This course is for teachers to learn why some children have so much difficulty with reading and writing, often called 'dyslexia', and to learn more about best practice in teaching literacy to all in light of recent scientific discoveries. Participation in or completion of this online course will not confer academic credit for University of London programmes
1.3 Models of reading – Part 1
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From the course by University of London
Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing
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From the lesson
An overview
Writing systems; models of reading acquisition (the ‘decoding’ and ‘direct’ paths); the importance of automatization; bilingualism
Meet the Instructors
Dr Jenny Thomson
Dr Vincent Goetry
So I'm going to talk about models of reading.
But before that, I would like to make a clear distinction between oral
language acquisition and written language acquisition.
In most cases, if you put a baby in a surrounding where people
are talking around the baby and other babies, other children, etc,
in most cases, that child is going
to learn the oral language quite naturally, so to speak,
by imitation and also because the child has some
modules in her brain which will allow, for example,
to deduce that the subject comes before the verb,
which comes before the complement in the sentence.
And no one will have to explain that explicitly to the child.
He will deduce it by imitation and by
the reliance on these modules which are in his or her head.
Now, for the written language acquisition, this is completely different.
You can put a child in a library for as long as you want,
unless there is an intervention from someone of the outside world,
let's say a teacher, or a parent, or a sibling who is older,
the child is not going to learn to read and write spontaneously.
And the reason is that there is no module, there is no pre-programmed
module in the brain for the acquisition of written language.
I will insist on this in this talk because when the child learns to read and
write, he will have to develop billions of new connections in
the brain which are not there before the child learns to read and write.
Now let's turn to the model of acquisition of reading development,
which I'm going to rely on the model of Uta Frith, which was developed some time ago,
but it's still used in most of the research devoted to reading
development in children.
It is a model in three stages: the LOGOGRAPHIC stage,
the ALPHABETIC stage, and the ORTHOGRAPHIC stage,
which I'm going to describe in turn.
The logographic stage is the stage where
the child is going to recognize some words
but as logos, as pictures,
because of the silent visual traits of these logos.
This is often a moment where the parents are very happy because
suppose the parent is driving with a child and the child said,
'mommy daddy, there is a stop sign there so you need to stop'.
And the parent thinks, 'Oh wow, my child can read.
This is tremendous'.
Actually, the child doesn't really read.
If you look at the logos here, say, take Coca-Cola,
if you write Caco-Calo instead of Coca-Cola,
the child will not perceive the difference.
At this stage the child doesn't make any relationship between letters and
sounds, because he still doesn't know the letters and
the correspondences between the letters and sounds;
he's only guessing, he's only recognizing
the word because of the silent visual features.
There are two prerequisites to get to the next stage, the alphabetic stage.
The first one is that the child needs to become aware
that words can be divided into smaller units called phonemes.
And we are going to come back to this phonemic awareness development
at length during the course.
So for example, a word like 'tap'
can be divided on to three small units, three phonemes:
't', 'a', 'p' That's the first prerequisite.
The second prerequisite is that the child needs to understand how
the spoken language is related to the written language,
and in alphabetical languages like English, this correspondence happens
at the level of the correspondence between phonemes and graphemes.
So the child needs to understand that the word 'tap'
consisting in three little sounds, three phonemes,
't', 'a', 'p', can be represented in written,
with three letters which are t, a and p.
So this is the second prerequisite,
it's the understanding of the alphabetical principle.
The principle which relate(s) the spoken language to the written language.
Once the child has grasped,
developed phonological awareness and the understanding of the alphabetical
principle, he will be able to develop recoding abilities.
'Recoding' can sound a little bit difficult word but
it's really says what it's meant to say.
The child is going to pass from one modality to the other, so
he's going to recode visual stimuli,
the written word, into auditory stimuli, for example saying
the word in his head or saying the word aloud if he is asked to.
And for spelling it's the other way around.
The child will hear a word, for example,
a dictated word, or he will say the word in his head with
his inner voice, so this is the auditory modality and he will pass
onto the visual modality, which means seeing the word as he will write it.
This will lead to the development of the first
path to reading, which is the decoding ability, the decoding route.
It has several names:
the phonological recoding route.
What is important to understand about this route, is that it is generative.
As long as the child knows the correspondences
between the graphemes and the phonemes, he or
she will be able to read any string of letters.
Then, with repetition the child will see words like 'school',
and 'mommy' and 'daddy', etc several times.
And so there will be a progressive memorization of the words, of
what we call the orthographic representation of the word
in the visual modality and the phonological representation of the word
in the auditory modality with the repetition.
So, let's say the child see the word 'school' for the 10th time (or the) 20th time,
he will have encoded the orthographic features of that word so
that after a certain amount of repetition,
he will not have to use the phonological route anymore,
and he will be able to have a direct access to the orthographic
representation of the word when he or she sees it on the page
and activate the phonological representation corresponding to
that word so that he or she can pronounce the word very quickly and
very accurately without relying on the phonological route.
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