[senco-forum] Reading

Mary Kelly <mary.kelly4 at ntlworld.com> wrote: My understanding is that (for a reader who is encountering a word that is
relatively new to him/her) the phoneme (or possibly the motor memory of the
movement needed to say the phoneme) for the first letter (or letter group)
within the syllable has to be held in working memory while the next is
decoded, then that has to be held there and so on, until the syllable is
assembled and blended. Then the syllable has to be held there while the next
syllable is decoded, and the next, until all the syllables have been decoded
and can be assembled into the word.
In other words, you can only process what you have in working memory. Items
from long-term memory have to be fetched to working memory for processing.

What I am speculating about is whether this is actually a necessary part of the decoding/blending process?  I am coming from my observations of my poorest 'blenders'.  These are the children who sound out each grapheme, then, LOOK AWAY and try to blend the sound sequence from memory alone.  This, to me, is analogous to a skilled reader decoding the syllable sequence of an unknown, complex multisyllable word (one of the constituents of shampoo, for example!) and then attempting to reproduce the syllable sequence from memory alone.  Unless one has a very good memory, it can't be done without several 're-readings'  of the word.  

Is this a 'working memory' task, or am I completely adrift in my understanding?  If it is 'working memory', then my theory is that the 'memorising' of the sound sequence is unnecessary as it can be rehearsed and consolidated by re-reading the sequence.

A good hunt around the web found this snippet:

"Resnick and Beck (1976) note that an important
feature of blending instruction is merging different
sounds successively—that is, /m/, /me/, /met/. Teachers
should avoid using sequences in which the merging
does not occur until each sound has been produced,
such as /m/, /e/, /t/, /met/. Among the reasons that
successive blending is preferable is that it avoids the
need to keep a string of isolated sounds in memory."

"The Role of Decoding in Learning to Read" Beck & Juel (2002?)

(http://www.scholastic.com/dodea/Module_2/resources/dodea_m2_pa_roledecod.pdf)

Maggie

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