Raising Kids Who Read

What Parents and Teachers Can Do

Daniel T. Willingham

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118911501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Lehrmethoden für Lesekompetenz

How parents and educators can teach kids to love reading in the digital age

Everyone agrees that reading is important, but kids today tend to lose interest in reading before adolescence. In Raising Kids Who Read, bestselling author and psychology professor Daniel T. Willingham explains this phenomenon and provides practical solutions for engendering a love of reading that lasts into adulthood. Like Willingham's much-lauded previous work, Why Don't Students Like School?, this new book combines evidence-based analysis with engaging, insightful recommendations for the future. Intellectually rich argumentation is woven seamlessly with entertaining current cultural references, examples, and steps for taking action to encourage reading.

The three key elements for reading enthusiasm—decoding, comprehension, and motivation—are explained in depth in Raising Kids Who Read. Teachers and parents alike will appreciate the practical orientation toward supporting these three elements from birth through adolescence. Most books on the topic focus on early childhood, but Willingham understands that kids' needs change as they grow older, and the science-based approach in Raising Kids Who Read applies to kids of all ages.

• A practical perspective on teaching reading from bestselling author and K-12 education expert Daniel T. Willingham
• Research-based, concrete suggestions to aid teachers and parents in promoting reading as a hobby
• Age-specific tips for developing decoding ability, comprehension, and motivation in kids from birth through adolescence
• Information on helping kids with dyslexia and encouraging reading in the digital age

Debunking the myths about reading education, Raising Kids Who Read will empower you to share the joy of reading with kids from preschool through high school.

Chapter 1
The Science of Reading

Scientists have learned a lot about the mental machinery that supports reading, and this research base inspires much of what I suggest you do throughout this book. So we need to get the basics of these scientific findings straight. I’ll introduce scientific findings about reading as they become relevant, but this chapter starts with three foundational principles, to which we’ll return again and again: (1) the sounds that letters make (not their shape) pose the real challenge as children learn to read print, (2) comprehending what we read depends mostly on our general knowledge about the topic, and (3) the key to motivation lies in getting kids to read even when they aren’t motivated to do so.

The Role of Sound in Reading

We think of reading as a silent activity—consider a hushed library—but sound in fact lies at its core. Print is mostly a code for sound. English uses some symbols that carry meaning directly; for example, “$” means dollars, “@” means at, and “:-)” means smiling. But “bag” is not a symbol for a paper sack. It’s three letters, each of which signifies a sound; together, the sounds signify a spoken word. English is not alone in using a sound-based writing system. All written languages have some number of symbols that carry meaning, but the workhorse of communication is a sound-based code.

Because writing uses visual symbols that signify sound, children who are learning to read must master three things. First, they must be able to distinguish letters. They must notice that “j” has a little tail that distinguishes it from “i.” (I’ll put letters and words in quotation marks when emphasizing what they look like on the page.) Second, they must learn the mapping between these visual symbols and their auditory counterparts—for example, that the letter “o” sometimes goes with one sound (as in the word TONE) but at other times goes with another sound (as in TON). (I’ll put letters and words in small capital letters when emphasizing their sound.)

There’s a third thing to be learned, and this is the least intuitive for us to appreciate; learning the mapping is not quite what you think. We think that the sound that goes with “t” is TEE, but that’s actually two sounds, a consonant and vowel sound. Children must be able to hear that TEE is two sounds; they must be able to hear individual speech sounds. To read, children must be able to know what T sounds like in isolation, because that’s the sound that goes with the letter “t.” That turns out to be especially hard for kids. Let’s start with the easier tasks and work our way to this tougher one.

The Visual Task in Learning to Read

Most kids find distinguishing one letter from another relatively easy. Sure, some letters are confusable because they have similar shapes (e.g., B, D, P, R) or are the mirror image of another letter (e.g., M/W, b/d). And beginning readers do indeed mix up letters that look similar, a phenomenon also observed in languages other than English. But we shouldn’t think this problem is worse than it is. The fortunate fact is that there aren’t that many letters to learn, so with some practice, kids get it (figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1. Confusable letters. Even experienced readers occasionally mistake one letter for another, a problem that can be made more likely by unusual fonts. Overall, however, distinguishing one letter from another is not the most common obstacle to learning to decode.

Source: © Jason Covich.

Learning Letter-to-Sound Mappings

Learning which sound goes with which letter seems rather obviously more challenging. As I noted, some letters do double-duty for sounds: “o” represents one sound in ton and another in tone. There are actually forty-four speech sounds used in English, so such doubling up is inevitable given that we have twenty-six letters. Worse yet, it’s not just that two sounds go with a single letter. Sometimes a single sound goes with either of two letters. For example “y” in the middle of words often sounds like “i” as in RHYME.

If you were creating an alphabet for English from scratch, it would be sensible to create forty-four letters and match each speech sound with one letter. But written English, alas, was not created from scratch. Our language is a mongrel: Germanic origins, heavily influenced by Scandinavian (Norman) and French invasions, and later by the adoption of Latinate and Greek words. That’s a problem because when we borrowed words, we frequently retained the spelling conventions of the original language.

In consequence, our letter-to-sound mapping is messy. That has caused misery among generations of school children, although it has provided fodder for light rhymers:

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When the English tongue we speak. Why is break not rhymed with freak? Will you tell me why it’s true We say sew but likewise few? And the maker of the verse, Cannot rhyme his horse with worse? Beard is not the same as heard Cord is different from word. Cow is cow but low is low Shoe is never rhymed with foe. Think of hose, dose, and lose

And think of goose and yet with choose Think of comb, tomb and bomb, Doll and roll or home and some. Since pay is rhymed with say Why not paid with said I pray? Think of blood, food and good. Mould is not pronounced like could. Wherefore done, but gone and lone— Is there any reason known? To sum up all, it seems to me Sound and letters don’t agree

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And yet things are not as bad as you might first think. English pronunciation looks more consistent when we take context into account. A well-known example of the anything-goes character of English spelling is the invented word “ghoti,” to be pronounced FISH—provided one pronounces GH as in the word “enough,” O as in the word “women,” and TI as in the word “motion.” Cute, but there’s a reason most would pronounce “ghoti” as GOATEE. The context of each letter matters. When “gh” appears at the start of a word, it’s pronounced as a hard g (e.g., GHASTLY, GHOST). In the middle of a word, it’s silent (e.g., DAUGHTER, TAUGHT). It’s pronounced as F only at the end of a word (LAUGH, TOUGH).

In fact, researchers have found that consonants at the start or end of single-syllable words are pronounced consistently about 90 percent of the time. Vowels in the middle of single-syllable words are pronounced consistently only 60 percent of the time, but when the vowel is an exception, the final consonant frequently helps to determine the pronunciation. So, for example, the vowel string “oo” is usually pronounced as in the word BOOT, but sometimes it’s pronounced as in the word BOOK. It turns out that “oo” has the latter pronunciation only when it’s followed by “k” or “r” (BOOK, BROOK, CROOK, SHOOK, POOR, DOOR, FLOOR).

There’s another reason to take heart about the seemingly crazy pronunciation of English words. Many words that break pronunciation rules are very common. “Gone,” “give,” are,” “were,” and “done” all break a rule: when a word ends with “e,” the vowel sound is long. (Hence, “give” should rhyme with HIVE.) Although these words break the rule, they appear so commonly they are good candidates simply to be memorized as exceptions.

So there’s no doubt that learning the mapping between letters and sounds is a challenge, but that’s not the aspect of learning to read that most often gives kids trouble. The sticking point is the hearing of the speech sounds. Let’s look at why that’s so hard.

Learning to Hear Speech Sounds

What sound do you associate with the letter “p”? You might think of it as PUH—that’s what parents often tell children—but that’s two sounds: the sound of the letter “p” and then a vowel sound after it, UH. The sound associated with the letter “p” is actually just a plosion of air—your vocal chords don’t vibrate at all. In fact, that’s the same plosion of air you make for the letter “b.” The only difference is that when you say BEE, your vocal chords vibrate to make the vowel sound at the same time you make the plosion of air, whereas when you say PEE, the vocal chords start to vibrate only about .04 seconds after the plosion. Yup. The difference between “p”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Have Fun, Start Now
• Chapter 1: The Science of Reading
• Part I: Birth Through Preschool
• Part II: Kindergarten Through Second Grade
• Part III: Third Grade and Beyond
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Accessing the Bonus Web Content
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Works Cited
• Index
• End User License Agreement