What is Reading?

I'm hoping to keep this short, so forgive me if I oversimplify.

Reading is constructing meaning from text.

OK, well I guess I don't need to keep it that short.

Many adults who do not work in fields involving teaching, reading, or writing, mistake the concept of reading with the concept of decoding. Decoding is just saying the words. Decoding is what you do when you read this:

blophen gribluck weevin smid.

You use your knowledge of English to pronounce these words in a particular way. You probably didn't concern yourself too much with thinking about what was being communicated because you could tell early on that this was nonsense. You are still decoding when you read this:

With door black onion.

These are words, of course, so you are no longer looking at nonsense. Each of these words makes something happen in your brain. When you put them together it all sort of falls apart, though. When you read that last bit, you read it as a list of words, not as a chunk of meaning.

So we know what decoding is. Now let's talk about reading.

Reading is decoding PLUS thinking. (Don't worry, I'm not going to try to define thinking here.) Reading is saying the words, putting them together to figure out what is being communicated, thinking about what we already know about that, thinking about how we feel about it, being reminded of other things we experienced or read about, wondering new things, predicting words, ideas, events, or changes that may come later in the text. And there's more. When you read, saying the words is only the beginning. After that a whole lot of other things happen in your head. That's part of what makes it so rewarding!

When we help our kids read, we need to recognize this. They don't learn to decode first and only then make meaning. They must learn to make meaning, or do all that thinking work, AS they learn to decode. Even in the easiest of books! So when you are sitting with your little one reading a book, take a look at your input. Do you talk mostly about decoding, saying things like, "sound it out," or "you know that word, " or "look at that word again, is that right?" or "no, that's not what it says there"? If so, you are not alone, but you can do something about it. For every decoding-type thing you say, try to say TWO meaning-oriented things, like:

• What's going on here?
• Look at the picture
• That was funny
• I love this part
• Oh, no! He tore his shirt!
• Ooooh, she's going to be in trouble
• That was a nice thing to do
• What a good friend!

These are the type of comments that show our children that reading is a social act. When they read, they too will begin to comment more on the meaning than on the strategies they are using to figure out words.

Don't Say Sound it Out!!

Just don't say it!

This is a tool that one must fully understand in order to use it correctly!

Here's the deal. You can ask any child who just successfully figured out a word, "How did you do that?" and most of the time the answer will be, "I sounded it out." But most of the time that's not actually what she did! See, SIO has become a meaningless catch-all. I want children to use a wide variety of strategies to figure out words and I want them to have some awareness about what strategies they are using and how they work. I want that child to say, "I looked at the beginning of the word and it was a /th/ sound and the girl in the picture was throwing a ball so I tried 'throw' and that made sense, so then I looked at the rest of the letters and they all worked to make the rest of the sounds of 'throw'."

Also, the most appropriate strategy to use depends heavily on what your child can already do. You might more simply equate this with book level. Certain levels of books require children to use certain strategies. In very early books children should look at the pictures to help figure out words, and maybe sometimes look at the first letter. Children should not be 'sounding words out'- looking through the letters of the word left to right and blending the sounds together- until they are already reading pretty well. I'm not going to get into what strategies to use with what levels because that would be a really long long long post. However, there is sort of an order to things.

This is not exhaustive...

• Look at the picture
• Remember the words you know by heart. (Children should not try to 'sound out,' or decode, high frequency words such as the, it, and, me, etc. These should be memorized and recognized instantly. Most early books have just a few of these.)
• Look at the first letter(s) and make the sound (sometimes we call this getting your mouth ready. It is a precursor to sounding words out)
• Look for parts of words you know (if you know str- or -ike then you can figure out strike just by connecting those two chunks. This also applies to affixes, like re- or -tion)
• Always be paying attention to what would make sense or sound right. This is not guessing. This is predicting and we adults do it all the time.

If your child is struggling to figure out a word for a long time and is becoming frustrated, if you are becoming frustrated, if the connection to the meaning of the book is getting lost because of this one dumb word, just tell it to him! If there are several words like this (more than 1% in a chapter book. Yes, you heard right, children need to read with 99% accuracy in order to become better readers) change books. Reading should be easy. EASY. This idea does not compute for most of us. In our culture we believe that success comes from facing struggles and working really hard. We say, "no pain, no gain," and "nothing worth getting was ever gotten the easy way." But reading doesn't work like that. All the research shows that in order to become better readers (and therefore to go up through the levels of books, if that's what matters) children must have a lot of time reading books that are EASY. In chapter books this means over 99% accuracy. In very early books (with one sentence on a page) sometimes one error is already 5% of the words, so the rule in books with fewer words is a little less stringent. Regardless of level, children need to feel successful in their reading if they are going to put in the time that is required for further success. (Read the post on praise for some ideas on how to help children feel successful)

And try some other ways to support your child in figuring out words!