If you donât need to teach speaking, why do you need to teach reading/writing?
This chapter highlights the similarities and differences between speaking and reading, in order to explain why some children who have no difficulties with the former may still experience problems with the latter.
All parents, and all elementary/primary teachers who are parents, know that pre-school children acquire oral language without receiving explicit instruction in it. Indeed, parental attempts at such explicit instruction generally have little effect at all on the way young children speak. As a typical concerned grandmother of a grandson aged 17 months, who communicated only in a series of grunts, squeaks and gestures, I wondered about the need for some early language intervention. The day I decided to pluck up courage and suggest to his mother that she consult a speech pathologist, he greeted me with a perfectly constructed, if less than perfectly articulated, three-word sentence. It was my turn to be speechless.
Foorman (1995) also gives an interesting example of the ease with which nearly all children in all societies develop a language, even when the environmental trigger to their language acquisition is only minimal. She writes (p. 378) that children who grow up in societies where their parents speak an ad hoc communication of the marketplace, called a âpidginâ, create and transmit their own language, called a âcreoleâ. A pidgin has a small vocabulary and a borrowed, inconsistent grammar from the speakerâs native language. Unlike a pidgin, a creole is a language in its own rightâwith its own grammar, vocabulary and sound system. Children who speak Cajun, a creole language that developed out of the French and English linguistic environments of Louisiana, have acquired a language different from the pidgin spoken by their parents. It appears that children are biologically programmed to construct grammar in spite of the contrived linguistic input surrounding them. However, they are most unlikely to develop literacy in a similarly non-conducive environment.
To immigrants who arrive in their new country at adolescence or later, the dissimilarities between speech and reading/writing are, regretfully, only too obvious. My father, who arrived in Australia in his early thirties, became an extremely proficient reader of English (as good as he was of Polish) because his word recognition skills carried him through once he had acquired a working vocabulary in English. However, unlike his daughter, who arrived at the age of three and adopted the accent of the marketplace, he was never able to become a proficient English speaker, to the extent that he was never able to lose the Eastern European accent of his native land.
I have another interesting example of the ease with which children acquire new vocabulary, culled from my young grandson during regular baby-sitting sessions. He is now very aware of noises in his environment for which he demands continual explanation. When I told him that a particular noise was that of a window creaking, he looked at me intently and repeated âwindow cweakingâ. When his mother arrived to pick him up, and the wind and window began their usual orchestration, he remarked to his mother that it was only the window cweaking. Imagine reading the word âcreakingâ correctly after only one print exposure.
Examples such as these have led Barbara Foorman to comment on the profound discrepancy between the development of language and that of literacy. To say that they merely emerge as part of a common developmental pathway is to rob speech of its biologically driven nature (Foorman, 1995) and to impute to literacy a natural spontaneity that cannot be supported in fact or theory.
The reason for the development of speech, without explicit instruction, in all normally developing infants, is that speech is a product of biological evolution. It stands as the most obvious, and arguably the most important, of our species-typical behaviours. Reading/writing, on the other hand, did not evolve biologically, but rather developed (and then, only in some cultures) as a secondary response to that which evolution had already produced. A consequence of this is that we are biologically destined to speak, but not to read and write (Liberman, 1997, p. 5).
As Liberman (1997) also remarks, language has been around for 200 000 years or more, and articulate speech for perhaps 75000 years (Corballis, 2004), while the idea that it could be rendered alphabetically only occurred about 4000 years ago, suggesting that it is far more difficult to transcribe our thoughts on paper than it is to produce them orally. Furthermore, while all cultures have an oral tradition, only some find it necessary to translate that tradition into print.
To clinch the argument, we know, as teachers, that we will experience an unfortunate number of reluctant readers in our classrooms. However, we are less likely to experience the luxury of even a few reluctant speakers. Speech may have to be learned, but it does not have to be taught. On the other hand, reading and writing, for most people, will not be learned unless it is taught, and for some people, it will not be learned unless it is taught well. It is important for teachers to understand the dissimilarities as well as the similarities that exist between speaking and reading/writing. Without this understanding, they could easily underestimate the difficulties some children will have in acquiring literacy.
The aim of this book, therefore, is to give teachers in inclusive settings access to theory and research-based programs that have a generally preventive effect during the early school years in reducing the literacy problems of many at-risk learners.
What is the real relationship between speaking and reading/writing?
Having established, pragmatically and intuitively, that speaking a language does not necessarily entail reading or writing that language, we still need to know why this divergence exists.
Essentially, reading involves two basic processes (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990). One process is learning how to decipher print and the other is understanding what the print means. Or, as expanded by Torgesen (2000, p. 56), âTo comprehend written material, children need to be able to identify the words used to convey meaning, and they must be able to construct meaning once they have identified the individual words in print.â
Teaching these two processes in a complementary fashion guarantees a balanced approach to reading instruction. Michael Pressley, when making the case for a balanced perspective on reading instruction, has this to say: âBalanced-literacy teachers combine the strengths of whole language and skills instruction, and in doing so, create instruction that is more than the sum of its partsâ (1998, p. 1). The strengths of a whole-language approach, as I see it, are its insistence on a print-rich environment to stimulate a childâs desire for reading. The strengths of a skills approach are its insistence on the explicit instruction of soundâsymbol associations, both in isolation and in context to foster a childâs word recognition ability.
It is this latter precept that has aroused the greatest controversy, despite overwhelming evidence that expert readers are extremely proficient at word-level processes (Pressley, 1998, p. 56). The need to include explicit decoding instruction when teaching beginners to read arises because difficulties at the word level often prevent children (particularly those at-risk) from becoming competent and interested readers. This is largely because speaking (and even speaking well) does not automatically translate into being able to decipher print. However, having a good command of a language will certainly enable children to understand the language written down, once they have learnt to decipher the print.
Another of my grandsons is just over four years of age and lives in a non-English-speaking country. From time to time, I send him tapes of books that I read aloud in English. He has no trouble listening to the tapes and understanding the stories on them, provided that they are pitched at a four-year oldâs level of comprehension. Furthermore, being bilingual he can readily understand appropriate stories that are read to him in his native tongue. However, if he were given the same books to read by himself, in either language, he would not yet be able to decipher the print and, apart from the pictures, these books would remain meaningless to him.
Another interesting example of the same phenomenon is the apocryphal story of the poet Milton (Gough et al., 1996). As his eyesight faded, he would ask his daughters to read him books in his beloved Latin. Although he could no longer decipher the print (he was blind), he could still enjoy the text because of his mastery of the Latin language. His daughters, not being blind, could decipher the print, but no doubt found the reading process rather tiresome as neither of them could understand Latin.
So just what is the relationship between speaking and reading that prevents the majority of pre-school children from actually reading a story that is totally comprehensible when it is read to them? To answer this question, we should really examine all our options.
- âź Is reading easier than speaking?
- âź Is reading equivalent to speaking?
- âź Is reading harder than speaking?
In view of what Iâve already said, and from what experience as parents and teachers has taught us, the first option sounds a little bizarre. Still, letâs look at the arguments set out by a speech theorist, Alvin Liberman (1997, p. 9), to examine this proposition more closely.
He suggests that on the surface, reading/writing appear to be easier than talking. The medium of reading/writing is print and is much clearer to observe than the speech signal, which is transient, and leaves much to be desired from a physical point of view. Furthermore, if you compare the effectorsâfingers for writing, tongue for speakingâthe skilfulness of the former far outweighs the clumsiness of the latter. Apart from licking lollipops and stamps, there is a limit to what the tongue can actually do. Finally, if you examine the receptorsâthe eye for reading, the ear for listeningâyou would have to agree that as a channel for transmission the eye is more effective than the ear. For example, in how many households does the radio hold sway over the television?
Nothing Liberman has said so far can be effectively denied. However, if the proposition that reading was easier than speaking were true, we would be seeing more children in our schools with speech difficulties than with reading/writing difficulties. We also wouldnât have to read books to four-year-old children whose reading abilities would exceed the surprisingly sophisticated speech we know that they possess at this age. In such a utopia, caregivers could concentrate on their own interests while pre-schoolers sat in silence, reading to themselves! Unfortunately, it seems patently obvious that reading presents a greater challenge than speaking.
Letâs now examine the second option, that reading/writing and talking are equivalent. We have all heard arguments that reading and speech are similar in acquisition and that, as a consequence, reading/writing need no more explicit instruction than does speaking. This, after all, is the premise on which some whole language theorists base their approach to early reading instruction (for example, G...