Stepping stones to reading

Theory Into Practice, Autumn, 2004 by Margo Bowman, Rebecca Treiman

Additional research has detected several other factors that influence children's ability to use letter names in connecting print and speech. First, children's ability to take advantage of vowel letter names follows the same patterns as their ability to use consonant letter names (Bowman & Treiman, 2002b). Children perform better when a vowel letter name occurs in the initial position of the word than when it occurs in the final position. For example, a study using the same task described previously found that children learned print-pronunciation pairs such as AP for ape or OT for oat more readily than pairs such as PA for pay or TO for toe. Second, whereas young children may experience some degree of success when using a logographic strategy to read print, their attempts to spell based on visually distinctive print are typically unsuccessful (Bowman & Treiman, 2002a; Treiman & Rodriguez, 1999; Treiman et al., 2001). In fact, the lack of a phonetic connection between printed and spoken words hinders prereaders' spelling performance to the point that both letter names and letter sounds in word-initial position produce superior performance to visually distinctive print. For example, after being shown how to spell a set of five made-up words using phonetically plausible letters of uniform size and color or a set of five made-up words using letters that were not phonetically plausible but that varied in size and color, children tended to produce the phonetically plausible spellings based on both letter names and letter sounds more often than the visually distinctive spellings. These results highlight the importance of phonetic information when children are trying to produce print to correspond to the sounds they hear. While children may be able to experience a small degree of success when learning to read visually distinctive print by using rote memorization, they cannot rely on a memorization technique when attempting to spell a set of words. When spelling, children tend to use auditory cues rather than visual cues.

Educational Implications

Given the mounting evidence that even prereaders can sometimes go beyond the rote memorization method of linking visual patterns and spoken words, teaching programs should be developed that take advantage of this information. Research suggests several factors that allow even young children to go beyond a logographic approach in learning about print. One factor is the availability of links between print and speech that make sense based on knowledge that children possess. For many young children in the U.S., this includes knowledge of letter names. Because young children typically learn the names of alphabet letters before they learn the sounds, and because they become quite proficient at identifying letters by name, early reading material should include words that contain letter names. For example, one can teach words such as eat and no, which contain vowel letter names, as well as words such as peek and car, which contain consonant letter names. Prereading children can use the information contained in these words to form systematic connections between print and speech, thereby taking the initial steps toward using letter information to identify print.