Some experts say, yes, citing research that one indicator of future literacy achievement is how many nursery rhymes a student knows by heart when they enter their school years.
There are a number of reasons proposed for why repeating nursery rhymes is so important to the development of literacy skills. They can be a practice of phonic sounds and language rhythms that young learners need to know to read well. They even introduce children to complex literary devices, like alliteration and onomatopoeia, as well as drawing their attention to unusual vocabulary words.
Nursery rhymes are also a preview the broader skills needed to comprehend whole texts. Though short, many of them have a sequence of events that must be connected by the listener in order to make sense of the whole. The fantasy in the rhymes also encourages the listener to use his or her imagination to follow along with the tale. Being able to mentally picture a story that is told in words is a skill that students will be asked to use later, in their school years.
The linked article ends with a list of strategies for making the telling of the rhymes fun and interactive for children, such as leaving off the last rhyming word for the child to fill in herself and replacing names and places in the tale with those they recognize from their own lives.
Here, at the PBS website, a scientist expounds further on how sound, song, and communication have been linked throughout the course of even primitve history.
Even if phonic decoding has a greater impact on on fluency, the ability to memorize how a word appears, creating a “visual dictionary,” also has an important influence on reading ability, particularly after a word has been learned, according to a Nov. 2011 study conducted at Georgia University Medical Center.
Subjects were given a list of homophones to read (words that sound the same but are spelled and appear differently), while hooked to imaging technology that tracked their brain activity. The researchers observed that completely distinct neurons in the brain lit up, even when the words being read sounded identical to one another. They concluded that, to the brain, same-sounding words are as different as those that sound and appear utterly different (“hare” and “hair” are different as “hair” and “soup”). Their findings may also help pinpoint why some children, like those with dyslexia are slow to learn words–it could have something to do with their ability to transfer the sounds of words into an efficient visual dictionary.
However, they emphasized that not all words are read as sight words. Reading primarily or solely by visual recognition is simply a more cognitively efficient way of recognizing a well known word, rather than sounding it out each time. Words that have not been previously memorized by sight will need to be sounded out by learning readers.
One of the most clear examples of how the brain identifies the sight of a familiar word is our names. Our names may be one of the first words we learn to recognize and write, and some children may learn them before they understand all the sounds the letters represent. We then hear and use this word so often, it can become a symbolic image we hang on our walls or even tattoo onto our bodies, not just an expression of a group of sounds. Try putting your own name into the National Geographic hieroglyphics translator. You may accept these hieroglyphs as a graphic representing you, but until you learn to associate the sounds of your name with the symbols they represent, it would be difficult for you to read more broadly with these symbols.
Most readers use both sight and sound to read, as was shown in an August 2007 study at New York University. Using brain imaging technology, the comparative influence of three processes affecting adults’ reading speed was measured: phonics decoding (sounding out a word), whole word recognition (sight recognition), and whole text processing (understanding how words in a sentence are related to each other). They concluded that 62 percent of the readers’ speed variance was due to impediments to phonic decoding, 16 percent they assigned to problems with whole word recognition, and 22 percent was found to be related to setbacks in whole language processing.
What the researchers noted as most important to their findings was that the skills they measured were additive. In other words, they supplemented each other. Each of the three processes made a contribution to the readers’ speed exclusive of the other two, suggesting that one skill alone can only go so far to improve reading ability–it cannot make up for deficits in other areas. While the study’s manipulation of the phonics of words had the greatest affect on the subjects’ reading speed, an unusual change in how the words appeared on the page also slowed them down significantly, as well as when the sentences were scrambled.
Dyslexic students are known to have problems connecting the sounds in words with their symbolic shapes, so it stands to reason that they have a particular difficulty with reading processes. However, even children who can easily make these connections must also continue having exposure to the words they are sounding out in order to memorize their appearance, or their reading fluency may be impaired. They must also be able to recognize and predicting how words are strung together to compose a full thought. All three of these skills, connecting phonemes (sounds) to morphemes (symbols), recognizing known words on sight, and connecting words meaningfully and predictably together, are important abilities to the minds of developing readers.
One caveat: the focus of this study is on reading speed. Although there is a meaningful correlation between reading speed, fluency, and comprehension, a child who reads quickly does not necessarily comprehend the text or derive the meaning from the text that a given activity requires (the topics of comprehension, vocabulary, and constructing meaning from text will be discussed here in another series of entries).
With that said, reading speed is necessary for fluency, the development of which can have a positive effect on students’ motivation to overcome reading challenges. It makes sense that readers who struggle to get through a sentence will be discourages from reading an entire book.
The video clip below of shows how a percussionist used his personal passion to encourage struggling readers to increase their speed, and thus their confidence and willingness to engage in reading more often and with greater enthusiasm.
Language is a sensory experience. In particular, the tools of sight and sound are a means of practicing the cognitive skills necessary for reading. How the experience of seeing and hearing impact the learning brains of children is the subject of a wide array of research valuable to understanding literacy development. Our first series of posts will explore this aspect of students’ learning brains.
One way to begin thinking about how the senses are used in the classroom is to look at the literature on modality of instruction (how the teacher presents information: in audio or pictorial format, for instance).
The brains of most all people, of course, retain sensory experiences, including auditory, visual, and kinesthetic memories, and students can certainly recall the information gathered by these perceptions. However, studies have shown that when the brain is gathering one type of information from an experience, it tends to downplay other unnecessary modes. For instance, even a talented visual learner will probably be unable to remember the details of a picture book, if the teacher is asking the students to listen for a particular vowel sound during the reading, and even a talented auditory learner is not likely to recall the meter of a poem, if asked to watch for the placement of punctuation marks.
Furthermore, studies have shown that students will often remember what they learn as concepts (an abstracted idea: word definition or story plot), since that is what their teachers are often asking them to do. Learning an abstract concept has the same affect on our perception as focusing on a visual or auditory task: extra information is diminished in our memory. The concept sticks, but the visual or auditory details of the learning experience are frequently forgotten.
Therefore, research suggests that new information should be presented to students in the modality that most greatly enhances our goals for their learning, not necessarily their particular preference. If we want a student to be a able to recognize a word in a book and in speech, it should be practiced in writing and aloud, regardless of their natural ability to work in either modality. If we want them to learn the concept behind the word, we can help them to construct an abstract idea using a mixture of sensory experiences that will act as a medium to this goal.
Students’ preference for a certain modality might be better used to engage them in content or to encourage personalized expression of learned concepts, rather than improperly narrowing the delivery method we use to teach them skills and information (the idea of student-directed learning will be addressed here in a future group of updates).
In his speech at the TED Conference, autistic savant Daniel Tammet prompted the audience to consider the idea of using a multitude of senses wisely to better understand the world around us, arguing that particular aesthetic experiences guide our ability to analyze and problem solve. Though he is a sensory savant, educators can follow his lead, helping to draw students’ attention to the modality that will best assist them to engage with a given task or problem, whether that is color-coding important visual language cues or allowing students to kinesthetically feel a physical experience important to comprehending a text.
