OnTrack Reading

Your child needs to understand phonics to read efficiently. English spellings are intimately linked to the forty to fifty sounds used to build the spoken words of the English language. Linguists and curriculum writers argue all the time over the number of sounds that are relevant, but most agree that for purposes of instruction the word “sat” can be thought of as composed of three sounds, /s/+/a/+/t/.

A comment on notation used throughout this site: When /…/ is used, it means a particular sound, indicated by the notation between the forward slashes. We’ll have to agree on each notation, or discussing sounds on a website can get extremely confusing. When “…” is used, it means a letter name.

Thus, we say “s” can represent /s/ (as in “sit”) or it can represent /z/ (as in “is“) and it can even sometimes represent /sh/ (as in “sugar” or “sure.”) See Notation for the 43 Sounds for a complete list of the sounds and the symbols used to denote them.

Phonics and Comprehension

If you have an apparently fluent reader who has poor comprehension, you should administer the four Phonics Assessment Tests described starting on the Page titled Testing Blending Skill to determine whether he knows the phonics of English. If your child doesn’t have a decent grasp of the phonics content of English spellings, reading will always be challenging, even if he appears to be reading fluently.

So, why should comprehension suffer if your child doesn’t know phonics, as long as he sounds like he’s reading fluently aloud? Because if he doesn’t know the phonics, then your child has to be using some other means of recalling his reading vocabulary. More precisely, he has to be using his memory in some manner. If this is the case he’ll also be inclined to make mistakes, such as confusing “when” for “then” or confusing “house” for “home.”

Using Mnemonics to Read

Clearly, a child who confuses “when” with “then” does not understand the phonics of either word very well. So how is he figuring out which word it is? Well, I believe that he develops a memory crutch of sorts, by which to sort out each of the words he typically confuses, and the development of what could be hundreds such memory crutches, or mnemonics, impedes comprehension.

Why would this be so? Because researchers have established that decoding of the phonics of words is a left-brain activity, whereas the mental picturing of a story line tends to be a right-brain activity. Therefore, when a child is decoding, he’s using the left side of his brain, while keeping the story line straight in the other side. If he’s not decoding, but instead is using a string of mnemonics to sort out the words that he’s reading, all of those memory “crutches” are being processed in the right side of the brain.

In other words, he hits the word “when” which he always confuses with “then.” Maybe his mnemonic is something like “‘when’ points down and ‘then’ points up,” and that he’s convinced himself that he can look at the first letters and sort them out. (These mnemonics don’t have to be either easy to use or reliable. After all, they’re being built by six-year-olds!)

Comprehension Suffers

Regardless what the particular mnemonic is, every time one is drawn upon, the right brain’s memory and cognitive resources, are called into service. But the right side of the brain is where the storyline is being followed. So, the child ends up with two activities going on at once in the right side of the brain. It’s very much like trying to read this page while simultaneously listening to your spouse explain something. One of the two gets ignored, and since your child can’t ignore the mnemonics because that is how he reads, the loser is the storyline. Note though that you can continue “reading” (in that you are doing left-brain decoding) while listening to your spouse. But you’ll have to re-read to get the drift. This is also why we feel like we’re reading when we’re actually daydreaming. The left brain is charging along, decoding reliably, but the right brain checked out a page and a half ago and is busy planning your next vacation.

Incidentally, I have seen numerous examples in my reading practice of very young clients working hard to decode the unfamiliar words in a short story all the way to the end, only to laugh at a punch line that would make no sense to them if they hadn’t been keeping track of the storyline throughout. If your child just doesn’t get it, see if he really knows phonics.

Here’s my story of the client who convinced me of the existence of these mnemonics: A young boy who was really struggling with both comprehension and decoding at the time was reading aloud to me and said “when” instead of “then.” I pointed at the word; his cue to re-examine it. He stared at “then” for a full two seconds and then burst out forcefully with “That is ‘when’!” An instant later, he shook his head and said dejectedly, “then.” I have no idea exactly what he was thinking during that two second interlude, but he was clearly thinking hard, and he was obviously frustrated when all that thinking still yielded the wrong answer. And where was the storyline while all that was going on?

Next: An overview of the OnTrack Reading Phonics Curriculum, or Home Page