By Sara Finegan
Several people have asked me recently which program I recommend to teach kids the mechanics of reading: decoding and phonemic awareness. I’m having a hard time answering.
My problem isn’t choosing between a variety of programs, or determining which is the most successful at helping kids learn to decode the letters and their sounds.
My problem is that I’m not convinced that decoding is as important as everyone seems to think it is. Before you start throwing rocks at me, let me explain.
If you spend any time at all thinking about how you read, you are undoubtedly going to realize that you actually use your phonemic skills to decode words less than 10% of the time. Maybe less than 5%. I did a little survey of myself (it was fun, being both the subject and the observer!) and discovered that in 847 pages, I only had to decode one word.
How can this be? Isn’t the foundation of reading the ability to put the letter sounds together to form actual words?
Not…..really. It may be so at the beginning, but I’m wondering if it isn’t a really limited period of time in the life of an emergent reader.
What do readers do, really, at all but the primer stage?
We recognize words.
My theory, and it is untested and will not necessarily be particularly popular among reading researchers, is that sight words are more important than decoding skills. I think that good readers are people who recognize words when they see them. I think that the difference between any level of reading in elementary school through middle school has more to do the expansion of one’s personal bank of sight words than anything else. The more words we can recognize and know, the more words we can read.
Don’t get me wrong: I still spend time with my students on basic phonemic skills. I don’t allow people to leave my class without knowing the basics, more or less. But we spend a lot more time on word recognition, which we work on in a variety of ways. Much of what we do is outlined in the Reading Category on our other blog, The Demanding Classroom (www.thedemandingclassroom.com).
Over the years, I’ve had numerous students enter my classroom in the fourth grade and up who still do not know their vowel sounds and blends, and are not able to decode any words that have more than one syllable. These students have been given intensive interventions, either in self-contained classrooms or in pull-out sessions in the Resource Room, but despite at least four years of work, still have not been able to learn basic decoding skills.
Now, my school’s Resource Specialist is a gem among gems, an incredibly talented teacher with endless patience and know-how. Teachers in the primary level of our self-contained classroom at our school had more training than I in reading instruction, and a good many more years of experience. If they couldn’t get a child to competent decoding levels, there isn’t a lot I can do.
It has seemed like focusing intensively on the phonemic skills was not working. I’ve come to the conclusion that in cases such as these, we need to approach the reading from another angle, and the angle that seems to have the most success is addressing word recognition and reading fluency.
In the coming weeks, I’ll try to post some more about what we do, and why. In the meantime, check out The Demanding Classroom!
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