ecn-pa.haamu (07/29/82)
I hope this requested clarification is not redundant: I am not an educator or psychologist, but to the best of my limited knowledge Michael Wagner is correct: "chunking," or increasing the amount of information taken in with a single eye motion, is the most important technique to be learned in order to increase reading speed. But subvocalization, or mentally (and possibly even physically) pronouncing words as you read them, is the most important "technique" to be unlearned. Since subvocalization is much more time-consuming than visual recognition (in most adult readers), it negates the advantages of chunking; moreover, it encourages the reader to pronounce every single word, no matter how unimportant. I'm not talking about "speed reading," a term I'd like to avoid because it is too often equated with "skimming." I'm talking now about reading with complete comprehension at or slightly beyond what researchers consider the highest "conventional" speeds--around 1000 to 2000 words per minute. Such speeds are entirely plausible while taking in no more than half a line of text at a time. Many researchers attribute subvocalization to the way in which reading is initially learned--orally--and that the answer is for trained readers to disable their subvocal processes, if that doesn't just occur naturally, through reading drills while listening to music or saying nonsense words. I seem to recall, however, someone recently saying the real answer is to reduce or remove the oral and phonetic emphasis we place on the training of beginning readers. (Unfortunately I don't have time to dig up the reference.) If this idea has validity, then moving towards a phonetic (or increasingly phonetic) spelling standard would reinforce a connection we should perhaps disavow. (Of course this is far from the strongest argument against spelling reform, but I will defer to the poets on that score.) -- Mark Raabe
henry (07/31/82)
Non-phonetic reading is definitely faster, and it is probably true that many people find the transition from phonetic to non-phonetic to be a substantial hurdle. This would seem to imply that reading should be taught non-phonetically from the beginning. There is just one problem. Non-phonetic reading is *the* major cause of the wave of illiteracy in school graduates in the last decade or so. It is much harder to learn to read via the non-phonetic approach. One must learn to walk before one can learn to run; non-phonetic teaching of reading is a failure. I had the good fortune to have taught myself to read before school, so I was largely exempt from this problem. There are (or at least, were) cultures where it is taken for granted that children will know how to read before entering school. This seems a much better approach. Does anybody know of any studies that have been done on how children in such cultures teach themselves to read? Given that they are expected to absorb it the same way they absorb spoken language, it would seem pretty much inevitable that such kids would learn to read phonetically.
wagner (08/03/82)
I wonder how many people in netland were reading before they got to school? I know I was, but I dont remember how long before (and my parents are out of town, so I cant ask them). Anyone know what the statistics are in the general population? Michael Wagner, UTCS
wagner (08/03/82)
One thing that might help guard against sub-vocalization is a device they used with us in grade school. It was a film strip projector specially equiped with a device that limited the view to a small area of the screen (typically a line at a time, but there were options to make it only a flying spot about 2 words wide on the line, or up to several lines high and no spot). Using this special projector, we were shown stories. The object, clearly, was to teach us to read without backtrack. A second objective, always less important, was to up the speed and get us to read quickly. It didnt work entirely for me...I sometimes still backtrack a whole paragraph, convinced that I have missed something. Only once in my recollection over the last few weeks did I actually miss a line, so clearly my fears are unfounded in the main. And yet I do it about once every 5 pages or so, depending on the content. But I deviate from the point - in flying spot mode with the speed up, there was never time to vocalize the words. If you didnt recognize the word by sight alone, there was no hope of going back and trying to pronounce it for recognition. We were taught to forge forward and go for comprehension of the rest when we missed a word, and only to go back if at the end of a unit (sentence or paragraph, dont remember which), we were still in the dark as to the meaning. While this helps reading quickly a lot, I find I sometimes just ignore words I dont know, and never bother to look them up (a bad habit, I am sure). Does anyone have any references to this sort of stuff? I would be interested in reading more about this phase of learning, now that my interest has been roused. Michael Wagner, UTCS