World-renowned literacy expert, the late Dame Marie Clay, identified three cue sources that contribute to effective reading.
Visual cues involve teaching readers to recognise, for instance, that the written symbol S usually represents a sss sound in spoken English – in other words, phonics.
While this approach may provide a reliable pathway to literacy in languages where the sound-symbol relationship is constant, English is not phonetically regular.
The ability to link sounds to letters is an important aspect of becoming literate, but it has its limitations.
From their earliest experiences with text, children will encounter words like the, mother, come, of, where sounding it out won’t help. (Yes, I acknowledge that the structured literacy approach accepts that some “heart words”, i.e. ones you have to learn by heart, can’t be avoided in their phonically controlled reading books.)
A second cue source identified by Clay is grammatical structure. This enables readers to anticipate the kind of word that fits logically into a sequence of written and spoken English, and in fact helps with those “heart words”. You don’t need to sound out the to know it belongs in a grammatical structure like this: The cat sat on the mat.
Clay’s third cue source is the whole point of why we bother to read at all – to gain meaning.
From the moment we come into the world we try to make sense of it by discovering patterns and relationships.
Clay believed that beginning readers, with their knowledge of the world and how it works, should be driven by the desire to make sense of print.
Throughout many years of teaching early literacy in New Zealand and overseas, I’ve seen this magic play out on countless heartwarming occasions when children have the privilege of learning to read by engaging with captivating and meaningful texts.
The light bulbs flash, they laugh, they rush to get to the next page, and sometimes they leave out or mispronounce words, but it doesn’t matter.
They’ve learnt to love reading, and they’re motivated to continue. Why would you deny beginning readers a range of cue sources, in favour of sounding out phonologically controlled texts which exclude words that may have helped to make sense?
We can all agree that here in Aotearoa New Zealand significant numbers of our students struggle with literacy, but the reasons for this are many and varied.
They include challenges with symbolic reasoning, limited vocabulary development, hearing loss, fetal alcohol syndrome, ADHD, and inadequate nutrition, to name a few.
The solutions have to go beyond ideologically driven responses such as removing everyday terminology that is part of our unique cultural way of communicating.
Patricia Fenton is a Northlander who has held teaching and administrative positions in New Zealand and international schools, and wrote curriculum for the International Baccalaureate Organisation, specialising in literacy.
