Paradigm Inertia: Adult Bias About Code Ambiguity         

Letter sounds behave differently in different environments. If you're doing systematic phonics and you've only gotten up to L — suppose you do letter of the day and you've only gotten up to L, and you ask children to write about their Halloween costume? Did you ever see a kid doing inventive spelling who only used the letters A through L? Never. You really want them to think. So if I taught cat, hat and fat, I do want them to figure out what sat is, you know?

David Boulton: And the point is to be able to generalize on any one of the letter sound combinations and understand the patterns.

Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Exactly. ‘I'm teaching you examples and you're learning to think. Now, this is your job. This isn't my job. You think. You think for you. I don't think for you. I teach. But I watch to see if you're thinking well.’

States like Texas and California define everything in terms of single letter sound, which totally gets people back into the1950’s. Even if they're not thinking that way, the instructional materials come out in that SR Learning Theory kind of thing where everything is in a very closed system. But then the opposite side of having it defined that way is when you look at the decodables that get passed by the adoption committees. They start using letter sound correspondences without any consideration of number of syllables.

David Boulton: One of the things that we’ve developed was a way to look at the variations of — in other words, the number of possible sounds that a letter can make in a particular vocabulary set. We looked at the vocabulary lists, and it's amazing to me how confusing the words are that are in these vocabulary lists.

Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: In terms of letter sound correspondences?

David Boulton: And in terms of what you were saying, the number of syllables. What’s missing is an understanding of the levels of ambiguity-challenges involved and the question: ‘How can we help children step-by-step through being able to process these different kinds of ambiguity-challenges on the road to reading?’

Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Exactly. At the first level there are these consonants, then vowels. You're going to do the short vowels, and you read them left to right, and sound them out, and that's the way the word goes. Fine.

Now we have these long vowels. How will we do this? Remember, these vowels are very special letters, but they need help to say their names. So then you do the — thank God there's the final e convention. It's pretty straightforward and very generalizible, because you can do lots of contrasts to make them think, and make them think about which sound they're hearing and if it's a this and if it's a that, and real usage, because the vowel diagraphs really stink. I hate them, you know? 

That’s another case where there's just no substitute for visiting it. This isn't going to come through experience. I can't tell you how many curricula I've picked up where they say, ‘Okay, we're doing long /ee/, so let's teach final e. The magic e thing, and let's teach ee, ea, and ie, and maybe final y, too. Why not? It says /ee/, too.’  So they present all those things. I hate this. Then instantly after presenting these as single letter-sound correspondences, they give the children a dictation test and count them wrong.

How are the kids going to know when to use ee and when to use ea? If they could do this, why would you have needed to teach this lesson? Don't put the ea in the same lesson; just do the final e and get that done with all the vowels. Once we have the contrast down, we'll work on the other ways to spell long vowels.

Convince them. Keep the con game up. There are lots of things you do as a grownup. Like you teach them that they have to say please to get what they want. And you know what? That almost never works in real life. You still teach them to though.

You want them to have these basic frameworks, like the alphabetic system, like, ‘Vowels need help to say their name, this is one way they do it. Here's another way they do it.’  When they get to second grade, the kids who are coming along will say things to you like, ‘Uh, this shouldn't be begin, this should be bejin, ha ha. This should be jiggle, not giggle, ha ha. This should behave.’

They think that's very interesting. So there's give and have and glove. Next?

It’s parenting. It's about conning your children. 

Marilyn Jager Adams, Chief Scientist of Soliloquy Learning, Inc., Author of Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. Source: COTC Interview - http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/adams.htm#BacktoAmbiguity