Interactive Orthography

Despite their profound differences, the reading method debaters all share a common assumption. They all assume that learning to read MUST occur within the media of two-dimensional static text. But why must the mental models of the 15th century (printing press) continue to constrain how we envision and design 21st century instruction? While good readers must be able to read static text, nothing except centuries of inertia says we have to use static text to teach beginning and struggling readers.

Reading is an artificially simulated language experience constructed by our brains according to the instructions and information contained in a c-o-d-e. Though many factors contribute to difficulties in learning to read, what most makes learning to read (English and other deep orthographies) difficult for most beginning and struggling readers – what initially most challenges their brains – is the confusing relationship between the naturally evolved and naturally learned code of speaking and listening, and the artificially created and artificially learned c-o-d-e of reading and writing.

English orthography is an archaic legacy technology (like telegraphs and typewriters). However, unlike the development of modern information technologies, there was no committee of designers concerned with developing its ‘user interface’. Instead, English orthography is the result of elitism, prejudice, ignorance, negligence, and a series of historical accidents (https://goo.gl/vXZ6te).

Many notables, including Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, Melvile Dewey, Theodore Roosevelt, and Mark Twain, recognized that the code’s letter-sound confusion was at the root of reading difficulties. But despite their efforts and those of hundreds of others, centuries of attempts to change the alphabet or reform English spelling – to render their relationship more simply phonetic – failed (https://goo.gl/ifsvZx).

The central issue is inertia. Any change to the alphabet or spelling would create a ‘before’ and ‘after’ disconnect in the continuity of written English; and would be a disturbance, nuisance, and expense to everyone literate in the system as it is now. Because changing the code – changing the alphabet or spelling – has such intolerable consequences, our conceptions of ‘teaching reading’ have been constrained to accepting the confusion as immutable. As a consequence, virtually everything we think about reading, learning to read, and the teaching of reading (including “Scientifically Based Reading Research“), is based on – warped by – accepting the code’s letter-sound-spelling confusion as immutable (https://goo.gl/GvAdeZ). All traditional approaches to teaching reading are based on training the brains of readers to deal with this letter-sound confusion by either working around it (whole – contextual guessing) or by recognizing rule-clues (cues) in the letter’s lexical and semantic context (phonics). Phonics and whole language methods are both attempts to compensate for (work around), rather than directly address, the confusing correspondence between letters and sounds.

We can’t change the alphabet and we can’t change the spelling. However, today, in an era of ever less expensive and increasingly more powerful digital devices, what stops us from revising our models of reading instruction around using modern technology to dynamically, in real-time, scaffold and differentiate the process of learning to read?

What if, rather than teaching learners to decode / recognize words by using abstract instructional exercises (and hoping they will apply them well enough and fast enough when they are later actually reading), we provided instruction while they are actually engaged in the live act of trying to read words? Not some words some of the time, but any and every word they 'stutter' on.

Using today’s inexpensive digital technology we can easily add another ‘beginners layer’ to English orthography. We can preserve the two-dimensional alphabet and spelling, and digitally embed within it a dynamically responsive ‘layer’ that provides a profoundly more neurologically efficient way to learn to read.

What if ‘beginner orthography’ was able to respond; letter-by-letter, sound-by-sound, word-by-word, meaning by meaning, with whatever learners need as they progress to fluency in reading? Not just read the words for them (short-circuiting their learning), rather, interactively scaffold, in real-time, the process of learners learning to work out recognizing and understanding the word for themselves. What if beginning and struggling readers learned to read with LIVE dynamic text that instructs, guides, and supports them word-by-word, not only to recognize and understand each and every particular word they ‘stutter’ on, but in a way that generalizes to learning to read all words?

Sound far fetched? If you click on this link: https://goo.gl/QjkXNL this same post you’ve been reading will open on a website equipped with the new layer I’ve been describing. Why not take 3 minutes to try it?