I’m still learning from the podcast Sold a Story! You can too. Just click on the link and listen!
About a year and a half ago I learned the term “orthographic mapping.” I was very familiar with orthographic mapping from my experience teaching children to read, but I didn’t know what it was called, just that it is amazing to see it happen.
Then I discovered Sold a Story has some episodes I’d not heard yet. While reading through episode ten I came across the selection below. This time I learned the term “implicit learning.” I’ve witnessed this with Ella, my third child, who got the best of my reading instruction after I learned from the first two.
She long ago forgot the phonograms. But her reading has continued to evolve. I won’t belabor you with how much it has evolved. Again, she forgot the phonograms years ago.
I’ve always been kinda sad about that, but I couldn’t complain about it as I watched those scores continue to climb. In this episode, I learned why this has been happening. Implicit freaking learning. What she learned way back in the beginning twelve years ago wired her brain for reading like this.
Read the section below to learn more about implicit learning. They discuss another thing I’ve always felt but thought was blasphemous. That is the belief that teaching reading isn’t that difficult. Teach the phonograms and some spelling rules, start them blending and decoding, make them read. They don’t need to know much more. That has seriously felt blasphemous for years. The discussion below gives me some relief.
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And what he’s (Seidenberg) seeing now — when he visits schools, when he talks to teachers, when he reads what they’re saying online — is that some schools may be teaching kids more than they need to know.
Seidenberg: I’ve seen first-grade classrooms where “phonological awareness” is the big term that’s on the wall, or teaching kids what diphthongs are.
The point is — children need to be taught how to read.
They need to know how to identify the sounds in words — but they don’t need to know that’s phonological awareness.
And they need to know that the letters “oi” make the sound /oy/ in coin. But they don’t need to know that’s a diphthong.
Seidenberg: I think there’s a failure to distinguish what a teacher might need to know about how language works and how reading works, and what a kid needs to learn.
He’s concerned that teachers now think they have to teach kids everything there is to know about how English spelling works — every spelling pattern, every exception, every rule.
Seidenberg: And so you have the emergence of a view that really emphasizes explicitly teaching everything that goes into becoming a reader.
There’s not enough time in the school day to teach kids everything they need to know about how written language works. And more importantly — it’s not necessary.
Seidenberg: There’s another kind of learning.
This other kind of learning has a name.
Seidenberg: Implicit learning or statistical learning.
This kind of learning occurs without explicit instruction. Mark Seidenberg’s research has shown that the brain has a remarkable ability to learn from the statistical regularities in language, such as the frequency of certain spelling patterns in words. Explicit instruction is critical at first — most kids don’t just start picking this up. But research shows that a lot of what a good reader eventually knows about words — and how they’re spelled and what they mean — is stuff they learned implicitly, through reading. Mark says the goal of reading instruction should not be to teach kids everything they need to know. It should be to teach them enough so that this implicit or statistical learning can kick in.
Seidenberg: You know, there’s this idea of cracking the code where the lightbulb goes on and the kid kind of goes — oh, that’s how it works.
Remember Kah’Marii?
Kah’Marii: s-m-i … smi — ing
You heard Kah’Marii having a lightbulb moment in Episode 2.
Kah’Marii: Smiling. Smiling. Smiling.
Kah’Marii got a lot of phonics instruction — not on things like what a diphthong is, but on how to sound out written words. He needed extra help. But eventually, he was able to decode words with spelling patterns he hadn’t been taught. That’s implicit learning.
That kind of learning depends on lots and lots of practice. And Mark Seidenberg is worried that schools may now be spending too much time on instruction and not giving kids enough time to read.
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There are a few points that stick out to me from this selection because I’ve believed the same thing for years.
- As mentioned before, I don’t believe teaching a child to read is difficult. Too much mystery is assigned to the idea of teaching children to read.
- There are minimal steps to teaching children to read and we need to focus on those, excluding that which is not important in the early part of teaching reading.
Like I said, I continue to learn. Today’s point, implicit learning. And the thing to remember is that we need to teach explicitly to get our children to learn implicitly.
