Teaching your baby to read is becoming more and
more high priority for parents now as it becomes clear that learning to
read at a young age offers numerous advantages for the child once he or
she begins school. Studies have consistently found that teaching a baby
to read and helping children develop phonemic awareness well before
entering school can significantly improve their development in reading
and spelling. However, when it comes to teaching babies to read, there
are two main teaching methods.
These two main methods of teaching a baby or
child to read are the whole language method, and the phonics and
phonemic awareness method (the phonetic approach), which should be the
preferred teaching method in helping children learn to read. Some
prefer the whole language method, while others use the phonics approach,
and there are also educator that use a mix of different approaches.
With the Look-say approach of whole language learning, a child begins
with memorizing sight words, and then taught various strategies of
figuring out the text from various clues.
The whole language method produces inaccurate and
poor readers compared to students of the phonetic approach. Using the
whole word approach, English is being taught as an ideographic language
such as Chinese. One of the biggest arguments from whole-language
advocates is that teaching a baby to read using phonics breaks up the
words into letters and syllables, which have no actual meaning, yet they
fail to acknowledge the fact that once the child is able to decode the
word, they are able to actually READ that entire word, pronounce it, and
understand its meaning. So in practicality, it's a very weak argument.
English is an alphabetic system, and unlike Chinese, it is not an
ideograph like Chinese characters, and should not be taught using an
ideographic approach.
I always say that if your baby can speak, then
you can begin to teach your baby to read. I won't mention any names
here, but I think most parents are probably aware of one very popular
"reading" program, which is a whole word approach. Using this method,
your baby simply learns to memorize the words without actually reading
the words. There is no scientific evidence to suggest that teaching your
baby to read using the whole word approach is an effective method. In
fact, there are large numbers of studies which have consistently stated
that teaching children to reading using phonemic awareness is a highly
effective method.
Teaching phonemic awareness to children significantly improves their reading more than instruction that lacks any attention to phonemic awareness. - statement made by the National Reading Panel [1]
I do think that the debate on the effectiveness
of teaching a baby to read using either the whole language or phonics
method is settled by the statements made by the National Reading Panel.
They reviewed over 1,960 different studies to make their conclusions.
In fact, while my wife was pregnant with our
first child, I began doing extensive research on the subject on how to
teach my baby to read - after birth, of course. Like most parents I also
came across the popular whole word teaching approach being heavily
marketed. Seeing the infomercials got me quite excited actually, seeing
the babies on TV "reading". But after trying it out, it occurred to me
that the our baby wasn't actually "reading", but actually "memorizing",
and I thought to myself, how are my children supposed to read newer, and
more complicated words as they grow older without an appropriate method
of decoding those words? This is where my long and extensive research
into phonics and phonemic awareness began.
After many hours of research and learning as much
as I could, I felt comfortable enough with our simple phonemic
awareness teaching method, that my wife and I began giving brief 3 to 5
minute lessons to our daughter, aged 2 years and 8 months. Within just a
few short weeks, her reading ability (and I mean actual reading
ability, not memorization) was astounding, even for me as the parent who
gave the reading instructions. Friends and family alike, were simply
flabbergasted at what our daughter was capable of reading at just 2
years and 11 months. Please watch the video above, composed of clips of
her reading randomly created sentences for reading fun.
I simply can't imagine this kind of progress
possible with the whole word approach - just think of the tens and
hundreds of words a young child would have to memorize!
Our son is fast approaching the age where he will
soon be able to speak, and we will be using the same simple
step-by-step method to teach him to read. If you'd like to learn more
about our simple, effective, step-by-step program, please signup for our
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Click here to learn how to easily and quickly teach your child to read.
Notes:
1. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report
of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An
evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on
reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
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