Jj is for Jottings 105.  Phonics: Visualising Versus Listening.

 

We have another major problem with phonics: visualising versus listening, in addition to the problems created when children don’t know their sound letter links,  This is a problem I encounter frequently when working with children, but I have never heard anybody else mention it in those terms.  I am referring to the fact that children often use their visual modality when they need to be using their auditory modality. Here is a simple example.  Question: “What sound can you hear at the end of ‘come’?”  Child’s response: “ee” (if they are using letter names instead of sounds; “/e/” (if they are using sounds).  The child has visualised what the word looks like and has given a response based on the last letter, not the last sound.  A letter is something they see; a sound is what they hear.

WHY IS VISUALISING RATHER THAN LISTENING A PROBLEM?

It isn’t really a problem with regular words, but it becomes a problem with less regular words.  With a regular word that the child knows how to spell you wouldn’t have any indication that the child was visualising rather than just listening.  But when spelling rules start to apply – that’s when the visualisation becomes apparent, as in the example above.  (I chose “come” because many children know how to read and spell that word early on.)

There is another dead giveaway which occurs when you ask them to tell you the first/middle/last sound in a word.  If they say “I can’t remember”, you know they are probably trying to remember what the word looks like.  Visualising in this context hampers the child’s ability to analyse and blend sounds.  And analysing and blending sounds are key skills which unlock the door to good literacy.  Saying “You don’t need to remember, you just need to listen” has never made any difference, in my experience.

The underlying problem is that children (and almost certainly most adults) are not aware of whether they are visualising or whether they are what I like to call “auditorising”.  Therefore they are not in a position to use the most appropriate modality for the job.  The same problem arises in a different form with rhyming.  Many children think that the spelling at the end of the words in question is what constitutes a rhyme.  To be fair, it does – with simple, regular words.  But they are just getting away with it visually until they meet words with less regular spelling.

IS THERE A SOLUTION?

I have not discovered a hard and fast solution.  I wish I had.  However, there are general strategies which should help, and we will discuss these in the next article.

 

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