Are We Teaching Children to Read... or Simply to Decode?

There has been a tremendous shift towards the use of decodable books in recent years. For many children, this has been a positive change. Books that match what children have been taught reduce guessing and allow children to apply their phonics knowledge successfully.

However, when children have only been introduced to a small number of sounds and graphemes, authors are faced with an enormous challenge. They are trying to create meaningful reading experiences while working within a very limited set of words.

In these early stages, do we have to accept some compromises?

Should we expect that a child's first experiences of reading stories may sometimes contain language that is less natural than we would normally use? Or that pictures may need to play a greater role in helping children understand the story?

Not so long ago, we were using a combination of whole language and analytical phonics, where children were encouraged to use pictures for a very different purpose – to help identify unfamiliar words.

Today, pictures appear to have returned, but for a different reason. Rather than helping children identify words, are they helping children understand stories that the words alone are not yet able to tell?

Perhaps the bigger question is not whether these compromises are necessary, but what impact they might have on developing readers.

If a child's earliest reading experiences place greater emphasis on decoding than on constructing meaning, what habits might they be developing?

Might we be teaching children to become highly accurate at decoding while paying less attention to constructing meaning from the words they read?

Could children begin to assume that meaning comes from somewhere outside the text – from pictures, from an adult's explanation, or from someone else telling them what is happening?

Should we expect the words on the page to carry the message?

Or should we simply accept that, in the earliest stages, this isn't always possible?

Should an early reader's goal simply be to finish the page?

Or should they pause, think, and expect the words themselves to communicate something?

Perhaps the goal is not simply to produce children who can decode accurately. Perhaps the goal is to produce children who expect written language to communicate meaning.

Because if children learn from the very beginning that reading is about making sense of print, what might that mean for their comprehension...