[senco-forum] Re: How many rules?

'So what is the most efficient way to grasp literacy?'

Naturally.  

You're quite wrong about it being impossible to learn to read and write without being taught how they work.  Naturals are taught only the very basics (and some can self-teach without any direct instruction) - and then off they go.  They make their own generalisations about how letter combinations might work, without being told.  So seeing the digraph 'ar' behaving similarly in two words prompts a tentative generalisation, which gets tested next time 'ar' comes up.  And in time, we might notice that it isn't entirely consistent in sound when prefixed with 'w'.  (We might not notice this, but still arrive at a consistent recognition of how to pronounce and spell words that start 'war'.)

I count myself as a lucky natural in this respect - after Janet and John, there wasn't much, if any, explicit teaching - just some corrections while the system refined itself.  And my son, given the tools only of the initial sounds of the letters, gaily read at 3 and carried on at his own pace.  One daughter with severe dysarthria learned to read through word recognition (mainly because she couldn't articulate many individual sounds, so phonics...was tough).  Second daughter, not a natural, only just survived 'whole books' and was saved by her intelligence and diligence.

I don't think (and neither do you) that it's a case of learning 180-ish correspondences OR learning 250,000 words as discrete entities. Knowledge in both informs and supports the other.  Eddie (and I) would vouch for the improvement brought about in reading fluency for some children using his program, which doesn't have a correspondence in sight.  Lots of users will say the same.  I don't think that this improvement is brought about entirely by learning to recognise words as individual units - my observation suggests that the improvers are generalising, making connections and recognising rules - without direct instruction.

So trust me, there is an extremely efficient way to grasp literacy, but you probably need the gene....

Biff
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Maggie Downie 
  To: Biff Crabbe ; Philip MacMillan ; Amanda ; Phil ; senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk 
  Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 10:41 PM
  Subject: Re: [senco-forum] Re: How many rules?

  Biff Crabbe <ba at biffc.vispa.com> wrote:
    Not a piece of research published in a learned journal, but personally I'd
    recommend Bill Bryson's 'Mother Tongue' as an excellent and eminently
    readable book about the English language. Populist rubbish in some circles
    I'm sure.

    It's apparently encouraging that the number of 'rules' in English is finite,
    albeit with more exceptions to rules than is comfortable. But if you're
    having to learn how to read and spell via those rules, you're probably not
    showing promise of being a 'natural'. 

    I'm not quite following your reasoning here, Biff.  How can one learn to read and write *without* being taught how reading and writing 'work' (i.e, the 'rules', if you insist on being rule bound)?  Reading is not a 'natural' process, therefore no-one can be 'a natural' at it...

    Surely, those who are slower to learn have a far better chance of learning 180ish 'correspondences', and how to apply them to decode & blend words, than they do of learning 250,000 words as discrete entities?  

    Those people lucky enough to just
    learn to read and spell fluently without particular difficulty very often
    can't articulate the rules, or even recognise that there is a rule governing
    something that they know how to do (as Jean has attested).

    So while we might be comforted by the finite number of rules to be learned,
    we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that those who need to learn in this way
    are already at a comparative disadvantage. And it's certainly not the most
    efficient way to grasp literacy.

    So, what is the most efficient way to 'grasp literacy'?

  Maggie

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