R.I.F.

These are some of the topics that come up again with Sudbury parents, including yours truly:
Screens/video games/computers
will they get into college
reading

Des and Amelia are sort of starting to read. Amelia makes a project out of it about once a week. She sits down with Frog and Toad and slogs through it. Des spells out signs to me and asks what they say. He also reads signs and menus when we're out, or he tries to sound them out.

English a tricky language. It's a cluster fuck of borrowed words and latin grammar superimposed(arbitrarily) on a germanic language. It's also extremely difficult to learn to read english because it is not purely phonetic in its spelling like most languages. That being said it's mutability is ultimately a strength because it is so expressive and allows for a great deal of nuance in communication.

Back to reading, when it comes to learning or teaching someone to read I am strictly on the side of phonics. The greeks came up with such an elegant solution to recording speech by transcribing sounds instead of whole words or ideas. The flexibility is amazing. One of the first things linguists do when they discover a new language is assign it an alphabet. Not a set of pictograms but phonemes. Why? Because all languages have a finite number of sounds that they form but a much larger set of words, ideas, etc. that are conveyed by these sounds in different combinations.

So that's my biased view. I had to rethink reading when the kids were first interested in it because I have read thousands of books. I don't read the same way they do. I am a fluent reader in English. I don't have to sound out the word "can" every time I see it because I have probably seen it a hundred thousand times. I recognize it and I only have to focus on its context. So the first part of reading is decoding, matching the letters with the sounds and the second part is context, understanding the place and definition of a word in relation to other words. It takes some serious thinking at the beginning. Many of us, without realizing it, read on autopilot. The way you drive to the grocery store and have no recollection of how you got there because you've gone so many times you don't really have to think about. You can focus on yelling at your kids to cut it out already.

So here's an experiment inspired by a set of christmas ornaments I have.
Read this word:
POSTOB
What does it mean? How do you pronounce it? POST-ob? Wrong! Po-STOB? Guess again.
Here's a hint: It's the name of a city.
Still can't get it? Well, I'm being a jerk here, I'm using the Cyrillic alphabet.
In the Cyrillic alphabet P makes the sound of the latin R and B makes the sound of the latin V.
Now try-
Yay! You did it!
A small city on the Don river in southern Russia. The word is at the bottom.

The ornaments are painted to look like Matrushka's with the name of a different russian city inscribed at the bottom of each. My dad brought them back for me from Russia. I studied Russian for about two years. I actually went there about ten years ago. Can't speak a word of it but I sort of remembered the alphabet so I was able to sound out, slowly, the names of the cities( Yaroslava was by far the toughest). You had to figure it out with no background info. What assumptions did you make? That it was an English word or an american city? Why did you do that? Because this is a blog written in English by an American. When I was trying to read it I had a different set of facts but it still took me some time because the material is so unfamiliar. New readers are reading with much more of a blank slate than us. That's one of the reasons why they struggle.

Hmm, what's my point here. I guess my point is that reading is difficult for anybody if it is unfamiliar material. We all go through the same process but our experience let's us move faster.
So I don't worry about my kids learning to read or being fluent readers eventually. I respect their process. People worry so much about the decoding part of it when they could help their kids ultimately more by just talking to them more and introducing them to as many unfamiliar words and ideas as possible. This way when they come across something in their own reading they won't be flying blind.

Rostov.