Earlier in the year, a friend good-heartedly mentioned how baffling it was that my daughter, then three and a half, could tell complex, abstract stories but could not consistently say her ABCs. At first, I had a stroke of panic. Then I realized that she didn’t know her ABCs well because we had never focused on them. I wondered, Should I? She might trail other kids her age. Am I doing her a disservice by not “teaching” her the alphabet, her numbers, basic math, etc.?
And then I remembered all my training. I am actually a teacher myself, and I spent a small part of my career in early childhood [bilingual] literacy development. I know that the prevalent theory behind learning to read is called, aptly, the Simple View of Reading. It states that reading is composed of two parts: decoding and language comprehension. Decoding means being able to sound out words according to the phonetic rules of the language. For example, if you know some basic phonological rules in Spanish, you might be able to say, “¡Cuánto tiempo sin verte!” without having the foggiest idea what it means.
Decoding is—relatively speaking—easy to teach and to assess. Even in English, when the phonological rules are absurd and irregular, many teachers are successful at getting young kids to “sound out” what they’re reading. However, those same kids may or may not understand what they’ve read. That’s the language comprehension part. Only when both of those concepts are happening simultaneously is a child successfully reading.
The trouble is, language comprehension is extremely hard to teach. Often, teachers use assessment inappropriately in an attempt to teach it. For example, elementary school children will read a passage and then have to answer reading comprehension questions about it. The teacher will then go over the answers and explain why answer choice B was better than the other options. This is not really teaching comprehension but testing it. Teachers feel like they need to resort to that because actually teaching language comprehension is so slow and nebulous.
How do kids acquire language comprehension? By interacting with language—early and often. All the language input that babies receive, the conversations they have when they get become toddlers, the books that are read to them—all that contributes to language comprehension. It can be augmented in school, but it starts at home.
Claire was verbal early on. Before her first birthday, she was uttering pretty intelligible words. Before she was two, our jaws dropped when she used a five word sentence. Like all children, her grammatical constructions are creative (e.g., “stay it here” instead of “leave it here”) and give insight into her cognitive and linguistic development. She has now entered the stage where she creates full dialogues between two characters—playing both parts, of course. She makes up songs, narrates for her not-yet-verbal younger brother, and asks thought-provoking questions. She and I talk about most everything. Months ago, she wanted to know about how the dotted and solid lines on the road worked. I recently found myself explaining how elevation contributes to different climate/weather, and for three years old, she was pretty well informed about the election.
She has also always loved reading. When she was an infant, I read National Geographic articles to her. As she got older, my husband and I—and whoever else she roped in—read her board books and picture books constantly. This June, when we went on a river trip, I only wanted to bring one book so we started her first chapter book: all 200+ pages of Brighty of the Grand Canyon. She loved it and we kept on in that vein. We’ve since read Justin Morgan Had a Horse, Misty of Chincoteague, and all the American Girl Felicity, Samantha, Kirsten, and Molly books. Claire even requests books in Spanish. Although she can’t understand the words, she listens aptly and patiently.
So I realized that not teaching Claire the alphabet wasn’t doing her any harm. And indeed, when teachers at her school began to cover it, she picked it up quickly, as she did writing her letters and as she will likely do with numbers and other academic basics. But I’ll leave those concepts to her teacher; I don’t feel like I need to play that role at home. The best thing I can do for her, as per the research, is to lay a foundation for language comprehension. Once she has that, other aspects of learning—not just reading—will come much more quickly and easily for her. So for now, I’ll just soak in our long, mature conversations and read her as many books as she asks for.