Chapter 44: Modeling the Connections Between Word Recognition and Reading

Chapter 44
Modeling the Connections Between Word Recognition and Reading MarilynJagerAdams
· Adams’s article explores the relationship between word recognition and literacy. It discusses how scientific efforts to understand this relationship have contributed to a greater understanding of the nature of reading.
· The parts of the reading system are interconnected and work together in complex ways.
· They are not simply completed in isolation and then “welded together” from the bottom up in a modular, discrete fashion.
· The challenge for reading educators is to understand the parts of the reading system and how they are related.
· Questions:
· What kinds of specialized knowledge do skilled readers have?
· How is that specialized knowledge organized and what processes bring it into play?
· How does our knowledge of skilled readers help us understand the learning process and its potential difficulties?
· We know skillful readers read quickly and seemingly effortlessly (@ > 5 wps)
· Certain assumptions (numbered below) have been made about this skill. These unproven assumptions have been seriously considered by researchers and education professionals and have thereby found their way into instructional practices and classroom curricula.
1. Skillful readers recognize words as wholes and depend on the shape or pattern of the word rather than on closer analysis. Therefore, it may be counterproductive to focus on letter-by-letter spellings.
2. Skillful readers access meaning directly from seeing a word; therefore, it is also counterproductive to teach children to sound words out.
3. Skillful readers use context to anticipate words they will see; therefore. It is useful to teach children to use context and distinguishing features of words such as first letters and word length rater than decoding instruction.
4. Since skillful readers use context to anticipate the words they will see, and comprehension confirms those meanings, shouldn’t children’s ability to guess be encouraged?



Answers from Research
· Adams strongly addresses these unproven assumptions and ideas about word recognition and reading skill. She reveals research that exposes these ideas as faulty, and argues against their being incorporated into reading curricula. Research shows that:
· 1. Skillful readers do process virtually every letter of every word they read. Letter recognition is integral to the reading process.
· 2. All meanings of a word are aroused in the course of perception. Context selects the most appropriate meaning from among alternatives. (No preselection)
· 3. Skillful readers habitually translate spellings to sounds as they read.
· The Four Processors
· The Four Processors Model seeks to understand the reading process as a whole, coherent system. The key too many newer models of reading is “…the coordination and cooperation of all [processes within the model] as shaped by the reader’s own prior knowledge and experience.”
· ” Processor” is used as a term that is descriptively convenient to separate one from the other three.
· The interrelations among pieces of knowledge as they pass through and among the excitation and inhibition of the individual “processors” are responsible for reader fluency and text coherence.
· Each “processor” hones in on the ID of the word in question, and relays its progress back to the others. With connectivity among and within each of the processors, skillful readers then access the sound, spelling, meaning and contextual role almost automatically and simultaneously.
· The Orthographic Processor
· Represents the reader’s knowledge of the visual images of words; necessary for word recognition and spelling.
· It alone receives information from the printed page.
· Ignoring or guessing an author’s words will not facilitate eventual comprehension. Even skilled readers are unable to guess correctly more than 25% of the time.
· “There may be no more broadly or diversely replicated set of findings in modern cognitive psychology than those that show skilled readers visually process nearly every letter and word of text as they read.”
· Learned associations between and among individual letters are responsible for the easy manner in which skilled readers respond to printed words.
· Letter order difficulties will only be surmounted by students’ learning more about likely and less likely patterns of spelling in English.
· Skillful readers’ ability to read long words is dependent on their ability to syllabify. Skilled readers syllabify automatically and in the very course of perceiving letters.
· The OP responds to the relative strengths of the interletter associations if the orthography has been deeply overlearned by the reader.
· [Implication for teaching: Teach children to syllabify. Also, research indicates there is NO SUBSTITUTE for teaching writing, spelling, phonics, and affording students lots of reading at manageable levels. Addtionally, call attention to internal details and spelling patterns within written words as you strive to guide students toward automatic word recognition]
· The Context Processor
· In charge of constructing coherent, ongoing text interpretation: selecting word meanings appropriate to the text
· Does not prevent stimulation of inappropriate meanings; revises the reader’s understanding to meet the situation found in the text
· In countless studies, context only affects word ID when the experimenter has done something to affect, slow or disrupt orthographic processing.
· Beginning readers, who are less skilled in decoding, will often guess when reading simple stories, using contextually appropriate words. This is a sign that the OP is not quick enough to do the job.
· As reading shifts to more complex topics, longer and more difficult content words carry the comprehension, and guessing becomes detrimental.
· Decoding must become more and automatic before it can work in concert with contextual processing.
· Use of context comes AFTER the word has been sounded out; not as a word ID device. Context is a back-up system for word interpretation.
· [Implications for teaching: Teach children the background knowledge they need to interpret what they read.]
· The Meaning Processor
· No comprehension is possible without the meaning processor.
· Word meanings stored in the MP are stored as interassociated sets of more primitive meanings, not as whole, familiar words. This enables the reader to focus on one aspect or another of the word as appropriate to the context.
· Morphemic awareness may be useful in inferring meanings of new words.
· Broad, frequent, and thoughtful reading influences vocabulary most.
· Spelling patterns children attend to during instruction influence the patterns they
· do attend to during word recognition
· [Implications for teaching: Reading a lot influences vocabulary, and linguistic and cognitive growth. The number of times students encounter a vocabulary word and the richness and variety of the contexts in which the word appears affects the learning of the word.]
· The Phonological Processor
· Processor for speech sounds and sound sequences
· PP acts to hasten and consolidate the connections among all the other processors including that between sight and meaning
· For skilled readers, words that are visually familiar can be recognized and understood without phonological processing.
· However, printed words vary greatly in their frequency and visual familiarity
· 50% of print children see is accounted for by only 109 words; 90% by only 5,000 words
· Although text coherence depends on the frequent words, text information depends on the less-familiar words
· PP is a back-up system for less visually familiar words – how?
· (Syllables are represented by frequent spelling patterns -> spelling patterns translated to phonological equivalents -> pronunciation will evoke meaning)
· The more frequently the word is encountered, the stronger the direct
spelling-to -meaning connection becomes
· Phonological translations: underlie ability to “sound out “ words
· The speed of this basic ability ensures the many words of known meaning, but less visual familiarity can be recognized with ease
· Readers cannot depend on visual memory alone for reading the thousands of words that are much less frequently encountered, but that carry essential information.
· Insensitivity to the sounds of speech and their relationships to letters is the single most glaring difficulty in disabled readers of all ages
· Even with special instruction, this difficulty does usually persist into adulthood
· Students must be consciously taught to realize the insight that the sounds of words can be represented by a relatively small number (44) of “articulatory gestures” (phonemes). Phonemic awareness is not “natural”.
· It is determined, in part, by heredity.
· “The pressing issue for the field of dyslexia at this time is the extent to which the elusiveness of its cure derives from the difficulties of trying to turn off or displace an overlearned but self-limiting mode of perceiving text.” (p 1240)
· Deep, overlearned knowledge of letters, spelling patterns and words, and their phonetic translations, enables the reading process.
· [Implication for teaching: teach phoneme ID, pronunciation and phonemic awareness]