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How To Teach Your Baby To Read

This document discusses different methods for teaching babies to read. It argues that the phonics and phonemic awareness method is more effective than the whole language method. The phonics method teaches children the relationship between letters and sounds, allowing them to decode words. In contrast, the whole language method has children memorize words without understanding the connections between letters and sounds. Research by the National Reading Panel found that phonics instruction significantly improves reading abilities compared to methods without phonemic awareness training. The author provides their experience successfully teaching their young daughter to read using a simple phonics approach.

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Sayeem Sarkar
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187 views

How To Teach Your Baby To Read

This document discusses different methods for teaching babies to read. It argues that the phonics and phonemic awareness method is more effective than the whole language method. The phonics method teaches children the relationship between letters and sounds, allowing them to decode words. In contrast, the whole language method has children memorize words without understanding the connections between letters and sounds. Research by the National Reading Panel found that phonics instruction significantly improves reading abilities compared to methods without phonemic awareness training. The author provides their experience successfully teaching their young daughter to read using a simple phonics approach.

Uploaded by

Sayeem Sarkar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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How to Teach Your Baby to Read

By: ChildrenLearningReading.com

Teaching your baby to read is becoming more and more high priority for
parents now as it becomes clear that learning to read at a young age offers
numerous advantages for the child once he or she begins school. Studies
have consistently found that teaching a baby to read and helping children
develop phonemic awareness well before entering school can significantly
improve their development in reading and spelling. However, when it comes to
teaching babies to read, there are two main teaching methods.

These two main methods of teaching a baby or child to read are the whole
language method, and the phonics and phonemic awareness method (the
phonetic approach), which should be the preferred teaching method in helping
children learn to read. Some prefer the whole language method, while others
use the phonics approach, and there is also educators that use a mix of
different approaches. With the Look-say approach of whole language learning,
a child begins with memorizing sight words, and then taught various strategies
of figuring out the text from various clues.

The whole language method produces inaccurate and poor readers compared
to students of the phonetic approach. Using the whole word approach, English
is being taught as an ideographic language such as Chinese. One of the
biggest arguments from whole-language advocates is that teaching a baby to
read using phonics breaks up the words into letters and syllables, which have
no actual meaning, yet they fail to acknowledge the fact that once the child is
able to decode the word, they are able to actually READ that entire word,
pronounce it, and understand its meaning. So, in practicality, it's a very weak
argument. English is an alphabetic system, and unlike Chinese, it is not an
ideograph like Chinese characters, and should not be taught using an
ideographic approach.

I always say that if your baby can speak, then you can begin to teach your
baby to read. I won't mention any names here, but I think most parents are
probably aware of one very popular "reading" program, which is a whole word
approach. Using this method, your baby simply learns to memorize the words
without actually reading the words. There is no scientific evidence to suggest
that teaching your baby to read using the whole word approach is an effective
method. In fact, there are large numbers of studies which have consistently
stated that teaching children to reading using phonemic awareness is a highly
effective method.
How to Teach Your Baby to Read

Teaching phonemic awareness to children significantly improves their reading


more than instruction that lacks any attention to phonemic awareness. -
statement made by the National Reading Panel [1]

I do think that the debate on the effectiveness of teaching a baby to read


using either the whole language or phonics method is settled by the
statements made by the National Reading Panel. They reviewed over 1,960
different studies to make their conclusions.

In fact, while my wife was pregnant with our first child, I began doing extensive
research on the subject on how to teach my baby to read - after birth, of
course. Like most parents I also came across the popular whole word
teaching approach being heavily marketed. Seeing the infomercials got me
quite excited actually, seeing the babies on TV "reading". But after trying it
out, it occurred to me that our baby wasn't actually "reading", but actually
"memorizing", and I thought to myself, how are my children supposed to read
newer, and more complicated words as they grow older without an
appropriate method of decoding those words? This is where my long and
extensive research into phonics and phonemic awareness began.

After many hours of research and learning as much as I could, I felt


comfortable enough with our simple phonemic awareness teaching method,
that my wife and I began giving brief 3-to-5-minute lessons to our daughter,
aged 2 years and 8 months. Within just a few short weeks, her reading ability
(and I mean actual reading ability, not memorization) was astounding, even
for me as the parent who gave the reading instructions. Friends and family
alike, were simply flabbergasted at what our daughter was capable of reading
at just 2 years and 11 months. Please watch the video above, composed of
clips of her reading randomly created sentences for reading fun.

I simply can't imagine this kind of progress possible with the whole word
approach - just think of the tens and hundreds of words a young child would
have to memorize!

Our son is fast approaching the age where he will soon be able to speak, and
we will be using the same simple step-by-step method to teach him to read. If
you'd like to learn more about our simple, effective, step-by-step program,
please sign up for our newsletter below. We also send out new articles,
updates, tips, and guides on teaching a baby to read.

Click here to learn how to easily and quickly teach your child to read.
How to Teach Your Baby to Read

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