Little Reader

[beetiger]

projectmothra is sight-reading some phenomenal number of words these days. He's just randomly walking around places, trying to read signs, and getting them kind of right more often than not. (It say "Please Flush"! This store is "Closed on Sunday"! "Men"! That the bathroom of going with Daddy!" That lady's shirt saying "Soccer"!) It's kind of boggling. He'd been "playing" our Apples to Apples set by trying to read the cards, so we just bought him Apples to Apples Junior so he'd be able to get more choices like "Hot Wheels Cars" and "Cowboys" and fewer like "Henry Mancini" and "Adolf Hitler".

In any case, as I mentioned, his sight reading vocabulary is huge, but he doesn't have any interest in phonetics/sounding out words. He knows all his letters and the primary sounds they make, but he's somewhere between uninterested and incapable of "sounding out" a word even if I guide him heavily through it. He'd rather I tell him the word so he remembers it next time he comes across it.

My friends who know more about Early Education than I do: should I be fussing about trying to help him get the sounding out concept, or should I just let him build an arsenal of sight-read words and not fuss about it?

Comments

[beowabbit]

I don’t know much about early childhood education, but I know a fair amount about linguistics and writing systems and the psychology of perception (and a teensy little bit about the neurology of perception), and I promise you that sight-reading is perfectly fine, and won’t get in his way later on. He needs to eventually be able to sound out completely unfamiliar words when he comes across them, but really, adults with good reading skills only read a word letter-by-letter if they don’t know it already. We pick out words based on some combination of general shape and recognizing the combinations of letters, but the latter case isn’t sounding out the word phonetically, it’s knowing instantly that the word house corresponds to the letter-pattern h-o-u-s-e (which you can quickly distinguish from l-o-u-s-e because it’s slightly shorter) in the same way that a literate Chinese speaker knows instantly that it corresponds to the stroke-pattern 家.

Yes, it’s really important to be able to sound out new words, but that’s one of those things that can come on its own once you have enough words memorized by sight. And being able to sound out new words letter-by-letter, while it lets you get through a short job application if you have to, is not adequate on its own (in my opinion) for real, fluent literacy of the sort that you’re used to in your social circle.

He’s gonna be fine!

One thing that occurs to me as useful is to give him lots of material that’s a little bit beyond his current abilities, but that he can get with a stretch. Material he’s mostly familiar with, but with some unfamiliar words (and some context to help him figure them out). Apples to Apples is a great idea. Another would be to see how much of a kids’ movie he can get with the sound off and subtitles on. (I’d bet you’d need to introduce him to the movie that way, though; it’s probably not something to try with a movie he’s already used to.) I’d encourage you to mix a little of what you read in, even though that’s going to be generally way over his abilities; I bet part of why he’s excited about signage is that it’s not contrived, but language written as adults use it, and being able to figure out a headline (or even a few important words) in the newspaper Mommy’s reading or the subject of the email that Daddy’s about to send would be pretty cool for him.

Do you do crossword puzzles? You might want to start — doing them around him will create all sorts of opportunities for talking about words and letters, even if the puzzle itself is way beyond him, and will also give him a model for looking at words in a different way than he’s doing now. (I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what he’s doing now, but I’m all for versatility and looking at things from new perspectives.)