When you are teaching beginning reading, does it matter what language you are working in?Charles Temple, Ph.D.Hobart and William Smith CollegesGeneva, New York USA

Or, to put it more precisely, does it matter what orthography (spelling system) the language is written in?Let me give you some lengthy background. Back in the 1970’s, psycholinguistics and studies of language acquisition were exciting many of us who were studying literacy, and at the University of Virginia under the tutelage of Edmund Henderson, we were investigating children’s invented spelling in English. When a four-year-old in Boston wrote YUTS A LADE YET FEHEG AD HE KOT FLEPR (“Once a lady went fishing and she caught Flipper”) and a five year old in Virginia wrote LAS NIT I POLD OT MI LUSTUF AD POT ET ONDR MI PELR (“Last night I pulled out my loose tooth and put it under my pillow”) we saw evidence, as Noam Chomsky had prepared us to, of “psycholinguistic universals:” there was something going on here that suggested that children had an innate disposition to discover relationships

between what they said and what they wrote. The relationship was based on expectations of a similarity between the names they used for written letters and the sound units of speech. I got so interested in this phenomenon that I wrote a book about it in the early 1980’s. At the same time a number of researchers were saying, yes—but not all children can manipulate those

small sounds of speech they are

spelling with the same ease, and those children who cannot are likely to have trouble learning to read. Those researchers, working entirely in English,

Second grader in Kumasi, Ghana, who was asked to draw a picture of a mouse!

paved the way for the now widely-held conviction that the principal culprit in reading disabilities is some children’s lack of awareness of phonemes. By the way--those researchers were psychologists and psycholinguists and not special educators. Special educators at the time were still seeking the cause of reading disability in confusions of visual perception tied up with lateral dominance—only in recent years have special educators become vocal advocates of phonemic awareness for children at risk of reading failure.

Just as researchers were beginning to recognize the difficulties being aware of phonemes posed for some students struggling to read English, some researchers in Pennsylvania, USA, decided that if reading by phonemes was hard, they would make it easier on struggling readers by having them read an invented syllabary instead of words spelled with alphabetic letters. Gleitman and Rozin did that, and it worked. Nobody took them up on the suggestion that we teach reading in English by syllables, as far as I know—and it’s easy to see why. Whereas some languages build their words out of relatively few syllables (Japanese makes do with forty-something) English has an enormous number of different syllables (5,000 by one count I came across). Nonetheless, their work raised a question that is relevant to our work: since phonemes are so hard to isolate and manipulate, should we base our reading instruction on phonemes if we don’t have to?Back to invented spelling for a minute: Would this seeming universal tendency of children to invent spellings—which is the same thing as instinctively hypothesizing an orthography--and doing so on phonetic grounds, hold up in other alphabetic languages? A colleague and I examined invented spelling in French and Spanish, and later in German and Finnish, and we reached the conclusion that yes, children would hypothesize spellings before they had been taught them, and yes, in spelling all of the languages in question children seemed to examine the phonetics of words and seek a close match between the names of letters and sounds in words. But children’s hypotheses were thwarted in spelling different languages at those points when the phoneme to letter name assumption didn’t work reliably, such as when there were competing spellings available for the same sounds (CE BA for “se va” and LLO for “yo” in Spanish, for instance), when there were silent letters to be spelled (such as IL PAL for “ils parlent”), or when there are alternations in pronunciation brought about by phonological rules (such as ZUK for “Zug” in German). Spanish and Finnish see far fewer invented spellings of any variety, of course, because those languages use shallow or transparent orthographies—whereas English and also French have deep orthographies, meaning that spellings of words must be understood in relation to other words, morphemes within words, grammatical rules, or word histories. In the US, Richard Gentry and later Bob Schlagal identified developmental stages of invented spelling in English; and some years later, Uta Frith in the UK and Linnea Ehri in the US described stages for word

recognition in English. Both systems began with children focusing on individual letter-to-sound relationships, and then working with larger chunks of words—onsets and rimes (as one linguist called them) or phonogram patterns-- and then more complex features such as inflectional and historical morphemes. (These points are important. Even in English, phonics and spelling are not a simple matter of matching phonemes to letters).Meanwhile, our SIG’s own Donald Bear and other colleagues who were Edmund Henderson’s students at the University of Virginia have taught the English-speaking world to use “word sort” strategies for teaching children to recognize words and also spell them; strategies that are based on children’s natural learning progressions, especially calling attention to onsets and rimes and morphemes in words. But how well do these stages and teaching strategies work outside of English?Ten years ago, I was doing a workshop for early grade teachers in Slovakia, and I assumed word sorts would be an appropriate strategy to teach them. Not so! Looking through a Slovak dictionary, I could find no more than two words that shared the same rime, or phonogram pattern. Then just two years ago, my good friend Professor Sally Beach and I were working on a USAID project to teach early primary grade teachers in Armenia to develop Informal Reading Inventories (reading tests that have text passages and word lists prepared on graduated levels of difficulty). But what is a word in Armenian? Armenian is an agglutinative language, which means many morphemes can be combined in the same word, with the result that a whole English sentence would be one word in Armenian.For the past four years I’ve been working part-time on a project in Tanzania, where the language of instruction in primary schools is Kiswahili. I’ve made five observations. The first is that Kiswahili has a transparent orthography: each sound is spelled one way only. Second is that relatively few syllables are recombined to make up Kiswahili words. I don’t know the number, but surely Kiswahili is closer to Japanese with its forty-something syllables than to English with its 5000. Third is that Kiswahili words are agglutinative. A popular song in Kiswahili has this line: Ningekuowa, Malaika. The first word all by itself means “I would have married you.” Fourth is that Kiswahili words have eleven noun classes that are represented with syllables, so spelling is not purely phonetic--or you could say spelling is not just about representing speech sounds with letters. My fifth observation was a real surprise (the others were not a surprise, because I had studied Kiswahili in college). The ministry of education in Tanzania has adopted the “Big Five” skills from American Bush Administration’s National Reading Panel. Teachers are being trained to teach reading by stressing phoneme awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. In Tanzania, teachers are telling me that syllables are “out.” The training is especially intense on having children hear phonemes, and matching letters to them. Now the “Big Five” don’t enjoy the cachet they once did even in the US—not only are US educators putting

more attention into different kinds of comprehension and writing, but the approach to phonics promoted by the National Reading Panel was not much enlightened by views that went beyond simple letter-to-sound correspondences. Is the stress on phonemes and letter correspondences the most efficient and effective way to teach children to read words in Kiswahili? Many teachers, after all, had traditionally been teaching children to recognize familiar syllables in words. Should we retrain those teachers to use the American Big Five?107,000 teachers staff 11,400 primary schools in Tanzania. Many of those schools are located kilometers and kilometers from the nearest paved road (Tanzanian staff from our project reported that when they recently drove out to some project schools in a remote district, the children ran out of the school building and hid in the corn fields. They had never seen a motor vehicle). Training in the “Big Five” is meant to reach each one of those 11,400 teachers. We can imagine that it will be a very long time before the ministry of education has the money or the energy to train them all a second time in literacy, just in case stressing the Big Five wasn’t a good idea after all.I haven’t seen any research specific to Kiswahili that supports the approach of stressing phonemes and phonics over all other possibilities—or any that doesn’t. Hence the question: When you are teaching beginning reading, does it matter what language you are working in? Or, to put it more precisely, does it matter what orthography (spelling system) the language is written in?

Charles Temple, Ph.D.Hobart and William Smith CollegesGeneva, New York USA