How do children learn to read?

Research indicates that skilled readers are proficient in being able to decode unfamiliar words, which gives them an advantage in teaching themselves new words when reading. Many children with reading difficulties such as dyslexia find it hard to form a link between letters and the pronunciations they typically represent in words. This makes learning new words much more difficult!

Imagine you are a beginning reader who has never read the word "sip". In English, the letters "s-i-p" represent three individual speech sounds, (/s/-/i/-/p/). If you can say the speech sounds that each letter represents, one after the other, then join (or 'blend') the speech sounds together, you will be able to say the word you are trying to read, even if you have never read it before. Here’s an example. Move your mouse or your finger over the letters to hear the speech sounds!

If you know the spoken word and its meaning, this decoding process leads to word recognition - a triggering of the meaning of the written word ("sip - a small mouthful of liquid"), allowing you to understand what you are reading. Furthermore, after reading the word this way several times, your brain learns to recognise the word without needing to ‘sound it out’ anymore. The word becomes a ‘sight word’ - meaning that it can be instantly recognised. Decoding is how our brains learn new words and with practice, we eventually become fluent readers.

Written English is an alphabetic language - meaning that it is a symbolic representation of the speech sounds of the language. Consequently, an ability to reflect upon and use information about the individual speech sounds in language (phonemic awareness) helps children to understand the relationship between spoken and written language. This makes ‘cracking the code’ of written language easier, helping students to become independent, competent readers and spellers.

The past several decades of research have provided conclusive evidence that this understanding of the relationship between the speech sounds in language and the letters used to represent those sounds is one of the most crucial skills involved in literacy development. Research has shown that good readers are very skilled at using letter-sound relationships when reading, while difficulty in understanding that words are made up of sounds and just how sounds are represented by letters is a hallmark of the struggling reader.

Decades of research also suggest that children should be taught to read by using a 'phonological approach' - meaning that we should help kids to develop a knowledge of speech sounds and the letters that represent them (to read an excellent summary of this approach and why it works, please click HERE). Furthermore, three national inquiries into the teaching of reading have concluded that a method of teaching reading in which students are firstly taught letter-sound knowledge followed by training in how to use this knowledge to read and spell words is the most effective form of reading instruction. This method of teaching is called `'synthetic phonics', and you can read more about why it should be used in all schools HERE. 

Of course, there is more to reading than just cracking the written code! Language comprehension is equally important for reading - but if students cannot read the words on the page, they don’t even get a chance to try to comprehend what they are trying to read. Furthermore, once students develop the ability to read, the new language they encounter when reading stimulates the development of new language skills.

Helping Kids Learn to Read

Teaching beginning and struggling readers to rapidly, automatically and accurately recognise letter-sound patterns and to use this knowledge to construct and deconstruct words is challenging due to the abstract nature of letter-sound relationships.

Furthermore, these squiggles sometimes combine with other squiggles to represent different speech sounds, as in the word "ship"! Understanding that letters and letter patterns represent certain sounds poses a great challenge to beginning readers since there is no meaningful relationship between the way that letters look and the speech sounds that they normally represent. Learning letter-sound associations is especially difficult for many children who struggle with reading due to difficulties in understanding and processing the speech sounds of language (phonological processing difficulties). Such difficulties are known to be the most common cause of reading failure.

Once children learn the sounds that letters typically represent, they need to be able to rapidly, automatically and accurately apply these skills in joining, or 'blending', sounds together when reading unfamiliar words. The opposite process occurs when spelling. Children need to be able to understand, for example, that the word "stop" contains the four individual sounds /s/-/t/-/o/-/p/, which may be represented in writing as the visual pattern, "stop". This skill is known as 'segmentation'.

So an understanding of the relationship between sounds and words allows a reader to "crack the code” of written language. These code cracking skills, combined with vocabulary knowledge, form the backbone of reading and writing ability. They help students to teach themselves new words without relying on another person. Research indicates that skilled readers are proficient in being able to decode unfamiliar words, while children with learning difficulties such as dyslexia typically have trouble with understanding the sound structure of language, especially with phonemic awareness, making learning to decode and self-teach difficult.

In addition to being able to apply sound-symbol knowledge in reading and spelling unfamiliar words, children learning to read need to be able to recognize commonly occurring irregularly spelled words, that is, words which do not conform to typical sound-letter patterns (such as "said", "who" and "yacht"). These words, also called 'sight words', must be learnt with some emphasis on unusual letter-sound patterns rather than through common letter-sound relationships alone. 

In summary, children who are able to independently decode unfamiliar words are able to teach themselves new words without relying on someone to tell them what the word is. Difficulty in using letter-sound patterns and phonemic awareness skills to decode words results in difficulty with reading and writing. Conversely, strengthening letter-sound pattern knowledge and the underlying phonemic awareness skills required to decode written language results in significant improvements in a student’s ability to read and spell.