Sound It Out, Shmound It Out

In “'Sounding Out': A Pervasive Cultural Model of Reading”, Catherine Compton-Lilly details her own research indicating that, despite students', parents', and even teachers' reliance on the mantra sound it out as a strategy for approaching unfamiliar words, successful readers actually use a range of strategies including, but not limited to, relying on the structure of language to guess the unknown word and using cues like pictures. In fact, it turns out the sound-it-out strategy is pretty low on the list.

Last semester, during my first field experience, and in the absence of practical knowledge about teaching literacy in K-2, I certainly found myself falling back on the familiar mantra. In one particular case, a second grader (who had been held back a year) asked me how to spell the word 'ready' (a spelling strategy in its own right) during a writing activity. Although reading and writing are not the same thing, the two processes do have a reciprocal relationship, and so I instinctively told her to sound it out and to try to think about which letters would correspond to those sounds. And I did this in spite of the fact that she had an Fudd-like speech impediment. To her credit, she knew that the word ready involved the vowel digraph “ea” and that the word ended in “y”, but because of my over-reliance on the sound-it-out strategy, she naturally ended up spelling the word 'weady.' Looking at it now, I see all the strengths she brought to the table and that my only contribution resulted in her only spelling error.

Although this student who was held back had a generally positive disposition toward reading, there was another student in this K-2 class who was feeling very frustrated with his own efforts to read. He enjoyed books and loved to be read to, but when individual reading time rolled around he focused exclusively on pictures and often refused to attempt to work with text. It occurs to me now that this first grader also had a (much more serious) speech impediment, and I wonder whether his frustration was the result of a clash between his own ability to reproduce phonologically Standard English and the general cultural insistence on the sound-it-out strategy.

Compton-Lilly suggests that the sound-it-out strategy is of limited use to all students and that it is of particularly limited use to students who speak a dialect other than Standard English. I wonder then, do speech impediments present another distinct dimension of complication to phonetic reading strategies? What particular considerations should we keep in mind for these students?

2.15.14 UPDATE:  It turns out that they reciprocal relationship between reading and writing is not quite as strict on the sound-it-out strategy.  While it is true that this strategy remains of limited use for reading, for a particular stage of writing development, this strategy is actually very useful.  Of course, I didn't know that at the time!