A "pronounced" victory for phonics!

2 questions:

• How many phonics rules do you know explicitly and work with with your students?  
• How fluent (in reading or speaking) are your students expected to become working with you?

  

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The (generally pointless but commercially and academically lucrative) battle between proponents of "phonic" and "whole word" approaches to reading instruction  is (apparently) over, according to new research by "Researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit", summarized by our friends at Science Daily, quoting one of the researchers:

"The results were striking; people who had focused on the meanings of the new words were much less accurate in reading aloud and comprehension than those who had used phonics, and our MRI scans revealed that their brains had to work harder to decipher what they were reading."

 Q.E.D.

Since from the summary we do not get much of an idea as to what the research methodology looked like, we'll just have to trust them--and their conclusions. (I'll access the actual article and report back in a comment to this post, but that is almost irrelevant here.)

What is of real interest is not the link between phonic training and reading comprehension but the connection between training in oral reading fluency and reading comprehension, well established in early literacy instruction for kids. (The current study was with adults learning a new, artificial language but seems to be a good parallel.)

In L2 pronunciation teaching, the relationship between accuracy of individual sounds or words and speaking fluency has not, to my knowledge, been researched--and published. (If you have a good ref on that, please post it for us!)  Part of the reason for that is that intelligibility, rather than accuracy, has become the "gold standard" of instruction in the field, to a large extent creating the understandable lack of interest in "traditional" segmental-focus-based (individual sounds) teaching methods.

The real irony here, if the new research is even close, is that in L2 instruction, downplaying phonetic accuracy and instruction in phonics may ultimately be undermining development of reading (and speaking) fluency. At the very least, the MRI data apparently indicated that the brains of  the adult "whole worders" in the study had to work much harder with word recognition.

Although in haptic work we are certainly not "phonatics" by any means, the method is still based on initial phonetic anchoring and extensive, systematic oral reading practice. If yours isn't, it may be time to get back to basics. To get started, begin by seeing how many phonics rules that you use in teaching you can jot down in less than 1 minute. Anything short of a dozen suggests that your students may be "dys-fluent" as well.

Citation:
University of Royal Holloway London. (2017, April 20). Phonics works: Sounding out words is best way to teach reading, study suggests. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 21, 2017 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170420094107.htm

The source article:

Taylor, J. S. H., Davis, M. H., & Rastle, K. (2017, April 20). Comparing and Validating Methods of
Reading Instruction Using Behavioural and Neural Findings in an Artificial Orthography. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000301

Connecting reading to pronunciation

Clip art: Clker

Fascinating study of the neurological correlates of literacy in children by Yeatman and colleagues at Stanford, summarized by Scientific American, "Brain connectivity predicts reading skills." The basic finding was that changes in the "white matter" connective tissues in the brain help explain individual differences in development of reading ability. Note how that happens:

" Differences in the growth of both tracts (the arcuate fasciculus, which conects the brain's language centres, and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, which links the language centres with the parts of the brain that process visual information) could predict the variations in reading ability. Strong readers started off with a weak signal in both tracts on the left side of the brain, which got stronger over the three years. Weaker readers exhibited the opposite pattern . . . Both processes are influenced by experience — underused nerve fibres are pruned, whereas others are myelinated — so they occur at different rates and times in different people."

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The researchers go on to propose that " . . . individual children might benefit from reading lessons that are tailored to their patterns of brain development." Research on the underpinnings of the process and pedagogy of L2 phonological system development seems to point to a common "thread," if you will: relative connectivity of language-related brain centers. By extension, L2 learners also "benefit" from a pedagogical system that involves multiple-modalities and multi-senses. Does your pronunciation method need a touch of pruning or myelination? It does . . . 

HELPS for fluency and comprehension: Oral reading rides again!

HICP/EHIEP is based on extensive fluent (haptically-anchored) oral reading both in class and as homework. In general, in reading education the value of oral reading had been played down for a number of reasons, among them a focus on the false dichotomy between language comprehension and language production--and the priority of the former. HELPS appears to bring that process back into perspective for beginning readers at least. On the face of it, the application to pronunciation work is striking.

The key claim is that developing oral reading fluency first can greatly enhance reading comprehension. Granted, that is part of an entire reading system that includes all the usual components, but the relative balance and ordering of priorities is intriguing. Notice the basic steps in the process the instructor uses (You'll have to watch both videos 1 and 2.) Then try this "simple" system sometime, sticking to the same dozen steps or so, with one of your students (with an appropriate text!)  In many respects it is not all that different from that used in EHIEP when working with an extended, practice conversational text. You will almost certainly find that watching this video "helps!" (Note: The link to the youtube video is in the title of the post, not off the HELPS logo.)

Haptic "hand" and kinaesthetic sky writing for spelling and pronunciation

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This video clip on the 5-step protocol of "Guided Spelling" for new readers has all the necessary EHIEP/HICP components: (1) Read the word, (2) Say it, (3) Write it on paper, (4) Write it in the air with pencil, (5) Close eyes and visualize it, and (6) Open eyes and "erase" the image in the air. (The testimonials from the kids are about all the confirmation that's needed.) With a little tweaking, that set could be adapted to do more with pronunciation, especially if some of the steps were done simultaneously. (See earlier post on the "Haptic Dictionary Pronunciation Protocol.)

Many adults anchor the spelling of a word as well when working principally on pronunciation. If you have worked with Japanese you have almost certainly had students who use "haptic hand-writing" on the palm of their hands, spelling out words as a favoured memorization strategy. When done by some learners, in fact, it is almost spell(ing) binding (or anchoring!)

A "cursive" look at haptic anchoring

With the coming of the digital age, some public schools have begun to eliminate training children in cursive handwriting. Research such as this nice piece by Mangen of University of Stavanger, Norway and Velay of the Université de la Méditerranée, Marseille, France which explores the potential impact on early reading development and general literacy that removing that visual/haptic "nexus" may have for at least some types of learners.

Clip art: Clker

There is substantial research on the kind of encoding and memory trace created by keyboard input with adults. In essence, the pattern of action of our fingers on the keys in most seems to be not as bound up holistically with the word being inputted. In other words, although we may be a very fast inputter, as we type a new word, or even a long one, the brain is still creating a more linear string that is for the most part temporary. Our fingers may not be of much help later in recalling the pronunciation of most words "digitally," what only the hands and not the full body (including the eyes) were involved in anchoring in the first place.

Not so with cursive encoding the argument goes, especially with early literacy development, requiring full arm, rhythmic movement. Having worked with many pronunciation students over the years who report that their best strategy was writing a word over and over in cursive as they said it out loud, I'm sure there is something to this. With those who know and are "fluid" in cursive--and that is not many younger nonnative speakers now--I still sometimes use that technique, even adding some additional anchoring on the stressed syllable and possibly a special "anchoring" rolling ball pen. Try it. Write (in cursive--sorry no appropriate font available here) if it works.