The problem with ‘whole word recognition ‘.

Georgina Smith – Dyslexia Tutor

Whole word recognition is great for reading but when an individual is trying to put words down on paper this can lead to some problems.  Dyslexia tutor Georgina Smith shares her insights on some of the problems with whole word recognition.

Georgina Writes…

Over the
years of assessing and teaching I so often see students of all ages who have  ‘gone under the radar’ as they appear to be
students who are functioning with reading and spelling, some at an age
appropriate level.At times
when I assess, I see a student who appears on the surface to read reasonably
well, with some flow and whole word recognition, however when they spell, their
written responses can default to a phonetic response and not be on a par with
their reading.

There are
also the children who practice so hard during the week only to forget the 10
spellings in Friday’s test.  Some recall
many but then as time goes on, they can’t continuously recall those spellings
they recollected only a few weeks or day ago when they write.

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Whether a
child is dyslexic or not, whole word recognition is not always the answer, all
the time, for all children.  Some
children thrive from whole word recognition but some of our children need
targeted intervention.I have found
over the years showing students, of all ages, how to sound out, blends,
breakdown, and learn the component parts of a word, to be able to transfer to
less familiar words which are not high frequency enabling them to develop
reading and spelling.  The structured
system of learning when to use patterns in words (i.e. mid/end) can often
unlock the key to learning.  This logical
way of learning in CodeBreakers suits many of learners I have encountered as a
dyslexia tutor.

The system
of over learning is also not one our schools can often afford time for when
curriculum targets need to be met.  The
joy of CodeBreakers allows student to work at their own pace with opportunity
for over learning.When a child
learns to read by whole word recognition, often they will learn to spell that
way too, recalling what a word looks like, rather than being able to sound it
out and encode the word.

Today was a
prime example of this, teaching a young learner that ‘ea’ say SV /e/ as in
‘bread’.  He surprised me that he could
tell me very quickly all the letter names. 
So I asked him to make me the word ‘bread’ using the wooden letters and
then show me what made the SV /e/ sound. 
He couldn’t answer. So I asked him to move each letter to represent the
sounds I said.  He moved ‘br’ for /br/,
then ‘e’ as I said SV/e/, then he moved the ‘ad’ and I said /d/.  Clearly he has not identified that the ‘ea’
part of the word makes the sound in the same way that only ‘d’ says /d/.

You may ask
why I put this child through sounding out this word when he could spell
it.  The answer, because I wanted him to
recognise the letters which made this sound and be able to transfer this to
other words he may not be familiar with and to learn to sound them out.Too often
when testing and teaching I find student cannot sound out using only the sounds
(not letter names and letter labelling) and this impedes their ability to
encode words.

Of course
it’s true to say that every word will not be spelled with ‘ea’ and that’s why
we need dictionary skills but that’s a narrative for another day.


What are your experiences with whole letter recognition and some of the challenges that Georgina has written about?  Please pop your comments in the comments box below.


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