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ABSTRACT:
The
greater the number of ambiguous letter-sounds (and letter-sound
combinations) coexistent in a word, the greater the number of
iterations of ambiguity reduction required before the word can be
virtually-heard or spoken. The greater the number of ambiguity
reducing iterations (disambiguations) involved the longer the
reader’s attention must stretch to process them.
The longer the span of attention required, the greater the
vulnerability to miscues in decoding causing drop outs from the
decoding-stream-flow-rate necessary to sustain the flow of reading.
The single most significant underlying cause for this, ambiguity-overwhelm
> stutter > drop out, is the archaic “technology”
- the 'code' we read with.
More On...
A
1000-year-old lack of leadership in managing the relationship between
the Latin alphabet and the English spoken
language has resulted in a deeply entrenched, convoluted and
highly ambiguous ‘code’. Every
attempt
to change the alphabet or reform spelling - to render their
relationship more simply phonetic - has failed. Phonics and phonemic
awareness pedagogies are both attempts to compensate for, not directly
address, the ambiguities created by the idiomatic correspondence of
these two systems (the code).
With
modern font technology it is relatively easy to add another dimension
of functionality to the concept of a character or letter.
Specifically, it is possible to print (paper or screen) letters with
shape, size, intensity and spacing variations that, while retaining
unambiguous letter recognition features, convey additional information
or cues about how the letter sounds in the particular word in which it
is encountered.
For
a detailed description of the Cues click here.
We are
proposing that a small number of alphabet-general letterface
variations, acting as phonetic cues, can dramatically reduce the
disambiguation-overhead involved in learning to read. Our intent is to
catalyze if we can, and, drive if we must, the development of a new
learning to read system based on developing this concept and
subsequently integrating it with the best of what remains relevant
from phonemic awareness, phonics and whole language pedagogies and
practices.
|
ARTICLE
A
New Way of Thinking About Learning to Read
By David Boulton
69%
of 4th graders read below the proficiency level
60%
remain below it in the 12th grade
National
Assessment of Educational Progress 1998 Reading Report Card
42
million adult Americans can't read; 50
million can recognize so few printed words they are
limited to a 4th or 5th grade reading level. According to
Literacy Volunteers of America, 237
billion dollars a year in unrealized earnings is
forfeited by persons who lack basic reading skills.
The
National Right to Read Foundation
There
is no natural, biological-evolutionary precedent for reading.
Spoken language - yes - the ability to discriminate among sounds
and associate distinct sounds with distinct meanings has been
evolving for millions of years. But, nothing about our natural
evolutionary development has prepared us to read – to focus
our eyes into small static spaces and translate and assemble
strings of visual symbols into virtually heard sequences that
simulate the sounds of spoken words. Human beings invented
reading (and writing), and it should be added, those that did
were far less familiar with how our brains work and children
develop than we are today.
Reading is a technology skill
that requires the use of two archaic technologies or systems
(the 3,000+ year old alphabet and the 1,000+ year old system of
English spelling) that were developed by adults for adults and
were never designed (or since in any way optimized) for use by
young developing minds. Moreover, they were never designed to
work together; like the proverbial square peg/round hole, we
have been ‘force fitting’ them for over a thousand years.
The fact is, that most people who struggle to read are suffering
from a kind of interface incompatibility with our
reading technologies that is the fault of the technologies, not
them!
Ancient
Greek and Latin were almost completely phonetically
written…
Teaching
Reading - a History
Just
as in learning to read, I said, we were
satisfied when we knew the letters
of the alphabet…
Plato,
the Republic
The major cause
of today’s reading problems began taking root nearly a thousand
years ago as the Latin alphabet and the English language collided.
The Latin alphabet was nearly phonetic; it had one letter for each
sound spoken in the Latin language. But in trying to represent the
English, the Latin alphabet came up short by over a dozen letters.
There were simply more sounds spoken in English then
there were letters to represent them in the Latin alphabet.
With
religion, politics and academia so entrenched in the written Latin
any thought of changing it was virtually inconceivable.
Consequently, instead of adding letters to the alphabet, a
series of rules developed whereby some letters, (but not all)
would no longer have just one sound but could have other sounds
depending on which of the other letters (in what sequence) they
preceded or followed (most but not all of the time). Sound pretty
convoluted? The consequence of this ‘hack’ has haunted us ever
since: the phonetic principle was broken and the relationship
between written letters and spoken sounds became complex and
confusing.
What
happened significantly altered the course of human history and
its effects are still felt today by over 700 million people. The
result of making up for the shortage of letters was an ambiguous
alphabetic ‘code’ that strained the process of learning to
read - a process that had for over fourteen hundred years been
based on the phonetic simplicity of one letter for one sound. No
longer as quickly self-evident, reading now involved the need to
determine which of a letter’s possible sounds it was supposed
to actually sound like in the particular word in which it was
appearing. The stress involved in such decoding has remained
deep in the ‘overhead’ of our reading process ever since.
To make
matters worse further complications followed as the words,
spellings and accents of Greek Philosophers, French clerks, Danish
typesetters and others were added to the system.
Now, in addition to idiomatic codes for missing letters,
spellings became incoherent as the various spelling conventions of
non-English influences were imposed on the language. With the
combination of Luther’s reformation, Guttenberg’s printing
press and the King James translation of the Bible, the cement
began to harden.
All these diverse and complicating stresses heaped upon a
writing system that was already inadequate resulted in a seriously
flawed and dysfunctional system.
TODAY
The
underlying cause of our reading difficulties is that we have
rigidly held to an inherited, technologically archaic, symbol
system (the Alphabet) that was developed in an entirely different
'age of the world', for adults not children, and that was never
designed to represent the 44+ sounds of the English spoken
language.
As
a result, the number and duration of the mental processing
iterations necessary to resolve the ambiguity of letter sound
correspondences all too frequently exceeds the attention span of
beginning readers. The consequences are ‘reading stutters’ and
'drop outs’ in reading flow.
The core problem is AMBIGUITY-OVERWHELM
and it is an artifact of the “technology” involved.
For
some reason - its 'sacredness' or simply its institutional inertia
- we have been unable to update the technology to reflect what we
know about human neurological processing and to make it friendly
to the self-esteem and developing mental processes of our young
people.
The first casualty
is self-esteem: they
soon grow ashamed…
about half of youths
with a history of substance abuse have reading problems.
National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development
35%
of children with reading disabilities drop out of school, a rate
twice that of their classmates.
50%
of juvenile delinquents manifest some kind of learning
disability, primarily in the area of reading.
National
Center for Learning Disabilities
There
aren’t many parallels to this. Under what other circumstances do
people spend years trying to learn something that continually
makes them feel bad about themselves as they do? Most children and
adults have very limited patience for repeatedly trying to do
something that results in self-esteem-lowering feelings. Yet,
we must compel people to learn to read. They can't function in our
modern world if they can't. However, the way things stand the
technology is causing real and significant damage to people's
lives (and costing us billions of dollars).
Up
to this point, absent a new alphabet or a way of spelling
phonetically with the one we have, our only course of action was
to facilitate the development of explicit skills and attention
span increases such that developing readers might be better able
to process the ambiguities we can't spare them from experiencing.
This has been the role of explicit phonemic awareness exercises
and explicit, systematic phonics both of which are attempts to
compensate for, not directly address, the ambiguity created by the
archaic alphabet and spelling system.
But
what if we could, without changing the alphabet or the way English
is spelled, present our letters (on paper or screen) with cues
embedded or accompanying them that could significantly reduce the
letter-sound ambiguity involved in reading?
This
kind of thinking was impossible until very recently, until
computers and modern font technology. Though the moveable type of
the printing press was a breakthrough innovation in its day, it
restricted us to thinking about printing through a paradigm that
was based on what was and was not possible in a mechanism that
used real physical objects to print letters with. Whereas moveable
type made it relatively easy to set up any number of alternative
typefaces, once within a typeface it was impractical to offer
letterfaces or optional variations on the way each letter might
appear.
However,
today, with modern font technology, it is possible and relatively
easy to add another dimension to the idea of a character or
letter. Specifically, it is possible to print (paper or screen)
letters with shape, size, intensity and spacing variations, that
while retaining unambiguous letter recognition features, allows
the presentation of the letter to convey additional information or
cues about how it sounds in the particular word in which it is
encountered.
The
P-CUES Concept:
Mind your Ps and Qs - Phonic Cues - P-Cues
The
intention is to prompt the reader with unambiguous CUES that
reduce the number and complexity of the instances of ambiguity
encountered during the immediate decoding-stream-flow of the
reading process.
For
a detailed description of the Cues click here.
The
Software and Font Technology Involved
Conceptually,
the technology involved is relatively straightforward. The first
component is the "carrier" or shell that extends the
font family to have the added capacity to store the alternate
presentations for each character in a font. The second component
is the "P-Cue presentation dictionary" which, like a
spell checker in a standard word processor, scans the words in
documents and looks them up in its database. When a word match is
found, the P-Cue dictionary reads the character presentation
variations (P-Cues) for the letters in the word and substitutes
the P-Cued letters into the publication to match.
IN
CLOSING
The
examples I have put forth are placeholders.
There is significant work ahead to map the territory of
letter-sound ambiguities and to determine which metaphors and
variations of letter presentation will best serve different types
of developing readers. With that said, I believe it is possible to
develop a system of variations that will cue developing readers in
ways that reduce the 'overhead' involved in reading by many times
the 'overhead' involved in processing the cues.
Based on my preliminary and informal experiments with
children, I am confident that, once fully developed as an overall
system, this approach will dramatically simplify and speed up the
process of learning to read.
What
I am proposing bridges the phonic and whole language ideologies.
Instead of having to create ‘dumbed down’ reading
materials or having to design reading materials around the awkward
pedagogical requirements of cryptic decoding, the P-Cue model
reduces the ambiguity involved in decoding and allows developing
readers to access more meaningful materials faster (extending the
ceiling on ‘decodable text’ to a more meaningful and enjoyable
level). Finally, it does this without changing the alphabet or
English spelling.
This
is not meant as an alternative to learning other rules of
decoding, as it won't eliminate all the ambiguities. Rather, what
I am proposing will provide developing readers the means to
quickly filter out a significant portion of what would otherwise
be ambiguities leaving them with a less dissipated attention span
to apply whatever rules remain appropriate (arguably new rules
based on an integrated approach to using this technology with
phonemic awareness and phonic instructional pedagogies).
I call this 'Training Wheels for Literacy" because this
system is not intended to replace our colossal inventory of
written materials, but rather to provide developing readers with
an 'on- ramp' and the ‘training wheels’ that enable them to
develop better phonemic awareness, phonic skills and greater
attention span by making it easier for them to keep themselves
from 'falling' out of reading. By enabling them to extend
their reading flow, they will learn to associate the P-Cues with
the phonemic distinctions available in written word structures and
ultimately take the 'wheels off' - stretching into the next
step of becoming an empowered reader.
In
summary, this learning to read barrier; it's pain, shame and
life-disabling consequences...our arguments about methodologies
and the money we spend on efforts intended to compensate for it,
stem not from some deficit or lack of natural capacities in
our brains, but rather, from the change resistant technology of
our 3000 year old alphabet and its poor interaction with the
(nearly as change resistant) 1000 year old technology of English
spelling. For the sake of the children, in the spirit of plain
good science, lets acknowledge the fact and do something about it.
Learning
to read is a process of acquiring an “inner-interface” between
our biologically native all-at-onceness processing and our
enculturated mind’s one-at-a-time thought processes. Indeed,
reading plays a significant role in creating the later. Taking
up this challenge could create a breakthrough in literacy, reduce
damage to self-esteem, reduce the waste of billions of dollars
and, perhaps, beyond all of that, change the ecology and
efficiency of the "inner interface" that regulates our
learning, and, who we are.
AN
ANALOGY?
Imagine
that a fictional product called AlphaPhon is the
world’s leading English language GUI (Graphemic User Interface).
AlphaPhon is the entry-level product of a company (also
fictitious) named USASoft. All is not well with USASoft. Market
research has revealed that 92 million older AlphaPhon customers,
due to their poor use of the product, are suffering major
financial losses.
42
million adult Americans can't read; 50
million can recognize so few printed words they are
limited to a 4th or 5th grade reading level. According to
Literacy Volunteers of America, 237
billion dollars a year in unrealized earnings is
forfeited by persons who lack basic reading skills.
The
National Right to Read Foundation
Perhaps
even more alarming, user-test reports indicate that 60% of the
company’s new customers are less than proficient with AlphaPhon
even after 12 to 13 years of day in and day out attempts to learn
it: USASoft is in serious risk of losing its future customer base.
69%
of 4th graders read below the proficiency level
60% remain below it in the
12th grade
National
Assessment of Educational Progress 1998 Reading Report Card
The
first casualty is self esteem:
they soon grow ashamed…
about half of youths with
a history of substance abuse have reading problems.
National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development
35%
of children with reading disabilities drop out of school, a rate
twice that of their classmates.
50%
of juvenile delinquents manifest some kind of learning
disability, primarily in the area of reading.
National
Center for Learning Disabilities
Disturbed
by these reports, USASoft undertakes a massive research campaign
to discover why their customers are having such difficulty
learning to use AlphaPhon.
Billions of dollars and thousands of research
studies later a scientific consensus emerges: the customers who
have difficulty learning AlphaPhon exhibit a common ‘core
deficit’ in something the researchers call ‘alphaphonemic
awareness’
Phonemic
Awareness: It’s the hottest topic
in education.
National
Adult Literacy and Learning Disabilities Center
Converging evidence from all research centers show that
deficits in phonemic
awareness reflect the core
deficit in reading disabilities.
National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Moreover,
they also lack ‘alphaphonic’ code knowledge and skills.
Letter
knowledge,
which provides the basis for forming connections
between the letters in spellings and the sounds in pronunciations,
has been identified as a strong predictor of reading success
National
Center to Improve the Tools of Educators
Moreover, if the letter-sound code
(phonics) is not
taught, all reliable studies concur that poor readers
and nonreaders will not become fluent
readers
National
Adult Literacy and Learning Disabilities Center
Based on this new understanding, USASoft issues
orders to all of its distributors to initiate a nationwide
training program designed to train the minds of its users in the
alphaphonemic awareness and alphaphonic skills required to use
AlphaPhon.
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If
it worked, the analogy started to sound absurd as USASoft began to
act like AlphaPhon’s problems were exclusively in the minds of
its users. As if it were inconceivable that anything could be
wrong with AlphaPhon, or, that if something was wrong, that
AlphaPhon could be in any way changed or improved. What’s
disturbing, of course, is this is exactly how we have come to
think about our reading problems and the role our reading
technologies play in creating them.
How could USASoft be so blind and negligent about the
usability implications of such a human-engineered human-interface
product?
How
could we?
STORY
In 1989-90, my son, Daaron
who had, since his birth, been my learning
guide, began to want to read. Daaron grew up in an environment
of rich
dialogue and quickly developed a remarkable proficiency with
language. By the time he was three he could engage in complex conversations about
his own thought process and he and I were able to
travel together throughout our thoughts and feelings.
Daaron’s
kindergarten teacher described him has having ‘the vocabulary
of a 20 year old’. He was masterfully, verbally, dexterous.
From the time he was a month old I read to him. I never read him
baby books; I read him whatever I was reading. He picked up the
alphabet sounds when he was 2 and, because he loved playing
games, he had a good sight vocabulary by the time he was 3.
He was never pressured to read before Kindergarten. It
was his starting school that precipitated our journey into
learning to read and it was then that, for the first time since I learned to
read myself, I was drawn into the problems of reading.
His
game playing had taught him to trust the game he was playing –
that if only he learned what he needed to learn he could win.
This had enabled him to stay with his frustrations because he
knew it was possible to learn through them.
Daaron became an exceptional learner because he had
developed a refined sense of his own meaning
needs and he trusted them to direct him, like a compass,
through any learning challenges he encountered.
When
he began to read he couldn’t believe it. He was incredibly frustrated by the lack of
coherence in the process and the seemingly arbitrary ways in which
reading was so different than the ABCs had prepared him
for. He had no problem with the alphabet letter
sounds; he had no problem with understanding the meaning of
words. It was the ambiguity in-between that broke the flow in
his mind. With his ability to articulate his confusion and our
combined ability to track the flow of meaning in his mind,
we bumped right into the sound-letter correspondence problem. Why
was it so confusing? So many rules and exceptions, he asked me
‘why dad?” “Why
does it work this way? It just doesn’t make sense!”
“How could it be such a mess?” He was sure there must
be something simple that once he understood it would enable him
to read.
At
the time I couldn’t answer the question very well. I explained
to him that his struggle wasn’t his fault. The problem was in
the mess, not in him. It
really annoyed us that something so fundamental and basic as
reading could be so unsystematic, illogical and so inconsiderate
of the way our mind's functioned most naturally. I explained that
there was a very complex set of rules that made the mess make
sense to adults that studied it but that there wasn’t any
explanation I could give him that would make sense of it
to him. Though I couldn't
help him understand it, paying careful attention to what he was
going through made it obvious how I could help him.
I
began using a pencil in much the same way an orchestra conductor
uses his wand - moving it up and down, in circles and left and
right. We developed a cueing system.
When I sensed his flow stumble, I would move the pencil
tip just above the letters he was reading and tap the letter
when it was supposed to sound like its letter name. I would move
the pencil tip in a circle when it's one of the letter's other
sounds and down when it was silent. I would move it left when
it's blended with the letters before it and right when it's
blended with the letters after it. He quickly understood these
simple signals, and, as my cueing reduced the ambiguity he
experienced, we both felt an ease and acceleration in the flow
of his reading. It worked so well that soon Daaron was off
and reading. I never did explain the complex rules and
exceptions I just reduced the ambiguity overhead to the process
and he learned his way through.
As my work was about learning and my concern was
how our insidious
curricula did damage to our core capacities for learning, this
reading issue really troubled me. Realizing that the key to real
change lie in the direction of providing paper and screen based
disambiguation cues to the developing readers, I wrote the first
article: Training Wheels For
Literacy in 1991.
For
many reasons I never actively pursued or pushed the project –
Daaron was no longer struggling and my work went back to its
earlier focus. But in 1999 my daughter Deanna, began to learn to
read and once again I was drawn into the frustrating reality of
a child's struggle with this process. Deanna's strengths
are different than Daaron's. Like him, she is emotionally and
somatically smart and conceptually dexterous. However, unlike
him, she had a slight but noticeable auditory-memory-processing
problem. In reading this manifested itself as an inability to
remember a word she had just decoded. She had to re-decode the
same word she had just decoded only a sentence or two
previously. Once
again the spotlight was on decoding and, I think more accurately
stated, overcoming the ambiguity. I began to use the ‘wand’
again and also to write the words she was struggling with on the
whiteboard, varying the way the letters looked, to act like
cues.
This
time, because the process lasted so much longer, I experienced
a side-affect of the process that I hadn’t encountered
with Daaron. Even though I helped her understand that the
problem wasn’t her fault – that the messy code made it hard
on her, she couldn’t help but ask “why can’t I read as
well as everyone else”? She began to doubt her own mind –
her struggle with reading made her feel bad about herself, feel
shame about her own mind. To avoid these negative feelings she
began to comfort herself by saying ‘I am just not a good
reader’.
This
time as I felt such compassion for her struggle, I vowed to give
the Training Wheels concept a full exploration....and that led
to the work of this site.
©Copyright
2001 - 2003: Training Wheels for Literacy & Implicity
