On Teaching Beginning Reading With Different Orthographies
1. When you are teaching beginning reading, does it matter what language you are
working in?
Charles Temple, Ph.D.
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Geneva, New York USA
Or, to put it more precisely, does it matter what orthography (spelling system) the
language is written in?
Let me give you some lengthy background. Back in the 1970’s, psycholinguistics and
studies of language acquisition were exciting many of us who were studying literacy,
and at the University of Virginia under the tutelage of Edmund Henderson, we were
investigating children’s invented spelling in English. When a four-year-old in Boston
wrote YUTS A LADE YET FEHEG AD HE KOT FLEPR (“Once a lady went fishing and
she caught Flipper”) and a five year old in Virginia wrote LAS NIT I POLD OT MI
LUSTUF AD POT ET ONDR MI PELR (“Last night I pulled out my loose tooth and put it
under my pillow”) we saw evidence, as Noam Chomsky had prepared us to, of
“psycholinguistic universals:” there was something going on here that suggested that
children had an innate disposition to discover relationships between what they said and
what they wrote. The
relationship was based
on expectations of a
similarity between the
names they used for
written letters and the
sound units of speech. I
got so interested in this
phenomenon that I
wrote a book about it
in the early 1980’s. At
the same time a
number of researchers
were saying, yes—but
not all children can
manipulate those small
sounds of speech they
are spelling with the
same ease, and those
children who cannot
are likely to have
trouble learning to read. Those researchers, working entirely in English, paved the way
Second grader in Kumasi, Ghana, who was asked to draw a picture of a mouse!
2. for the now widely-held conviction that the principal culprit in reading disabilities is
some children’s lack of awareness of phonemes. By the way--those researchers were
psychologists and psycholinguists and not special educators. Special educators at the
time were still seeking the cause of reading disability in confusions of visual perception
tied up with lateral dominance—only in recent years have special educators become
vocal advocates of phonemic awareness for children at risk of reading failure.
Just as researchers were beginning to recognize the difficulties being aware of
phonemes posed for some students struggling to read English, some researchers in
Pennsylvania, USA, decided that if reading by phonemes was hard, they would make it
easier on struggling readers by having them read an invented syllabary instead of words
spelled with alphabetic letters. Gleitman and Rozin did that, and it worked. Nobody took
them up on the suggestion that we teach reading in English by syllables, as far as I
know—and it’s easy to see why. Whereas some languages build their words out of
relatively few syllables (Japanese makes do with forty-something) English has an
enormous number of different syllables (5,000 by one count I came across). Nonetheless,
their work raised a question that is relevant to our work: since phonemes are so hard to
isolate and manipulate, should we base our reading instruction on phonemes if we don’t
have to?
Back to invented spelling for a minute: Would this seeming universal tendency of
children to invent spellings—which is the same thing as instinctively hypothesizing an
orthography--and doing so on phonetic grounds, hold up in other alphabetic languages?
A colleague and I examined invented spelling in French and Spanish, and later in
German and Finnish, and we reached the conclusion that yes, children would
hypothesize spellings before they had been taught them, and yes, in spelling all of the
languages in question children seemed to examine the phonetics of words and seek a
close match between the names of letters and sounds in words. But children’s hypotheses
were thwarted in spelling different languages at those points when the phoneme to
letter name assumption didn’t work reliably, such as when there were competing
spellings available for the same sounds (CE BA for “se va” and LLO for “yo” in Spanish,
for instance), when there were silent letters to be spelled (such as IL PAL for “ils
parlent”), or when there are alternations in pronunciation brought about by
phonological rules (such as ZUK for “Zug” in German). Spanish and Finnish see far
fewer invented spellings of any variety, of course, because those languages use shallow
or transparent orthographies—whereas English and also French have deep
orthographies, meaning that spellings of words must be understood in relation to other
words, morphemes within words, grammatical rules, or word histories. In the US,
Richard Gentry and later Bob Schlagal identified developmental stages of invented
spelling in English; and some years later, Uta Frith in the UK and Linnea Ehri in the US
3. described stages for word recognition in English. Both systems began with children
focusing on individual letter-to-sound relationships, and then working with larger
chunks of words—onsets and rimes (as one linguist called them) or phonogram
patterns-- and then more complex features such as inflectional and historical
morphemes. (These points are important. Even in English, phonics and spelling are not
a simple matter of matching phonemes to letters).
Meanwhile, our SIG’s own Donald Bear and other colleagues who were Edmund
Henderson’s students at the University of Virginia have taught the English-speaking
world to use “word sort” strategies for teaching children to recognize words and also
spell them; strategies that are based on children’s natural learning progressions,
especially calling attention to onsets and rimes and morphemes in words. But how well
do these stages and teaching strategies work outside of English?
Ten years ago, I was doing a workshop for early grade teachers in Slovakia, and I
assumed word sorts would be an appropriate strategy to teach them. Not so! Looking
through a Slovak dictionary, I could find no more than two words that shared the same
rime, or phonogram pattern. Then just two years ago, my good friend Professor Sally
Beach and I were working on a USAID project to teach early primary grade teachers in
Armenia to develop Informal Reading Inventories (reading tests that have text passages
and word lists prepared on graduated levels of difficulty). But what is a word in
Armenian? Armenian is an agglutinative language, which means many morphemes can
be combined in the same word, with the result that a whole English sentence would be
one word in Armenian.
For the past four years I’ve been working part-time on a project in Tanzania, where the
language of instruction in primary schools is Kiswahili. I’ve made five observations. The
first is that Kiswahili has a transparent orthography: each sound is spelled one way only.
Second is that relatively few syllables are recombined to make up Kiswahili words. I
don’t know the number, but surely Kiswahili is closer to Japanese with its forty-
something syllables than to English with its 5000. Third is that Kiswahili words are
agglutinative. A popular song in Kiswahili has this line: Ningekuowa, Malaika. The first
word all by itself means “I would have married you.” Fourth is that Kiswahili words have
eleven noun classes that are represented with syllables, so spelling is not purely
phonetic--or you could say spelling is not just about representing speech sounds with
letters. My fifth observation was a real surprise (the others were not a surprise, because I
had studied Kiswahili in college). The ministry of education in Tanzania has adopted the
“Big Five” skills from American Bush Administration’s National Reading Panel.
Teachers are being trained to teach reading by stressing phoneme awareness, phonics,
fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. In Tanzania, teachers are telling me that
syllables are “out.” The training is especially intense on having children hear phonemes,
and matching letters to them. Now the “Big Five” don’t enjoy the cachet they once did
4. even in the US—not only are US educators putting more attention into different kinds
of comprehension and writing, but the approach to phonics promoted by the National
Reading Panel was not much enlightened by views that went beyond simple letter-to-
sound correspondences. Is the stress on phonemes and letter correspondences the most
efficient and effective way to teach children to read words in Kiswahili? Many teachers,
after all, had traditionally been teaching children to recognize familiar syllables in
words. Should we retrain those teachers to use the American Big Five?
107,000 teachers staff 11,400 primary schools in Tanzania. Many of those schools are
located kilometers and kilometers from the nearest paved road (Tanzanian staff from
our project reported that when they recently drove out to some project schools in a
remote district, the children ran out of the school building and hid in the corn fields.
They had never seen a motor vehicle). Training in the “Big Five” is meant to reach each
one of those 11,400 teachers. We can imagine that it will be a very long time before the
ministry of education has the money or the energy to train them all a second time in
literacy, just in case stressing the Big Five wasn’t a good idea after all.
I haven’t seen any research specific to Kiswahili that supports the approach of stressing
phonemes and phonics over all other possibilities—or any that doesn’t. Hence the
question: When you are teaching beginning reading, does it matter what language you
are working in? Or, to put it more precisely, does it matter what orthography (spelling
system) the language is written in?
Charles Temple, Ph.D.
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Geneva, New York USA