Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Module 3: Reading Reflection
Based on supportive evidence from Weaver (2002), I do not agree with
Marilyn Adams’s (1990) statement that “Skillful readers of English thoroughly
process the individual letters of words in their texts” (p. 108). Weaver presented many ideas in Chapter 5
about how the brain and the eyes work to make reading possible even though they
are independent of one another and that both have very important roles. If someone is reading for meaning, which is
the highest goal of reading, Weaver, during her discussion of perception,
states, “…it seems clear, in fact, that we do not first identify the smaller
units of language, letters, and then work upwards” (2002, p. 90). She
provides practice activities for the reader to help identify which letters of a
word or text are more important than others (I really enjoyed these!), which
are consonants and beginnings. Weaver
relies on the thoughts of Venezky (1970b) to illustrate her argument against
Adams (1990) by quoting, “A person who attempts to scan left to right, letter
by letter, pronouncing as he goes, could not correctly read most English words”
(p. 129). As the chapter continues,
Adams’s thought is refuted with evidence of clustering letters into chunks, not
relying on phonics terms or rules for word perception, and that context is
essential. Finally, Weaver solidifies
her case, showing Adams’s claim is inaccurate, by explaining that not every
word is focused on, much less every letter, during proficient reading. Therefore, I agree!
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Elizabeth,
ReplyDeleteI also enjoyed working through the activities on pages 91-93! It was interesting to see how our minds worked through them. I never realized that certain parts of a word were actually more important than others. It definitely shows that proficient readers read words as a whole rather than identifying letter by letter and then forming words, which turn into meaning. Like you stated from Weaver's text, we do not start with the small stuff and work up. We start from the sentences and words and work our way down if necessary.
Elizabeth,
ReplyDeleteYou made some excellent points! Initially readers do start out by learning letter-by-letter (This can happen well before students ever set foot in a classroom), however it is not an efficient way of reading as a student grows. Chunking and clustering unfamiliar words is much more practical than reading letter-by-letter. As we become more efficient readers we begin to build more speed and comprehension. I feel if we focus on each individual letter the speed and comprehension will suffer as a result. The textbook did an excellent job providing examples of how our eyes fixate on texts and disproved Marilyn Adams' quote. Like you, I also disagreed with Adams' statement.
Elizabeth,
ReplyDeleteI also really enjoyed going through the activities within these chapters because it allowed me to in a way figure out reading for myself. I was able to see that the beginning and endings of the words were the most important when I was reading and then Weaver further explained why that is. While we read, we are actually simply recognizing either whole words or parts of words and not reading letter for letter. If we read letter by letter, reading would be very difficult to understand. It is hard to understand some words when we phonemically sound them out because they are not read fluently which is the way we recognize them.