Fluency with Reading and Spelling Words

Buy this book »

Advances in technology have allowed researchers, mainly in the areas of psychology and artificial intelligence, to investigate brain functions, eye movements, and other basic reading processes. The focus of this research was not on how to teach reading or on comparisons of various approaches but rather on what happens internally when we read and how this changes as readers move from beginning stages to more sophisticated reading.

We know that readers look at nearly all the words and almost all the letters in those words. The amount of time spent processing each letter is incredibly small, only a few hundredths of a second in proficient readers. The astonishingly fast letter recognition for letters within familiar words and patterns is due to our brains expecting certain letters to occur in sequence with each other.

Readers usually recode printed words into sound. Although it is possible to read without any internal speech, we rarely do (Stanovich, 2000). Normally as we read, we think the words in our mind. We then check this phonological information with the visual information we received by analyzing the word for familiar spelling patterns. Saying the words aloud or thinking the words also seems to perform an important function in holding the words in auditory memory until enough words are read to create meaning.

Skilled readers recognize most words immediately and automatically without using context. Good readers use context to see if what they are reading makes sense. Context is also important for disambiguating the meaning of some words ("I had a ball throwing the ball at the ball."). Occasionally, readers use context to figure out what the word is. Most of the time, however, words are identified from their familiar spelling and the association of that spelling with a pronunciation. Context comes into play after, not before, the word is identified, as a result of the brain's processing of the letter-by-letter information it receives (Cunningham & Cunningham, 2002; Nicholson & Tan, 1999; Stanovich, 2000).

Skilled readers can accurately and quickly pronounce infrequent, phonetically regular words. When presented with unfamiliar but phonetically regular words—nit, kirn, miracidium—good readers immediately and seemingly effortlessly assign them a pronunciation (Daneman, 1991). This happens so quickly that readers are often unaware that they have not seen the word before and that they had to "figure it out." This effortless decoding involves the reader's accessing known spelling patterns or similar words (Cunningham & Cunningham, 2002).

There has been a long debate on whether to teach phonics by using a synthetic or an analytic approach. A synthetic approach generally teaches children to go letter by letter, assigning a pronunciation to each letter, and then blending the individual letters together. An analytic approach teaches rules (e.g., the e on the end makes the vowel long). Recent research, however, suggests that the brain is a pattern detector and that while we look at single letters we are considering all the letter patterns we know. Successful decoding of a word occurs when the brain recognizes a familiar spelling pattern or, if the pattern itself is not familiar, searches through its store of words with similar patterns (Adams, 1990; Cunningham et al., 1999; Goswami & Bryant, 1990). Skilled decoding, then, involves the use of an analogy strategy.