Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Professor Terezinha Nunes is Professor of Educational Studies in the Department of Education, Child Development, and Learning, University of Oxford.

Professor Peter Bryant is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Education, University of Oxford and a Visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University.

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Children's Reading and Spelling draws on internationally renowned research to extend models of early literacy. While most psychologists have concentrated on the ways in which very young children begin to read and spell, here the focus shifts to how these skills are developed beyond the initial period.

As children mature, their approach to reading and spelling alters radically, and evidence suggests these changes continue throughout their school career. Authors Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant theorize that children use both informal experiences as well as more formalized instruction to devise their own conditional spelling rules. Ideas are presented in an interesting and accessible way, and potential educational implications are thoroughly examined. This innovative research has much to offer professionals and parents alike.

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Children's Reading and Spelling

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Most of children's learning is generative. They learn not just about specific facts or specific actions, but about how to deal with quite new experiences and new situations. Language is one obvious example, and counting is another. We only hear a limited number of sentences when we learn our first language, but a fluent speaker should be able to say anything he or she wants, using sentences never heard before. We learn to count by getting to know a limited number of counting words, but with this knowledge we should be able to count on and on, far beyond the limits of the specific words that we learned.

Learning to read and spell is much the same. What children learn about reading and spelling words should, in the end, make it possible for them to read and spell reasonably well words that they have never seen in written form before. If children memorized the spellings of lists of words and could write those words correctly, and only those, we could conclude that they had learned how to spell words one by one. But this is not what happens, nor what we would want to happen. We want children to be able to spell most words as a result of learning a limited number of words. This book is about how children manage, or in some cases nearly manage, to do so.

The Connection between Language and Literacy

For many years now the idea that literacy is a language-based activity has dominated research on children's reading and writing. For example, an important collection of papers, published in 1972 by Kavanagh and Mattingly, entitled "Language by eye and by ear" summarized the empirical evidence that had been developed up to that time to support the conception of literacy as a language-based activity. The idea shared by the authors of these papers, and by most researchers on reading since then, is that the core cognitive processes in reading and writing are linguistic because what we learn in literacy acquisition is a written language. Therefore, analysing literacy learning requires understanding what a written language is and how oral language and written language are connected-that is, understanding "the linguistic connection."

This may seem an easy starting point but there is more than one view of what the relationship between oral and written language is. In fact, this has been a matter of debate for some time; the debate permeates discussions in linguistics, the history of writing, the psychology of literacy and education. In this chapter, we will present two different views of how oral and written language are connected, and explore the teaching and learning implications of these. We will argue that, though these are different views, they are actually quite compatible with each other, and that it is a better approach altogether to develop a theory that integrates the two views.

Two Views of the Relation between Oral and Written Language

The first is called the notational view. According to Olson (1994), it has been assumed since Aristotle's time that writing is a graphic device for transcribing speech: "written words are the signs of words spoken" (Aristotle, De interpretatione). Although scientific revolutions since Aristotle have changed the ways in which we think about the physical world, this classical view of the connection between oral and written language has not been dismissed and continues to receive the explicit or implicit support of linguists (e.g. Bloomfield, 1933; Mattingly, 1972; Saussure, [1916] 1983), historians (e.g. Diringer, 1968; Gelb, 1963; Sampson, 1985), psychologists (e.g. Frith, 1985; Cossu, 1999; Treiman, 1993) and educators (Isaacs, 1930; Montessori, 1918).

Recently, Tolchinsky (2003) detailed this conception by exploring the characteristics of orthographies as notational systems, i.e. as artefacts that enable oral language to be encoded, recorded, transported and reproduced in a systematic way. Adopting definitions proposed by N. Goodman (1976) and Harris (1995), she summarized the features of notational systems in general and showed their value for understanding orthographies. A notational system contains a limited set of elements-letters, in the case of an alphabetic orthography-each with a distinctive form. These elements can be copied and identified in spite of variations in the way that they are copied by different users. The elements are semantically differentiated (i.e. they refer to different elements of what is represented) and can be structured by specific rules (for example, in English orthography we read and write from left to right, top to bottom). Because of these characteristics, notational systems are powerful tools. With a limited set of letters, we can write all the existing words in a language, and even new ones, invented much later than the orthography.

This notational view treats writing as a second-order system-a system of (graphic) signs for (oral) signs. Thus reading and writing are directly related to and entirely dependent on oral language. This conception of the relationship between oral and written language has consequences for theories of how children learn to read and write, and also for how they should be taught. If orthographies are notations for oral languages, children need to learn how this representation works, i.e. what is represented by the orthography and how. Alphabetic orthographies are those in which letters represent phonemes-even if there is no exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. Other ways of representing language through writing are also possible, for example, by using a different unit of analysis of the sounds that make up words: Japanese orthography uses Kana letters to represent syllables rather than phonemes (see Akita & Hatano, 1999, for a more precise description). Within this notational perspective, children must learn how the orthography represents the language that they speak in order for them to learn how to read and write. The notational view of the relationship between oral and written language is easy to understand and we believe that it is implicitly accepted by most people. However, it is not the only view of the connection between oral and written language.

The second approach goes beyond the notational view, and treats writing as written language-that is, as a system with its own rules to represent meaning, and not only the sounds of oral language. For some linguists (e.g. Siertsema, 1965; Uldall, 1944), a language system goes beyond the way that it is expressed, either in oral or written form. The sounds that we hear in oral language and the letters that we see on the page are only the surface of the language system. The surface representations express meanings that are part of the deep structure of the language.

Because this approach is less familiar to most people than the notational one, it is useful to start from an analogy to the connection between two different oral languages. A sentence in oral language-for example, "The boy chased the dog"-expresses more than each word taken in isolation. The word order indicates that it was the boy that did the chasing-it signals the subject-verb-object (S-V-O) structure of the sentence. The principle of word order is used in English to represent the underlying grammar and it is what allows us to "generate an infinite class of sentences" (Chomsky, 1975, p. 41). This abstract system is the basis for learning any language in spite of the differences that exist between languages, and it is also used to learn a written language.

The approach to writing as a written language starts from the idea that the same sort of deep structure is the basis for written language as well as for oral language. Thus written language can use its own resources to represent the meaning relations that exist in the grammar of the language, even if they are not captured in the same way in oral language. For example, we use "s" to mark the plural of nouns and we use "ed" to mark the past tense of regular verbs but in oral language plural words can have the ending sounds /s/ or /z/ and past regular verbs never sound as "ed" at the end. In principle, someone who understands about plurals and the past tense can learn how these meanings are marked in written language even when they are not phonological notations of spoken language.

When children learn an oral language, they learn to give a phonological form, which is arbitrary, to the semantic and syntactic relations that they wish to express. Similarly, when they learn to write, they learn to give a graphic, arbitrary form to the semantic and syntactic relations that they wish to express. Thus, in this view, an orthography does not represent only the surface form of oral language: there are also connections between the deep structure of the language, which represents grammar and morphology, and the way in which a language is written.

This conception of how oral and written language are related may seem highly academic and without any pragmatic consequences for teaching and learning, but it is not so. If written language is only a different expression of the same language system that can be expressed orally, it should be learned through its connection to the abstract language system, not through its connection to oral language. K. Goodman (1982), for example, argued that in reading instruction "So-called 'linguistic programs' that emphasize phoneme-grapheme correspondences la Bloomfield and Fries are still emerging, perhaps five or ten years beyond that point where there was any justification at all" (p. 90). He further proposed that

[A]lphabetic systems don't simply operate on a letter-sound basis.... Sequences of sounds seem to have relationships to sequences of letters, not simply because of the alphabetic principle on which the system was produced originally, but also because there is a common base underlying both of these. For the user of language, surface oral language and surface written language are related through a common underlying structure. As a language user generates a sentence, his thoughts bring him to a point at which he can apply a set of orthographic rules and write it. (pp. 91-92)

This view of how oral language and written language relate to each other implies that when children begin to read and write they learn a set of rules for expressing and understanding sentences in written form. They learn to produce meaningful sentences in writing, in just the same way as they previously learned to give an oral form to sentences in speech.

The second view of how oral language and written language are related is much less likely than the first to fit people's intuitions, and is more difficult to understand. Yet it is quite easy to find support for it. In written English, as in many other orthographies, we make distinctions in writing which are not marked in the sounds of words. For example, we spell the end sounds /ks/ differently in different words: think of "fox" and "socks," "mix" and "tricks," "tax" and "tracks." If we were simply trying to represent the sounds of oral language, why would we spell these word endings differently? Are these spelling differences illogical and entirely unpredictable? Of course not! These spellings are entirely predictable if we think not only about oral language but also about the connection between oral and written language to an abstract language system that represents grammatical relations. The /ks/ sound at the end of words in English is represented by the letter "x," as in "fox," "mix" and "tax"-except when the word can be decomposed into a stem plus an affix, as in "sock+s," "trick+s" and "track+s."

Linguists, such as Chomsky (1965), have argued that we understand sentences by connecting them to an implicit grammar that represents simpler sentences. He argues that this is what allows us to recognize ambiguities: a sentence that we hear is ambiguous when it can be connected to different underlying simpler sentences. To use one of his examples: the sentence "I had a book stolen" could mean that "I had a book; someone stole it" or "someone stole a book; I asked that person to steal the book." It is easy to make an analogy between analysing an ambiguous sentence by connecting it to different core sentences and analysing a sequence of sounds, such as /ks/ at the end of words, by connecting it to different forms of words: the ending /ks/ can be connected to a plural form, /k/+ "s" or to a singular form, which does not contain the letter "s."

These two views of the relation between oral language and written language have led to diametrically opposed approaches to the teaching of literacy. The first view has emphasized the need to help children become aware of the sounds in their language so that they understand that letters represent sounds. This is sometimes referred to as "attaining an alphabetic conception of written language" (Read, 1971, 1986; Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1983) or "learning the alphabetic principle" (Byrne, 1998). The second view is associated with the idea that children can learn to express language in writing if they are exposed to it (K. Goodman, 1982)-an idea that formed the basis for the "real books" approach to literacy instruction.

Steps towards a Synthesis

In this book, we will pursue a synthesis of these two positions. It is suggested that orthographies are notational systems and, as such, they enable the encoding, recording and reproduction of oral language. However, oral language and written language are not connected only through their surfaces: they are also connected through their relation to an abstract yet specific (e.g. English, French) language system.

The linguist Jean Pierre Jaffr (1997; adopting a modified version of Vachek's, 1973, definitions) explained this view by proposing that writing combines two principles: phonographic and semiographic. The phonographic principle

is manifested by correspondences between meaningless units of spoken language (phonemes or syllables) and meaningless units of written language (phonograms or syllabograms). The semiographic principle encompasses the units and their functions in the linguistic elements of written language. These units are determined by the morphological structure of the languages in question ... and by the way in which the written words are assembled. (p. 9)

The semiographic principle is at work, for example, when we spell all regular past verbs with "ed" at the end, irrespectively of whether the endings of the verbs are pronounced as /t/, as in "kissed," /d/ as in "killed," or /id/ as in "wanted." But the semiographic principle is not restricted to the spelling of words as such: it is much more pervasive because it is this principle that we use when we place spaces between words. Words are not phonological units but units defined by meaning and grammar. We say, for example, "I wento school yesterday" but write "went to," placing a space between the verb and the preposition, though we do not pronounce them separately. Words can change phonologically depending on the context in which they are spoken: a child may write "I hat to run" (see Nunes & Bryant, 2006, Figure 1.1, p. 27) not because the child cannot hear the difference between /t/ and /d/ but because the child is transcribing the sounds rather than preserving the identity of the word "had" across different phonological contexts.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Children's Reading and Spellingby Terezinha Nunes Peter Bryant Copyright © 2009 by Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant. Excerpted by permission.
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