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,
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