Jj is for Jottings 106. Strategies to Encourage Listening to Sounds in Words.
In the previous article I said that I would discuss general strategies to encourage listening to sounds in words, rather than visualising them. As I said, I have found no hard and fast rules, but these types of activities are helpful.
Shanti is coming to tell us all about strategies to encourage listening to sounds in words.
ENCOURAGE LISTENING FROM AN EARLY AGE.
It is really important to ensure that your child doesn’t always have visual support to decode messages. The exception would be in the case of children who have hearing or language difficulties for whom visual support is vital. I am talking about average children who can be expected to develop along normal lines.
For a start, here is a listening exercise, which you can do from a very early age, to help children separate sounds from visual stimuli. Even adults can benefit from this activity; it is very calming and ensures a person is in the moment, like a mini meditation.
When reading stories to children, you can sometimes do it without the aid of pictures, and check that they actually understand the story, purely by listening. As children develop and you are reading more advanced books, the number of pictures will dwindle to nothing anyway, so you know their comprehension comes entirely from listening, with no visual support. It is really important to keep reading to your children, for this and the other reasons outlined in the article.
MORE SPECIFIC LISTENING FOR SOUNDS IN WORDS.
Another way to help children separate auditory from visual cues is to give them activities which require them to do both, but separately. Present them with carefully chosen words and ask them how many sounds there are in the word and how many letters are in the word. They need to try and forget how to spell each word. Here are some examples in which the number of sounds does not match the number of letters:
| Word | Sounds | Letters | Sounds Heard |
| boy | 2 | 3 | b-oy |
| shop | 3 | 4 | sh-o-p |
| bath` | 3 | 4 | b-ar-th |
| slide | 4 | 5 | s-l-ie-d |
| thing | 3 | 5 | th-i-ng |
| judge | 3 | 5 | j-u-j |
| cough | 3 | 5 | c-o-f |
| brought | 4 | 7 | b-r-or-t |
| threat | 4 | 6 | th-r-e-t |
This is analysing sounds, with the added component of comparing the number of sounds with the number of letters.
EYE ACCESSING CUES.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, is a set of tools and techniques for learning the language of your own mind. One aspect is that of eye accessing cues. We have all noticed how people’s eyes move all over the place during a conversation. It turns out that there is a pattern to those eye movements, and that we think in three representational systems – visual, auditory and kinaesthetic. You can read a simple article on this here.
I decided to do a bit of experimenting with this. I decided to observe a secondary student’s eye movements when he was required to sound out a word. According to the eye accessing chart, he was definitely in the wrong mode for the task because he was clearly trying to visually recall the word. This confirmed what I had suspected. So I tried it again, this time asking him to do the task whilst keeping his eyes on my forefinger, which I held steadily in the Auditory Constructed direction. When he kept his gaze on my finger, his success at analysing the sounds improved. I think this is an area worth formal research.
I also remember reading elsewhere that people with dyslexia often operate principally in the kinaesthetic mode, which is even less useful for literacy than being stuck in visual mode.
Even just being aware of which system is being used to decode words can lead you to assist your young reader more successfully, since you won’t get stuck reinforcing the wrong modality.
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