- What’s so difficult?
- Children experiencing an act which is unnatural to them
- Learning to read alphabetical orthography is a tough activity
- Complex unnatural cognitive interactions that the brain and environment have to engage
- For a long period of time, humans lived without any form of writing, new invention?
- The alphabet is part of technology? It is a device which conveys information?
- Many words perhaps aren’t spell how they are sound – ‘enuff’ – ‘enough’
- Single letters are pronounced differently depending on context ‘Coke’ – ‘oCean’
- Some words have silent morphenes, therefore how are children able to understand this complexity? – ‘Knight’ ‘Pneumonia
- Reading is one of the more complicated processes – uses attention, knowledge of linguistics, mental speed to read out loud
- Different ‘processors’ have to work in unison to be identify the written word – phonological, orthographic, meaning, context
- It is said by Masha Bell (Coventry Uni) that English is the hardest language to not only spell, but read.
- She said that there are around 800 words which Children often misuse, such as; monkey, asparagus, caterpillar because they contain a combination of letters which are pronounced differently.
- 'It is the worst of all the alphabetical languages. It is unique in that there are not just spelling problems but reading problems. They do not exist anywhere else.'
- She also stated that there were around 200 words on the list that can be improved by dropping ‘surplus letters’ such as the ‘I’ in friend or the ‘u’ in the shoulder
- She argues that the spelling system was a huge financial burden on schools and that in countries such as Finland, words are more likely to be pronounced as they look
- This means that children are likely to be able to read within three months, whereas the UK average is around three years.
- Obviously it is dependent on the child’s actual life, for example disability can undoubtedly impose restrictions, as well as if the parents are reading aloud to them
- Many countries are making modifications to their language to make it easier for young children to learn, for instance, Turkey changed their entire alphabet from Arabic to Latin
- John Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London and president of the Spelling Society. 'It happened in the Soviet Union.' In Germany there were changes made in the 1990s to make the writing system more consistent. English has also developed with words such as 'olde' and 'worlde' dropping the 'e'.
- Perhaps one of the solutions can be to change the spelling of words to avoid any confusion, and spell words how they are spoke ‘enough’ ‘ocean’
Tuesday 29 November 2016
Why do children find it so hard to read?
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There is a slow but constant process of simplification - do some reserach for language change e.g. eyes used to be eyen and teaspoon used to be two words.
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