Last night I watched the Academy Award winning
movie The Imitation Game, which
recounts the story of how a group of British mathematicians and cryptographers,
led by the enigmatic genius Alan Turing, broke the Nazi “Enigma” code for
transmitting military messages and by doing so shortened World War II by two
years saving millions of lives.
The story is a compelling one, not only as a
sort of detective story, but also as a very human story of perseverance,
passion, heroism and broken lives. As a literacy specialist, though, one
message from the film jumped out in bas relief. The elusive code
was broken only when the codebreakers realized that the messages followed a
discernible pattern. Once the pattern was discovered, in this case the Nazi
habit of sending a 6 AM weather report each day and ending each message with
“Heil Hitler”, the rudimentary computer that Turing designed was able to
generalize to a complete translation of the code. This is essentially what our
5 and 6 year old children do every day – generalize from a few known meaningful elements
to break the alphabetic code and come to be fluent readers.
I bolded the word “meaningful” above, because I
wish to emphasize that it is meaningful encounters with print that allows
children to learn to decode. It is not enough to teach children to match
letters to sounds in abstract “phonics” lessons. In order to activate the
skilled “code breaking” abilities that all children have, we must present the
code in the context of meaningful language. Children learn to speak by
encountering oral language in real world contexts, so to will they learn to
decode when they are presented with meaningful reading contexts.
Let me be clear about this. I am not saying
that children don’t need instruction in phonics. I am saying that the best
phonics instruction is embedded in meaningful language interactions, because
these meaningful language interactions allow students to generalize the rules
of how language works. The influential literacy researcher, blogger and
emeritus professor Tim Shanahan puts it this way:
Learning
to read is a multidimensional pursuit. Lots of things have to happen
simultaneously. That’s why in my scheme teachers are always teaching words
(decoding and meaning), fluency, comprehension, and writing—not one after
the other but simultaneously. Kids who are learning to decode should also
be learning the cadences of text and how to think about what they read.
All at the same time.
Regular readers of this blog know that Shanahan
and I don’t always agree, but we are in agreement here. Of course, doing all
this instruction “at the same time” is a daunting task for the teacher. What
does this instruction look like? Here are a few ideas.
The Name Chart – A Name Chart is simply a chart listing the first names of
every child in the class in alphabetical order that is hung in the classroom
where every child can see it. Since children are highly motivated to learn the
names of their classmates, the name chart becomes a good place for children to
make connections about beginning consonant sounds in words. During a shared
reading or writing experience, teachers can refer children to the name chart to
help students decode a word. For example, if the students encounter the word
“shout” in their reading, the teacher can help them decode the word by pointing
to the name chart to show that “shout” starts the same as their classmate’s
name “Shannon.”
Interactive Writing – Interactive writing or shared pen is a language activity that
involves the teacher and children in constructing meaningful messages, while
also working on sound symbol relationships. At a “Morning Meeting” or following
a class read aloud the teacher leads the children in a writing activity on
chart paper for all to see. The teacher does the bulk of the writing, but
shares the pen with students who get to practice their growing phonics
knowledge by matching the sounds of the words they wish to write with the
letters needed to write it. For more on interactive writing see Reading Rockets here.
Shared Reading – In shared reading teachers use a “big book” or poem written
on chart paper to lead the children in reading. Children join in the reading
with the teacher’s support and the structure allows the teacher to provide
instruction in decoding words in a real language context. Reading Rockets has a
good description of Shared Reading here.
Cut Up Sentences – Children can practice their growing phonics understanding and
sight words through cut up sentences. With teacher assistance, students
generate a sentence based on a story they have read or an experience they have
had. The teacher (or students) writes the sentence on a sentence strip and
reads it with the student. The teacher then cuts up the sentence into separate
words and the students are challenged to put it back together. Again a
meaningful context forms the basis of a decoding lesson.
Prompting at Point of Difficulty – I have written in an earlier post about the limits of
“sounding it out” as a strategy when students encounter difficulty while
reading a word in a story. Since decoding depends not just on phonics, but also
on the structure of language and the meaning of the story, skilled teachers use
prompts like “Does that sound right?” Does that make sense?” and “Does that
look right?” to help students coordinate all the cues available to them as they
try to decode a novel word.
Word Families – Many words are best understood not as a series of individual
letters to be “sounded out”, but as groupings of letters to be thought of as a
whole. Research has shown that students can discern these patterns and use them
for more efficient decoding. Word families like –ight words are best taught as
families with an onset and rime. The word “flight” is made up of the onset “fl”
and the rime “ight.” Teaching students to look for these patterns and use words
that they already know to generalize to words with like patterns makes decoding
more efficient and reading more fluent.
Think Aloud – Often just talking about words and the strategies that
skilled readers use to decode can be helpful to students. I like to use think
alouds when talking about particularly knotty problems in decoding such as
silent letters. Students who over-rely on “sounding it out” may encounter
difficulty with a word like “sign.” I like to “think aloud” with the students
here. Suppose the students encounter the sentence, “Mom put her finger to her
mouth and gave me the sign to be quiet.” In this context I would talk about how
the word “sign” comes from the word “signal” and that in English spelling we
often keep letters that are silent to help us understand the meaning. So while
the letter “g” in “sign” is silent, it is still helpful because it reminds us
that this word means something like “signal.” Sharing knowledge and insights
about words can help children not only comprehend, but also decode.
Like the cryptographers in The Imitation Game,
children have a problem to solve when they encounter new and novel words. The
best way to help them solve the problem is to provide instruction that is both
targeted and in a meaningful context.
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