The
Psycholinguistic Approach to Reading
©
Written November 2004 by Robyn, South Africa
One Saturday morning we arrived at a beautiful
old rambly farmhouse out in the country to attend our course on the
psycholinguistic approach to reading. We
started with some coffee and freshly baked apple crumble & cream and
muffins. The course was run by Sally-Ann
who has 5 children and was one of the local pioneer home schoolers. There were 6 people on the course, three who
were not home schoolers. We started off
discussing home education in general and then sat down to begin the
course. Sally-Ann's approach to reading
and education as a whole was refreshing and inspiring!
Basically the Behaviourist Approach (which is
how most of us learnt to read) starts at the bottom, learning single letters in
a mechanical fashion like a for apple and c_a_t spells cat etc. Reading is a tool to decode letters, words
and sentences. A collection of isolated
skills which, when put together, one can read.
Normally when a child is learning to read and struggles to decode a
word, you then stop and help or correct them.
They then continue with the reading.
As you can imagine, the meaning gets lost along the way and there is
little comprehension of what they are reading.
With this approach you may be able to read (decode) certain words like ‘perished’ without even knowing what they
mean. It is therefore possible to read
without any comprehension (as we did for an example with a paragraph from a
medical journal).
The Psycholinguistic Approach starts from the
top, down. It is also known as the
language experience approach and it is about the importance of reading for
comprehension. Meaning comes first; you
learn to read as a whole. First, create
an idea of the whole book – the cover, the right way up, the
letters, the words, sentences, moving across the text from top to bottom, left
to right. Look and see where to find the
author and the publisher etc. Ask
questions about the book. Predict. What do you think this story is about? They can look at the cover and the pictures
for clues. Discuss. Look at two consecutive pictures and ask them
what they think is going to happen next.
Coming to the text with as much information as possible reduces the
uncertainty. It creates an enthusiasm
and understanding. It becomes applicable
to real life situations and is meaningful.
Correct pronunciation and accurate word identification become less important. You do not stop when they make a mistake and
focus on one word as you then lose the meaning of the whole. Meaning comes first and is absolutely
essential.
Let them finish and 90% of the time, they will
go back and correct themselves when they understand the word in context.
How do you put this into practice? It is simple.
First read to them A LOT. When reading to your children, use a ‘pointer’ eg. a knitting needle and point to
the words as you read. This creates the
idea. In a blank landscape book called
your ‘I Can Read’ book, children draw about a personal experience. They then dictate a sentence about that
experience that you write down in the correct grammar below the picture. Study the sentence together, show them that a
sentence starts with a capital letter and it ends in a full stop. There are spaces between words and the
sentence moves from left to right. Point
out each word. The child then ‘reads’ the sentence to anyone who will
listen as many times as possible. The
sentence must be recorded in various ways, on a strip of paper, with another
picture etc. Children are encouraged to
copy the sentence themselves, however crudely.
On a piece of paper write the squashed sentence with no spaces between
words. Get them to draw lines to
separate the words in the correct places.
Cut, mix and build the words together to make the sentences. Sort, match and stick into a separate ‘Reading Activity Book’.
Once you are finished with this sentence, start again with a new
one. As they get used to this, there are
ways to extend these activities. You can
incorporate conventional phonics and word recognition as you wish without
concentrating on them.
We all left feeling like we had received a
wealth of information, with a very simple approach.
Sally-Ann’s Recommended Books:
School
Can Wait by Raymond S and Dorothy N Moore
A
Different Kind of Teacher by John Gatto
Any
Child Can Read Better by Harvey S Wiener
Some
catch phrases ~
Learning
to Read must not be about punishment or reward.
Reading
must be a satisfying activity.
Baking
is Reading (the recipe)
Also
known as The Whole Reading Approach