How Children Learn to Read and How to Help Them

Cedric Cullingford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780749434915
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135382131
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is an introductory guide to the theoretical and practical aspects of the development of reading skills. The book looks at the success or failure of various techniques and provides underpinning theory.

Part one

How children learn to read

‘The books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way.’

(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 1)

Chapter 1

How children learn

You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse.

(Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1 Scene 2)

Caliban’s outburst about the ambiguous role of language reveals how ancient and unchanging is the controversy about heredity and environment, between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, or more recently between ‘genetics’ and ‘environmental determinism’. We all know that we are the products of the circumstances in which we live, sharing the language, culture and attitudes of that part of the world in which we happen to be born. We all accept that we display characteristics that can be traced to our parents, and that these make us distinctive. But to understand how these two forces in us are balanced, and to understand the processes through which we go to become what we are, is a complex matter. Our personalities and attitudes might seem shaped, but our behaviours are our own.

One human characteristic that seems universal is the tendency we have, once we have formed an opinion, to stick to it doggedly even in the face of evidence. Once they have reached a particular point of view, many people concentrate on bolstering their arguments and attacking all alternative opinions. Many of the arguments about the balance between innate intelligence and learned skills are conducted as if there are absolute alternatives. Perhaps there are political motives in suggesting either that children are all born with unchangeable innate abilities, or that they can be formed or moulded in whatever way one wishes. One extreme hypothesis that led to a particular line of research sought to prove that all behaviour is a result of conditioning–that a mixture of rewards and punishments produces particular forms of reaction. Stimuli of any kind, a gesture of approval by a mother, or a bit of food, are assumed to accumulate into a pattern of responses. Against this mode of thought is placed the argument that human beings, unlike animals, are born with innate characteristics that include the ability to use language. Chomsky defined young children’s natural abilities with language as if they were ‘Language Acquisition Devices’. There is still a tendency for people to polarize these different shaping influences, suggesting for instance that it is all a matter of genetics. Such extreme positions are unhelpful.

The ways in which children come to terms with the world, react to it, form their own perceptions and are formed by what happens to them are a fascinating study for anyone who is as interested in individuals as in general rules. Parents are obviously as excited by the family characteristics their children show, in looks or gesture, as they are by all the signs that children reveal of learning how to respond with their voice or through the manipulation of their hands. The fact of language constantly reminds us of the importance of children’s early interactions with others, and the more we learn about very young children, the more it is clear that they are both capable and active in their learning. That children are not mere passive receivers of information is clear; that they are dependent on the circumstances in which they find themselves is equally clear.

Children develop rapidly in the womb, and demonstrate by their reactions that they are already responsive. From the moment they are born, children are actively engaged in trying to make sense of the sounds and sights of the world, and are therefore, in a sense, already beginning the first stage of learning to read. Newborn infants constantly explore what they see in a systematic way. They are trying to understand what they see and hear by finding some characteristic consistency or pattern. They are seeking meaning. The first task of learning is to understand how to focus on, and recognize, relevant clues. At first the world looks like a mass of colours and shapes; parts of which move and parts of which are still, parts of which are light and parts of which are dark. By the gradual accumulation of small clues, and by many perceptual guesses, the complex disarray of visual impressions is understood through the recognition of constituent parts as a coherent whole. Faces become familiar, primary colours stand out, objects are perceived to be close or farther away. Learning to discriminate starts from the beginning. Gradually children make sense of what they have learnt, at first in their own way and then in ways that are closer to the conventions with which adults view the world.

Most of us take for granted many of the clues that children are still exploring. We automatically concentrate on sounds that are significant to us, and ignore others, responding to a voice and blocking off the music in the background. Children need to learn to focus on one item of information seen or heard rather than another. While ostensibly attending to a voice they can be more aware of other sounds that are going on: the sound of the wind, the sound of an aircraft, the buzzing of a fly on the windowpane or the bustle of other children. True listening means taking in all these sounds; but conventional attention demands that just one significant source of sound is attended to at any one time.

Learning is a matter of predicting and guessing which perceptions are significant and which are not. It can be a painful struggle for babies and toddlers to know what they are supposed to see and understand. Without any particular starting point, they often flounder through a series of guesses based on their own version of events. But this difficulty can remain for older children. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the way in which children do not take in implied rules, or unspoken assumptions. When a teacher says ‘Go and shut the door’, she usually means ‘Get up quietly and without disturbing anyone else’. For children every act is far richer than the more mechanical actions of adults. An adult going to close the door will march straight across the room. A child will tend to stop on the way, look out of the window, nudge someone else, try a different way of walking. This is not daydreaming but an indication of a way of seeing the world that has not become completely focused on a task in hand. For adults it is usually clear what convention demands, which clues, perceptual or cultural, need to be ignored and which rules are implied. For children the task of learning is not only a matter of prediction or guessing but also a matter of learning what to ignore and how to focus on the particular.

Children’s idiosyncratic view of the world is a result of this constant engagement in learning rules, whether of perception or behaviour or reading. Their interest in fairy stories is part of this engagement in trying to make personal sense of the world they are in. They know consistencies are important but do not always know what these are. Some of the worst traumas of childhood come about because the rules that children think are being applied are suddenly changed, or an excitement in which they are caught up is suddenly broken from outside. The cry from the heart that characterizes children’s deepest dissatisfaction is that ‘it’s not fair’. Suddenly their own consistent sense of the world and its patterning is broken by a change in convention. Children’s involvement in their learning, shown by their curiosity and capacity to go on being curious, means that they are constantly refining their point of view against others. Children are not empty vessels slowly being filled up with more information, or creatures incapable of rational thought. They have a picture of the world that is wholly their own, and which to adults seems merely idiosyncratic. Their picture of the world has its own rules including a clear distinction between good and bad. Children understand in their own way; they explore and play with ideas actively Even the mistakes they make show their desire for inner consistency. Even their attempts to emulate the world as they see it are more of a parody than an imitation.

Such a display of mental activity needs a variety of stimulation against which to develop. Parents clearly play a critical part. Without their parents’ alert responsiveness and ability to sustain a dialogue, children do not gain the necessary ability to analyse the world in which they find themselves. The desire to learn is innate, so deep-seated as to be taken for granted; but this desire needs to be encouraged. Even deaf children, for example, display the same range of sounds that other children try out, but for lack of any audible response they become silent. Lack of answers, of any kind, in sound or touch or gesture, gradually creates a world in which a child feels him- or herself to be separate. Children start by being capable of a close, optimistic relationship with the world about them; it is the lack of close attention that makes them become enveloped in a world that is entirely their own.

Parents, therefore, are the first and most important teachers. Children test out their voices and ears in their versions of conversation, listen to the different sounds which, like lullabies, contain distinct meanings and effects. Children parody the sounds of language that they hear in what is called ‘babbling’, and gradually become attuned to the distinctive sounds of the language around them. Parents are not only engaged in supplying warmth, food and comfort but in supplying dialogue and explanations through which children learn to perceive the meaning and structure in the world. In supplying toys, parents are also giving children their first learning tools to help them order and manipulate their surroundings.

From the beginning children are engaged in mental as well as perceptual activity. Indeed, it is hard to separate the two. The cerebral activity that is a common denominator of all learning is the need to categorize, to make distinctions and to generalize from experience. The greatest feat of learning is to know what makes one event distinct, and how to perceive the rule that makes it applicable elsewhere. It has been suggested that all learning is a matter of being able to draw up categories; to see the uniqueness of every dog, on the one hand, and see that the term ‘dog’ applies to creatures of all kinds of size and shape, from poodles to Saint Bernards, on the other. For young children the ability to recognize the same face, and the ability to recognize faces as a distinct phenomenon, and then the ability to understand that within each individual and uniquely different visage, a smile means something special, is just one of many examples of this development of understanding.

The power of children’s early learning is not always recognized because it is difficult to relate it simply to the terms in which adult cognitive development would be discussed. There tends to be an assumption that children are rather limited, and that it is only when they are capable of mental acts at a particular stage that they can be said to ‘think’ in the normal sense of the term. But it is clear that such a view of children’s limitations is based on a very careful choice of what should be tested, and through a very particular and very limited use of linguistic experiment. The fact that it is difficult to test children’s recall until they have the language in which to explain it has led to the assumption that children are not capable of recall. They might not have the capacity to explain what they are learning, but are nevertheless applying this capacity to the learning of language.

The rapidity with which children learn language is itself remarkable, especially when it is considered that most of what they learn is through their sense of context. Every extension of their vocabulary comes about through some form of guesswork and through actual use. Every new word in a conversation or in a book gradually has its own characteristic meaning defined by the use in a variety of different contexts. The richer in language their environment, the better chance children have to develop. The fact that not all do so shows up the important distinction between what children are capable of learning, or expressing, and what children actually do learn.

This distinction between capacity and performance is one that remains with people throughout their lives, for no one is mentally alert all the time. It is tempting to view learning as a constantly increasing cognitive mastery: but if this were so, all teaching would be simply a matter of conveying information. There are no distinct stages through which all children go at a particular age; nor is there a steady curve of cognitive improvement. Instead, since the ability to learn depends so much on seeing the relationship between different things, there are moments when children suddenly seem to have learnt a great deal and others when they seem to be at a standstill. Learning is not so much a matter of steady accumulation as a matter of adaptation. Each year might bring particular characteristics to children, and there are certain changes that children might go through. But the more we learn about different kinds of learning, the more we see that adults, like children, ‘regress’ to states of inarticulacy, of less than perfect rationality. Before we make a distinction between ‘childishness’ and ‘inactivity’ it is worth reminding ourselves that varying states of consciousness in adults are just as ambiguous as in children, if usually better disguised.

Not all children learn at the same rate; nor do all children learn in the same way. Some children approach the task of ordering the material that confronts them in a systematic way; others wait until they can see the whole solution at once. Children learn as much through their powers of imaging as through their powers of logic. Children learn through associations just as they learn through the amount of attention they bring to bear. Many of the subconscious attitudes, expectations and associations are as important to children’s learning as their ability to gain cerebral mastery over the organization of facts.

Accepting that children learn rapidly in their own way and have a strong desire to do so should help parents and teachers understand how they can assist and give them the means to develop. They will understand why children find what seem like simple tasks so difficult; why, when confronted by a word they can’t read, children will look away, out of the window, at their friends for comfort, at anything but the task in hand. Understanding that learning is an active process also helps us create the means by which children can help themselves. For the process of learning, and the mastery of language, underlies the task of reading. Reading can be taken as a symbol of learning; it encapsulates the need to predict, to understand categories, to see which clues make sense and which do not, to see the purpose behind the text and not to be put off by the seeming arbitrariness of some of the rules. Reading gives an insight into the world without which a child will be powerless. As Humpty Dumpty said, ‘It depends who is to be master’.

Chapter 2

The process of learning to read

Children learn to read from the moment that they make sense of language, for reading brings together the abilities of visual and auditory discrimination that children explore from birth, and the sense of meaning that language engenders. Any form of learning combines a variety of skills, abilities and definitions; the learning of language, in which reading is subsumed, is more complex than most. But because reading is a task so vital to so many others, and because it is so central to what takes place in schools, there have been many attempts to reduce the sense of complexity into a simple process, by means of teaching strategies that do not take into account all we know about the power of the mind to discriminate and to retain information. It is important to place the learning of reading in the wider context of learning, and recognize that it is more than a battleground between different approaches to the teaching of skills. This recognition of the importance of understanding the process of learning to read is both hopeful and liberating; it shows how important is the role of the parent as well as the teacher, and accepts that there are many things that can be done to help, most of which are not very technical or complicated.

Some of the complexities that apply to reading have already been met, and overcome, in the learning of language. Even the ability to make sense of listening is a process of precise analysis and prediction as well as response. Every person speaks in a different way: he or she has his or her own ‘ideolect’. Each person’s voice is unique and can be shown to be so when analysed on a tape. And yet we can all understand each other, because the sounds we make correspond nearly enough to the sounds, the phonemes, that other people make. We become used to different accents and different dialects, pronouncing ‘book’, for example, according to whether we are in the north or south, and yet this is no barrier to recognition. Children have to learn which sounds are meaningful entities, or phonemes. When a child first makes noises they have little bearing on speech; gradually every child learns to copy the sounds that carry recognizable meanings. Parents tend to talk to their infants of around three months old as if everything can be understood, but when the child starts to respond verbally, they simplify what they say, and develop a kind of ‘baby talk’. This reveals that they instinctively recognize that children are learning the sound rules of the language, particularly sounds that recognizably belong to a particular language.

Every language has a different set of phonemes. In English ‘l’ is one phoneme, although we know that it has two different sounds, when we notice where our tongue rests when we say ‘feel’ or leaf’. In other languages such a difference generates two different phonemes. In Arabic the ‘p’s in ‘spin’ and ‘pin’ are different. In Chinese there is no phonemic distinction between the two English phonemes ‘l’ and ‘r’. Each language uses different segments of sound to carry distinct meanings. Childre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part one: How children learn to read
• Part two: Early reading
• Part three: The first stages of reading
• Part four: Developing reading skills
• Part five: Extending reading skills
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes and references
• Index