When a child is reading a comes to a word they do not know, what can you do to support them? For many, the first strategy that may come to mind is to "sound it out." It seems like a logical and useful strategy for developing readers to add to their collection, but what is this strategy actually achieving? Sounding it out may help a child to put the letters and sounds together to decode the word successfully, but is that truly reading? We must first make the distinction between decoding and reading. Decoding is the process of blending letters and their sounds and focuses on accuracy. Reading is receiving information from text in order to make meaning out of it and focuses on understanding. In Catherine Compton-Lilly's (2005) article, "'Sounding Out': A Pervasive Cultural Model of Reading," she states that the strategy of sounding it out "privileges phonetic decoding over other decoding strategies, particularly those that involve the meanings of texts and the structures of language" (pg. 442). We need to support our students in developing strategies to not just decode the text, but to make meaning from it.
So what are some strategies that can help students to focus on the meaning of the text when learning to read? One strategy can be to look at the pictures to search for clues about what the text is saying, if there are pictures present. When text is accompanied by pictures or illustrations, there is a good chance that there is a relationship between them that can provide helpful hints as to what the text is saying. Another strategy to suggest is to have the student skip the word and read to end of the sentence, then read the sentence again. This provides the child with context in which they can draw clues from to figure out the unknown word. Breaking up the unknown word into smaller parts can also be a helpful strategy, especially if it is a relatively long word. There may be words or letter patterns that the child knows that are present within the unknown word that will help them to figure it out. The most important thing to remember when suggesting strategies to children is to keep the focus on the meaning of the text, not the accuracy of how it is read.
In the first grade classroom that I have been placed in for my field experience this semester, I have seen children sounding out words as a strategy. I completed a Running Record with a girl who came to the word "salamander," which she did not know. She began by sounding out the letters and attempting to blend them together. After giving up and skipping it the first time she came to it, the second time she came to it she said, "Sal...sala...salander?" I asked her if that made sense in the sentence and she shrugged her shoulders. I told her that the word was "salamander" and asked if she had heard of that type of animal before. She said, "No, what is it?" I then described it as an animal that was very similar to a lizard. She continued to read the rest of the book fluently. In this instance, because she was not familiar with salamanders, I think the best strategy that I could have suggested here is to break the word into smaller parts. It is a longer word with letter combinations that I think the girl would have recognized. Sal-a-man-der. Looking back, this would have been a better way in which to handle this word than just telling her what it was and explaining it. In my future encounters with unknown words, I hope to support children more meaningfully in developing strategies.
Source:
Compton-Lilly, Catherine. ""Sounding Out": A Pervasive Cultural Model of Reading."Language Arts 82.6 (2005): 441-51. Print.
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