I am going to commence with some information that may be seen as controversial from the start: To pretend that reading is a natural process and that students will pick it up with little to no effort, the way so many of us educators did, is a disservice to students and their families. It is NOT a natural process and students should not have to feel “less than” when it doesn’t come to them quickly and without a lot of effort. Teachers need to be better equipped to do what needs to be done to help students unlock the code of reading. The ability to read will ensure that our students have the opportunity at a more successful life.
Language works so much differently for humans before we learn to read. The word “apple” means a tasty fruit that grows on trees. The word “dog” is a cute furry animal always begging for treats and delivering wet kisses. Words are meaningful to humans on their own, however, to a non-reader, their letters don’t mean anything.
Have you ever wondered how the spellings of the 44 or so sounds in the English language were developed? Who broke down the sounds of whole words into phonemes, the smallest units of speech? I don’t know. I am more interested in helping students acquire the necessary skills to apply those sounds to graphemes, the letters that make up sounds, and those graphemes to words. Hopefully, my students can make meaning of those words, but most likely, it will probably require much more instruction and practice to get good at it.
It must be so arbitrary to non-readers, or non-spellers, that words are made up of sounds because they hear whole words.Plus, there are far too many words in the English language just to straight-up memorize. The human brain just isn’t built to catalog the hundreds of thousands of letter groupings or even pictographs. That’s WHY we use an alphabet, graphemes that represent phonemes. This allows for the brain to recognize familiar letter strings, and these letter strings offer meaning.
Reading is driven by understanding spelling and to do that, non-readers need to first learn to break the language into units and then master the spellings of these units and then apply them accurately and efficiently to capture meaning in a text. THAT IS A TALL ORDER!
I have been a reading teacher for about 7 years now. To be honest, I’ve tried a bunch of curriculum and approaches, learned many methods, and had some really interesting conversations with teachers, educational therapists, administrators, EdTech software sales associates, and researchers. I don’t really think anyone has the absolute right answer for how to get better at teaching reading, but I do want to offer my perspective, when I can, and build upon it by taking the time to reflect on the perspectives of other teachers and practitioners.