This week’s post is in response to Compton-Lilly’s article “Sounding Out”: a Pervasive Cultural Model
of Reading. I found the article to be written weakly; it was repetitive,
added a great deal of new information in the conclusion, and included a lengthy
and (I thought) unnecessary tangent about how the study’s parent subjects felt
looked down upon because of a difficulty or inability to pronounce things in Standard
English. This said, I agree with the thesis of the article and thought it
included a number of interesting and edifying points. Therefore, I think it
will be of benefit both to others, and to myself in the future, to reorganize
and sum up the main points below.
The overarching thesis
of this article is that the strategy of decoding an unknown word by “sounding it
out” is a cultural model. This means that it is a “taken for granted theory”
that pervades our culture of learning to read. It “privileges phonetic decoding over other
decoding strategies particularly those that involve the meanings of texts and
the structures” despite the fact that it is one of the least effective
strategies, especially when it stands alone. Because it is a pervasive cultural
model, however, it is the most often cited strategy - by teachers, students,
and parents alike - even when other strategies are being utilized more often
and more effectively! For example, “Ms. Webster tells (her daughter) Jasmine to
‘sound out’ the word and then immediately directs her attention to the picture
to help her successfully solve the word.” Young children see the ability to “sound
out” words as the mark of a good reader, and Compton-Lilly encourages teachers
to fight the urge to use sounding out not as “an excuse when teachers do not
have any other strategy up their sleeve to help the struggling reader."
According to Compton-Lilly’s research, people can mean one
of two things by “sounding it out”. The first is what I (and Compton-Lilly) was
familiar with – making the individual letter sounds and then putting them
together. The second is what I believe I have heard referred to as “chunking”: “finding
two or more chunks within the words that they recognize and putting these chunks together (read-ding).” Although I think the
latter would be a degree more effective than the former, both have problems. “The
tendency to vocalize every letter in a word becomes problematic when words have
silent letters and complicated letter-sound relationships.” And Compton-Lilly quotes Ken Goodman in saying
that, “sounding out words ‘can only put me in the neighborhood [of the correct
word]. Even if I sounded out every letter in
sequence, I wouldn't come close, because
there's no one-to-one correspondence and because sounds change with the context.’”
There are, as I mentioned, other strategies that children
can –and do! – use. Good word decoding, in fact, draws on three main ways of
making meaning, the use of Visual information being one. The other two are
Meaning and Structure. “The reader
uses understandings of what could happen in the world (meaning),
and language knowledge of words, structures and sound sequences, and
several approaches to phonological information from oral and written
sources. He mediates the appropriateness of possible
responses through attention to visual information.”
The solution Compton-Lilly
presents is a simple one: get the word out! Teachers and students, parents and politicians
need to be made aware that “sounding it out” is only one strategy in an
arsenal, and a relatively weak and unreliable one at that. Compton-Lilly states
that “parent workshops,
community forums, and informative websites are predictable solutions that one
might expect to encounter,” adding that this might take a while but that the
fact that children (the adults of tomorrow) are already using alternate
strategies gives her (him?) hope. Not to rain on his (her?) parade - and I
certainly see cracks in this cultural model - but I don’t see the unconscious
use of alternate strategies as a big leap forward. After all, parents today
also unknowingly use and share other strategies, as evidenced by Ms. Wilson,
but continue to tout above all else the strategy of “sounding it out”.
Perhaps this is an odd and disconnected way to conclude my post, but blog posts are allowed to be informal and, in the midst of scrolling through Google Images to find an appropriate image to head my post I happened upon this cool piece of history that I couldn't resist sharing it. If you haven't seen it before, this is the Cyrus Cylinder. It is written in cuneiform, one of the earliest known writing systems, and dates back to the 6th century BC in Babylonia. It justifies Cyrus the Great as the ruler of Babylonia and establishes his heir (nothing unusual there). But it is also cited as the written declaration of basic human rights! It's a good reminder of the power and value of writing (and reading).
No comments:
Post a Comment