We know how young minds learn to read, so why are so many children failing to master this essential skill, asks Colin Barras
MORE than 5000 years after the invention of writing, you would think we would have completely nailed the best way to teach people to read – literacy is a key skill in most societies, after all. But you would be wrong. Not only have scientists long disagreed on the most effective methods, but their arguments have fuelled a decades-long, politicised “reading war” over how to teach children to read English.
Meanwhile, large numbers of children are struggling to achieve the standards they should for their age. Last year, just 33 per cent of 9 and 10-year-olds in the US were assessed as being proficient or advanced readers. “The US has done poorly in teaching kids to read for a long time,” says Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. And the problem isn’t confined to English-speaking countries: there is also confusion about how to teach children to read other languages.
A key battleground is a teaching technique known as phonics. In the US, poor literacy is often blamed on having too little phonics in the classroom. But, confusingly, researchers last year argued that children in England are being failed by being taught too much phonics. Herein lies the root of the problem: it is one thing to understand how kids learn to read and, it turns out, quite another to figure out how best to teach them. The good news is that researchers, having begun to enter the classroom, are finally getting to grips with how they can translate their insights to improve teaching and, ultimately, bring an end to the reading wars.
For 400 years or more, there has been debate about the best way to teach reading. Today, most reading researchers say the learning process begins when the student – generally assumed to be a child – realises that the words they speak can be represented by text. A child learning an alphabetic script like English must also recognise that spoken words can be broken down into small elements called phonemes – the /k/ sound in “cat”, for instance – and that the alphabetic letters, or graphemes, represent these phonemes. With time, the child learns to associate each grapheme with one or more phonemes, and to blend strings of phonemes together to make words. They can then turn a written word, such as cat, first into a set of discrete phonemes – /k/a/t/ – and then into the spoken word “cat”. Researchers call this decoding. Formal instruction in decoding , otherwise known as phonics, allows children to read many written words. Ultimately, those words become familiar enough that the child recognises them instantly and knows how to pronounce them without decoding.
“Phonics has been a part of reading education in England sin
