Phonics

The first three chapters of Word Identification Strategies (Fox, 2008) were interesting to me because I wasn't completely sure before I read them what early reading strategies were, especially phonics.  Phonics stands out to me because it is something I remember my dad talking about, how in elementary school his teachers only taught with phonics and it just didn't work for him, and I didn't know enough about the subject to ask him questions about it.  Now I want to ask because as I was reading I wondered how anyone could learn to read without phonics, connecting speaking sounds to how they are expressed in writing.

I asked my husband how he was taught reading and writing because from a young age he was being formally taught at least two different languages at once, English and Arabic, and for both he was taught the alphabet letters and their corresponding sounds and how to put those letters and sounds together to make words, or, pull apart the words into their letter sounds to figure out what the word is.  So it made sense to me how phonics would naturally be how to learn reading because it is just the link between the audio sounds and the visual symbols.  Then it hit me like a brick: phonics would a crazy way to teach reading to a student that was deaf, and, my dad is very hard of hearing and probably was from a young age without anyone really noticing.  Now I understand why phonics is an important tool, and, absolutely must be used in conjunction with all of the other early reading strategies described in the book, because not every tool does work for everyone, ever, but probably something of everything helps almost everyone.

It was a little fun reading through the chapters and thinking about where some of the first and second graders in my main placement are at and where my kindergarten buddy is.  I think my kindergarten buddy is a "prealphabetic word learner and precommunicative speller", she is inconsistent with white spaces, her letters are sometimes turned a different way, pictures are prominent, her writing wanders on the page, and she was writing the same two letters over and over the other day (ERERERER).  That is very exciting because that is where the book says a lot of kindergarteners are at and then I know that some of the first graders I see are "partial alphabetic word learners and semiphonetic spellers" at various levels.  I appreciated a lot how the book emphasized that being able to identify the different stages and understand how they are and can progress to the next helps aware teachers encourage students to their advancing stages.

As I understand it, it is in these early stages of learning a first language that students are cementing what they already identify objects as in spoken words to their written words, so that now the concept of a tree is a real tree tied to being able to say it, read it, and write it.  When a student is learning a second language how does the new way to say, read, and write it tie to the real tree idea?  In my own experience all of them get all tied together and it almost makes learning a new written word for tree harder if I already know a way.  Or, maybe it makes it easier that I already have multiple ways of "knowing" tree, so my brain already has some nice pathways.  So do people who speak multiple languages eventually get a stronger separation between the languages or a really strong intertwining of all?  Is this very different for children who are learning more than one "first" language?
I hope I remember more about my own learning as I think about it more.

The METACOGNITION aspects were really interesting to me.  This video talks about it some, but doesn't quite do the amazing process justice.  Maybe it needs some of the rhyming strategies described in the book to pick up the energy a little bit.