English is extremely complex:
- Our alphabet letters to sounds
- It's not one language it comes from many other languages and moulds into English from Latin, German, French etc.
- There are 12 ways to make the sh sound
- While all words are speech written down, they aren't kiwi speech. The spelling is the same although the way we pronounce it in the 21st century is constantly changing
- Because it has so many strands there are no rules that apply everywhere
- It is a pattern based language
The complexity is not what makes it difficult. The thing that makes it difficult is that we do not have a reading centre in the brain - we create this centre. Some of us create this centre in different places in our brain (speech and language vs visual area) - which is what creates difficulty for some learners.
3 layers of skill in learning to decode:
The first layer - frog f r o g when you say a word we blend the sounds together. Students need to learn that it is four different things our mouths do and then how to blend it all together.
Second layer - if I know that I can split these words into onset (cluster at the beginning) and rhyme (vowel and what comes after) then I can make connections to mix and match the units of language. I can generate so many words by doing this. And I can add a prefix to this as well. This is 2/4 of the language covered.
Third layer - the self teaching principle - the student figures out the words by looking at it breaking it into words and understanding the spelling pattern. For example shout - sh and t make sense so the ou must make the ou sound. Teachers can not teach every word, students need to make meaning for themselves.
Visual thinking - focus on the beginning of words and the visual features.
What we now know about good readers - youtube video "how the brain reads" (look it up). Students see the sounds (not the letters) and it is attached in the brain in the same pathway as when they hear the sound.
Consequences of a visual approach:
- comprehension is compromised
- poor spelling
- unable to develop vocab through reading
Free assessment tool - agilitywithsound.co.nz - to support teachers to understand how students are making meaning of words.
Begin with how words work!
- An apps for older students who struggle (word chain app on iPads). Learning that the way I hear sounds when they come out of my mouth is in the same order as the way that the sounds are written down. Teach the skills but not how to blend the sounds.
- Word mat - Where's Wally page - find the words that have the same patterns. Start with the vowel and then add on the front letter. This is looking at word families. We need to teach students to chunk right from the start.
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