spelling helps reading

In her path-setting work on the difficult learning tasks every child must face, [Rebecca Trieman] has shown the importance of phonological awareness: The degree to which children are aware of the sounds of language strongly predicts reading achievement. Children whose parents read to them frequently are tacitly learning that the squiggles on the paper are codes for sound, meaning—and pleasure.

Treiman is particularly noted among scholars for discovering that linguistic concepts applied to the realm of cognitive psychology are critical to learning how children's understanding about sounds develop, how they learn to read and spell—and why they make certain types of errors. One such concept is the idea that a syllable comprises subunits of sound—for example, the bl in the word black, followed by ack. But some clusters are difficult for children to separate. "A 6-year-old may be able to break up black into bl and ack, but to her the bl can't be divided any more finely—and since she can't pick out the l sound in there, she spells the word back."

Treiman's research contradicts many claims of whole-language advocates—who oppose teaching phonics, or "sounding out" words, and believe, loosely put, that children can look at words such as table and the meaning will jump out at them, like a picture. While these theorists contend that spelling will emerge naturally as a by-product of reading—Treiman has found otherwise. "Even though learning to read does not automatically make good spellers," she has written, "learning to spell does benefit children's reading. ... in part by improving [their] ability to focus on the individual sounds, or phonemes, within spoken words."

She has also found that in many first- and second-grade classrooms, spelling and reading are treated as separate subjects, taught at different times with unrelated materials (if spelling is formally covered at all). Observing that for many children "spelling means dreary memorization of lists of words and boring workbook exercises," she argues that writing and reading should be integrated in instruction and taught in a way "more sensitive to the natural course of spelling development."

[snip]

...English is hardly chaotic... [I]n fact, a number of patterns exist, and a letter's pronunciation is often suggested by its surrounding letters." Treiman says she knows of programs in which teachers will point out that "oo" represents the sound of "ooh" in hoop and stoop, but when an exception like book appears, they'll say, "That doesn't fit the rule—you'll just have to learn that one." Actually, Treiman says, there is a pattern there: The sound in book comes much more frequently before k than before other letters.

...[O]f course, most teachers have never taken a single linguistics class and don't realize that patterns exist!"


nonsense words

Among the early findings: If 100 people are shown the pseudo-word "cilt," 70 percent will pronounce it "silt"—which reflects a very strong pattern in English. Surprisingly, despite years of exposure to words like cinder, cinnamon, and pencil, 30 percent of people tested use a hard c. (The computer [reader], of course, uses the sibilant c every time.) "That leaves some very interesting questions!" she says.


children with dyslexia

Treiman's earlier results challenged a widespread belief in her field: that dyslexic children learn very differently from other children. Although the children she tested were delayed, their stumbling blocks were very similar to what other, younger, non-dyslexic children struggled with. "We want to see whether we continue to find this controversial result," she says.

After the A, B, Cs

Rebecca Trieman: selected papers