Entry #5 “Sound It Out” an overarching cultural model of reading

           The article “Sounding Out”:  A Pervasive Cultural Model of Reading by Compton-Lilly (2005) describe a picture of how the teachers, the parents, to the whole society expect the beginning readers to sound out the strange words and learn the letter-sound information while doing so. In the article, the writer found that although many of the children and parents use different strategies other than sounding out the sequential letters when reading, almost all the children in the survey think “sounding out” is the most useful and most often used strategy to read. In a matter of fact, they unconsciously used many other strategies such as using the pictures to guess the word, etc. The author believes that sounding out is just a handicap, not a help to reading, and that there are better alternatives to master reading. 

          After reading this article I remembered when I start to learn both Chinese and English when I was young. My first language is Chinese, though it is different from English in many ways, I can still think of similarity to English learning. When I was about 3, I can use a picture book to tell a story with the exact words printed on the book, even though I cannot read a single word whatsoever. The only reason I can “read a book” independently was because that I was read to very often, so I recited every word my mom read to me and match them to the corresponding picture. I couldn’t recall how I felt about reading at that time, but I think I must have make meaning out of the pictures and the words to remember them all. When I go to school as a first grader, I encountered a big problem: I cannot pronounce the Chinese Characters using the sounding system (called Pinyin), which is a lot like English phonetic alphabet. I worked hard but got frustrated all the time. My mom, however, has decided to help me with it, so we did a lot of work practicing the phonetic symbols at home, and whenever we were outside, she would point to a random word found on the street, and she would pronounce it first for me to spell it in Pinyin. I gained progress pretty fast. By the end of the semester, I was so good at spelling Pinyin and I still am now. I found the spelling experience is very beneficial for me to learn Chinese, even though it seems like the sounding-out thing sounds useless and a waste of time.Then I started to learn English when I was in 3^rd grade. I learned the alphabet; phonetic alphabet first and then the words. My mom helped me to sound out the words and she always said I need to read aloud so I can learn a language.            

         Despite what the author said about sounding out, I feel I benefited a lot when learning both the languages. However, I do agree that there are better alternatives regarding reading English. As for me, I am very interested in teaching young children reading with picture books. As I mentioned before, I could make meaning of the pictures when I was only three, since I was exposed to the literacy. I believe that pictures help children make meaning of the texts as well as decode them as they read, and learn naturally. 

           My major concern is that what kind of strategies I should use when teaching English reading to children whose first language is not English? How can they make sense of the texts, the words when they don't know anything about English? Should I start step by step, like first class the alphabet, and then words, decoding words? I wish I could teach the second language learners to learn English naturally and in a fun way and fall in love in reading, not as most people who learned to read in pain.