Do you agree with Marilyn Adams (1990, p. 108) who argued that rather than relying on context, “Skillful readers of English thoroughly process the individual letters of words in their texts?” Why or why not?
I do not agree with this statement made my Marilyn Adams. When proficient readers are reading a text, they are not reading the letters, and then sounding out the words, and then giving meaning to the words. They are reading the words as a whole and giving meaning to them. It was interesting when completing the activities on pages 91-93 in Weaver's text. I never realized that certain parts of words are actually more important when it comes to visually seeing them. We learn that the consonants are more important than the vowels because there are more of them. It is much easier to read a paragraph with missing consonants than missing vowels. Needless to say, we don't need all of the letters to gain meaning from a text. Proficient readers do not identify letters to create meaning, they create meaning from the context of words.
Today, I was tutoring a former student of mine in reading comprehension. He came across the word minutely. He first pronounced it like minute (60 seconds) and added the -ly. He became quite confused when he said it because he didn't understand the meaning. I told him to finish reading the sentence and he was able to grasp that the author was using a synonym for slightly. He was able to pick up on the context of the word instead of using letter-by-letter identification. Even when we do not recognize a word right away, we group the letters together to make familiar sounds.
Callan,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that Adams statement is incorrect. We do not read for the small letters that create words. Rather, we read to allow groupings of letters (words), to tell us a story, and engage our thinking. I also thought that the activities in chapter five were very interesting. I agree that missing vowel words were much harder to determine than the ones with missing consonants. I also found it much simpler when altered words were still in a sentence, helping us determine the altered words due to the context around them. I like your reflection on your tutoring session as well. It encourages this thinking of context being such a beneficial factor in helping a struggling reader.