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From now on, in all discussions of balanced literacy versus SBRR (scientifically based reading research) curricula the fact that deaf children don't learn to read at grade level should come up.
It should come up because the concepts of phonemic awareness and phonics are counterintuitive. [update: true for me, but not for all? -- see caveat below]
The research on reading is one of those cases in which the findings of science utterly contradict felt experience. Reading feels visual, not auditory.
The dire facts of literacy in deaf children -- "Ninety-five per cent of profoundly deaf school-leavers only reach a reading-age of nine" -- are the jolt to the brain that gets the point across.
Children can't learn to read visually.
Children can only learn to read auditorily, through awareness of the sounds of language and their corresponding written symbols.
End of story.
The 60% of children who do manage to learn to read via balanced literacy and whole language are not learning visually.
They are managing to put sounds together with symbols incidentally, on the fly, in the course of their day.
That's not teaching.
update
Is the above an overstatement?
Do other people experience themselves as using phonemes and phonics when they read?
I experience the reading process as purely visual -- even though I do hear a voice inside my head if I pay attention!
Nevertheless, I experience reading as taking place the way whole language teachers describe it, not as reading scientists describe it.
Ken on Madison's reading scores
cued speech and literacy
forcing hearing children to learn as deaf children must
how to make a point
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5 comments:
i hope you're not suggesting that,
to make a point, it's a good idea
to exaggerate with remarks like
"the findings of science completely
contradict felt experience"
(seeing as hearing people will
generally "sound out" difficult
or nonsense words, for example...
indeed, those unaware of rhythm
and rhyme when reading silently
should probably be considered
very nearly illiterate (or deaf)).
I'll temper the statement.
It's true for me.
Reading "feels" completely visual to me, not auditory at all.
My relationship to reading research is one of pure trust; I trust that the researchers have it right.
But it doesn't feel right to me.
I have no conscious awareness of sound being part of the way I read.
As a matter of fact, I've always half assumed I may have learned to read visually, because I taught myself to read.
I am going to brag right now, but I have met very very few people who read faster than I do.
Both my parents were avid readers and I grew up as a bookworm. When I was 10 or 11 I remember laying on the floor reading the encyclopedia for fun.
I have people challenge me all the time, telling me I must be skimming, but I always manage to pass their tests.
Here is how I explain how I read so fast.
To me, it doesn't seem like I read words or even groups of words. I am able to read anywhere from half a line to two lines at a glance, or at least it seems to me to be like that. I suppose I am almost a text book case of the whole "whole language" type reader.
EXCEPT... that when I come across words I dont know, I tend to verbalize them silently. This is what lets me know that I am actually using phonetics to decode words.
Of course, when I grew up in New Zealand, we were taught to read phonetically so I know that it where the basis of my reading ability comes in.
When I read a book, I remember it like I saw a movie or a documentary. I seriously can't remember a page of words after I turn a page.
I suspect that I have gotten so good at phonetically reading that I do it without conciously being aware of it.
That's fascinating.
Processes that are so fast they're completely automated aren't accessible to introspection, by definition.
What's interesting about this is that often it seems that these automatic, unconscious processes feel different than they are.
I'll have to think about whether that's true or not...
Reading is auditory to me - the voice in my head is there all the time.
When I was at school in NZ apparently we were all formally being taught by whole-language methods (1982), but I distinctly remember my J1 teacher telling us to sound words out. By the memory of a five year old, however, she was quite old and may have just continued teaching phonetics. The primary school would have been classified as quite low socio-economic too.
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