This is totally unscientific information about learning to read and the best ways to do so, not from a researcher or early-childhood-education teacher, but from a secondary classroom teacher who has taught individually, and/or corporately, students who are just learning to read from grades two through junior high. I recently read that students who are not reading by third grade stand a small chance of learning to read. This may be true, but I have seen more than one seventh grade young man “get by” from looking at pictures and “guessing” at what the words say. When the only tests they encountered were T/F or multiple choice, students’ chances of passing tests in history, math, and English grammar, were surprisingly higher than one would expect.

A source I have long since forgotten stated that 40% of people who want to learn to read can do so, regardless of how they’ve been taught. When I was six and starting school, I’d often sit on my grandad’s lap and read him the “funny papers.” He told me it was good practice for me to read aloud. After he was gone, and I was an adult, I learned that my grandad couldn’t read or write, that he enjoyed the comics, and our time reading together provided him with basic instruction. As a teen, I remember him spending all Sunday afternoon reading the Sunday paper. It must have taken him the whole afternoon to sound out and guess enough to get the meaning of the “news.”

Beginning readers need to know by sight (think flashcards with pictures for commonly used words), but they also need an understanding of the sounds of letters in the English alphabet. (Some of my favorite tutoring experiences were with Spanish speaking women who were astounded that “v” and “b” sounds in English and Spanish languages were “reversed.” This was also true of the sounds of many letters in the English alphabet–they were different! We had many a laugh at my attempts to pronounce Spanish words with the letter sounds of the English alphabet. They loved to correct la professora.)

Marilyn Adams, a cognitive and developmental psychologist from the 90s said in her book that “sound spelling is necessary” as she pointed out that during that time, kids were not being taught phonics in schools. Teachers at that time believed that the most important thing was for students to understand and enjoy the text. Supposedly, from that, the bright pictures and excitement about the “story” the recognition of individual words would just pop out at them. There was little mentioned about decoding and sounding out words. The methods at this time led to a real lack of reading comprehension, something quite a few parents brought their students to me, to “fix”. They were generally disturbed that their students could not answer questions about what they had read. The students’ scores on comprehension reading tests reflected a “pattern” for many students. They were guessing at words, and it is words that carry the meaning of what is written.

Reading comprehension is the product of two things: sounding out of words and the meaning of those words. When it came to teaching beginning readers to sound out words, the awful truth was that teachers didn’t want to teach phonics. It was no fun for the kids (Phonics can be quite intimidating, where guessing what words are from the first letter, a picture, or the sentence’s context is more fun.) and it was hard work and no fun for the teacher. Phonics instruction is a partial cure for “weak word recognition skills…the most common and debilitating reading problem.”(Hanford “At a Loss for Words”)

Let’s be aware that it takes both phonics and memorization of the “look” of common words to draw out meaning from the words’ relationship to one another (phrasing). Keep in mind, that once we have word recognition through these two basic skills, sounding out and memorizing by sight basic words, comprehension of a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, and essay comes much more easily. Parents and teacher alike want what’s best for the children; district policies are well-intentioned, but sometimes a product of the “bandwagon effect” (X school district uses this method), and we need to be practical about what works and what doesn’t.