by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: April 28, 2010

One telling example of cognitive development versus demonstrated ability occurred when a proud father decided that his very little girl was a genius! She could count to 50. He was adamant that she be tested for geniushood and begin her life of special studies and perks early.

But when the child was tested, she could not demonstrate that she actually understood what the numbers meant and had only memorized the numbers. The test consisted of trying to get the child to start counting at 7 or 18, and the child could not do it. Other tests indicated that she was of normal intelligence, but still fairly bright to have memorized 50 numbers at such a young age.

Learning to read is about reading and comprehension. Pure phonics training, unlike whole word training, leaves great gaps in the ability to comprehend what is being read.

When phonics is the only focus of learning to read in very early childhood, there is no understanding of the meaning of the words. The only thing that is going on is memorization of the sounds that are made when visualizing certain symbolic and representational combinations of letters. Yes, the child can translate word combinations into convincing sounds, but is not getting or giving information from those words.

At some point, a young reader has to start memorizing words, their meaning and how to spell them. The young reader will have to learn how the words create different contexts or how words have different meanings in different contexts.

But, there is a time when more focus on phonics is helpful. More developed children, adolescent and adult illiteracy and pronunciation are helped when a larger proportion of phonics training is incorporated into the learning process. Pronunciation is improved by phonics. Learning other languages is improved by phonics training.

 In these cases, however, the individuals have gained a much larger vocabulary and have a greater understanding of the meaning of words.

Strictly teaching by the phonics method is faulty because the spelling, meaning and use of words in proper context is set aside in favor of memorizing sounds and memorizing pronunciation. When challenged to demonstrate that they know what a word or string of words actually means, the results will be the same as for the little girl who could remember an amazing number of numbers, but who did not know what the numbers meant.

Finally, being able to look up a word in a dictionary, being able to understand when other speakers have various accents and pronunciations that change the spoken word and being able to expand knowledge about words and their alternative meanings can be seriously delayed when a pure phonics approach is used to teach children to read.

Learning to read is a lengthy educational process that goes on for life. Even in adulthood, we stumble over old words, new words and changing word meaning. It is worth it to take the time to give very young children an understanding of word spelling, meaning, and pronunciation at the same time.

With a whole word approach to teaching reading skills, children may not be able to wow everyone by reading from the great books by age six, but they will be able to read, comprehend and discuss what is being communicated in children's books by age six.

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