Phonics in Bilingual Education

Symbols, Sounds, and Predictions

Some persons believe that when children read, they look at the squiggles or the symbols that are on the page and they pronounce the words. Children learn that particular symbols represent particular sounds or sequences of sounds, and they use this knowledge to sound out these symbols. This commonsense view of reading focuses almost exclusively on discrete, individual units of language within a text. This is possible in alphabetic languages such as English or Spanish. The answer might be different for a symbol-based written language, such as Chinese, which contains several thousand symbols, each denoting a word. This view of reading as pronouncing or sounding out begins with the letters that represent the sounds that together make up words. This view of reading asserts that children learning to read need to learn the sounds represented by letters. When this task has been accomplished, that is, when children are able to associate or connect letters and sounds, they will be able to read. This suggests that phonics knowledge, knowing the sounds that letters make, is central to reading, particularly beginning reading.

The basic assumption here is that if you can sound out the words, you can read, as Constance Weaver explains. While this view of what it means to read is a widely held one, it is not the only one. A different definition of reading begins with meaning or comprehending. According to this second view, what children do as they read is make predictions about the text and attempt to create meaning from the symbols on the page, whether or not they have a clear understanding of what symbols go with what sounds in the target language, as Kenneth Goodman and Weaver explain. For example, a child is reading a picture book about a young girl and her love of horses. The child turns to a page in the story that includes an illustration of a green and brown hill and, in the distance, a spotted horse. The child comes to the sentence: “Annie saw a horse on the hill.” One child reads the sentence: “Annie saw a h-h-h-o-ho-house on the hill.” A second child reads: “Ann saw a house on the hill. No, wait. Ann saw a horse on the hill.” A third child reads: “Annie saw a pony on the hill.” A fourth child reads: “Ann seed a horse up in the hill.” None of these children has read exactly what is on the page. How are these ways of reading different, and what might they tell us about definitions of reading and about the role of phonics in reading?

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