonetic language such as Italian, than children do learning English, and that the speeds are much greater in either than in a language with ideographs like Chinese, where the goverment has to fudge the figures to get reasonable literacy stats at all (the main problem being that learners forget the ideographs, and their reading age often declines precipitously with age after they've left school).

Finally, I would still like to see a link to some modern research as to what sight vocabulary is.

[jotham]

Do you really believe that we decode ever word we see, every time we see and no matter how often we see it. Does that not fly in the face of common sense? Surely our brains are much better organised than that belief would suggest.

This isn't really a factor. We, as adults see words compositely, which causes us to read faster, eventually. I agree with what someone said earlier: for children, however, it's like learning how to leap before they step. That's why it's called Phonics First. The whole-language advocates researched and decided that since adults look at words compositely, children should be taught that way from the start. That's where the controversy arises.
I now can see that Lorikeet is right. Even as recently as 1998, the NEA seems to have been on the whole-language bandwagon, but they've changed their tune and say that both are good and that we need balance. I've been out of the US for a while, so I just remember the controversy and never knew about the final outcome, or victory.
Chinese characters can actually be broken into parts. There can be two or three simpler characters that combine in ways to make one complex character. Sometimes the left character can give cues about the pronunciation.

[jotham]

their [Chinese students] reading age often declines precipitously with age after they've left school).

Could you show me a link on that? I'm not disputing it — I'm just curious.

[lolwhites]

Lori - I originally got the text in an email. There's a link to it here:
http://www.kith.org/logos/words/upper3/VVViolent.html

However, I don't see it as an argument against phonics. I suspect that it wouldn't have made much sense if I'd come across it before becoming a fluent reader.

Interestingly, everyone's talking about letters vs the shape of the word, but what about the one skill we (should) encourage our students to use: using knowledge of the language, and the world, to make sense of the texts we come across?

[Stephen Jones]

This kind of trick, missing out the vowels, only having the first and last letter, or swapping them round, and still having text that can easily be deciphered only works with very selected texts.

Practice it with random texts from the newspapers and the results are anything but the party trick you get with the emailed versions. The link lol gives points this out.

As to how it works - that's easy. You simply decide what words that begin and end with the letters can fit in the context; if you are still stumped you look at the other letters. No different from smashing a glass vase on the floor and picking up the pieces and working out the order, and no more relevant to the study of reading, than putting together a jigsaw is to the study of optics.

Here are some random examples from today's news.

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EU vtoe set to cut rmnaoig cstos Cmsreunos cloud fnid tlevemshes pianyg mcuh lses The csot of mkinag mbiloe ponhe clals in Eoprue is set to flal slitbasaulnty wtih lwmearkas piseod to bcak panls to cap so-cllead "raminog" cgehars. The anmout plpeoe are caeghrd by laocl ponhe otarroeps for unsig teihr pnheos wilhe aabrod wulod flal by up to 75% as a ruelst of the paoorplss. The EU Pmlnraiaet is eetcxepd to bcak the cegahns, wichh wlil afcfet mroe tahn 150 mlloiin pleope aocsrs Eoupre. But the new cegahrs are not lkeliy to cmoe itno efecft utinl leatr tihs yaer.