[senco-forum] Re: SP is boring

The question of how 80% of children are able to read by the age of 6 in spite of the fact that they have not had the benefit of being taught SP, is a very interesting one. I would not talk about 4 years olds because I support the view that they should be singing, dancing, drawing and  playing in nursery classes and not enduring formally structured teaching sessions.

It is widely accepted that we have the capacity to store about 4000 words in our visual memories as discrete visual entities. The phonics code has 44 graphemes whose association with particular phonemes have to learned to become 'phonemically literate'  (I just made that term up!).  Assimilating the ten words cat, dog, mother, baby, teacher, child, school, sheep, cow and snake provides children with an internalised reference library of about half of all of the graphemes in the code.  It should be quite easily possible to produce a very short list of all of the faily simple words which would be needed to provide a complete, internal reference library for all grapheme/phoneme relationships and I doubt whether this list would be more than say, 30 words.  Given that undoubted fact, where is the mystery in how 80% of children become phonemically literate by the age of 6 without the benefit of dedicated SP instruction?  I would have thought that it would be a much greater mystery if they didn't!  

I think this is a faily logical explanation which goes a long to explain how 80% of children crack the reading code by age 6 where they are taught by the now infamous ' mix of methods' or worse still, the 'whole word' approach.  I would love to read a reasoned challenge to this propostion. I do not pretend howver,  that it explains why about 20% of children with no specific learning disability fail either to assimilate a sufficiently large sight vocabulary or to deduce the code from those that they do assimilate. It has been my experience that a very significant proportion of this latter group have poor short term visual memory and that this could be at least part of the explanation.

Eddie C.