Horace Mann on letters and spelling

I came across the original source of Horace Mann's characterization of letters (and words!) as "skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions":

A LECTURE ON THE BEST MODE OF PREPARING AND USING SPELLING-BOOKS
Delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, August, 1841
by Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education
Common School Journal, Volumes 3-4 | p. 9-16; 25-32

My subject is Spelling-Books, and the manner in which they should be prepared and used for teaching the Alphabet, Orthography, and Pronunciation of the English language. I ought to say, of the English languages, for we have two English languages; one according to which we write, another according to which we speak.

True!

I need not occupy any time, to prove that the ability to spell with uniform correctness, is a rare possession amongst our people. It has not unfrequently been suggested that intelligence in the people is so necessary for the preservation of a republican government, that no person should be allowed to vote who could not both read and write. If, however, the suggestion means that no person should be allowed to vote, but such as could write without failures in spelling, I tremble at the almost universal disfranchisement. Our republic would be changed to an oligarchy at once.

[snip]

The advantages of teaching children, by beginning with whole words, are many. Nothing has to be untaught which has been once well taught. What is to be learned is affiliated to what is already known. The course of the pupil is constantly progressive. The acquisition of the language, even from its elements, becomes an intelligible process. The knowledge of new things is introduced through the knowledge of familiar things. At the age of three or four years, every child has command of a considerable vocabulary consisting of the names of persons, of animals, articles of dress, food, furniture, & c. The sounds of these names are familiar to the ear and to the organs of speech, and the ideas they represent are familiar to the mind. All that remains to be done, therefore, is to lead the eye to a like familiarity with their printed signs. But the alphabet, on the other hand, is wholly foreign to a child's existing knowledge. Having no relation to any thing known, it must be acquired entirely without collateral aids. In learning words, too, the child becomes accustomed to the form of the letters, and this acquaintance will assist him greatly in acquiring the alphabet, when the time for learning that shall arrive. I do not see, indeed, why a child should not learn to read as easily as he learns to talk, if taught in a similar manner.

[snip]

If we would know how to please children, we must know the sources of their pleasure. ... The principal sources are brilliant and variegated colrs, impressive forms, diversified motions, substances that can be lifted and weighed, and all whose dimensions, therefore, can be examined.

[snip]

In regard to all the other sources of pleasure, -- beauty, motion, music, memory, -- the alphabetic column presents an utter blank. There stands in silence and death, the stiff, perpendicular row of characters, lank, stark, immovable, without form or comeliness, and, as to signification, wholly void. They are skelton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions; and hence it is no wonder that the children look and feel so deathlike when compelled to face them. .... Now, it is upon this emptiness, blankness, silence, and death, that we compel children to fasten their eyes. To say nothing of the odor and fungousness of spelling-book paper, who can wonder at the energy of repulsion exerted upon quick-minded children by this exercise?

Apparently mimeograph paper sniffing was after Mann's time.

welcome to Kindergarten

CT's experience meeting her daughter's Kindergarten teachers:

Recent anecdote. My daughter is starting kindergarten (part-time) this year, and she and I just met with the kindergarten teachers. When I was talking with one teacher about something, the other quietly (without telling me she was about to do it) tested my child on the kindergarten sight words, which she read off quickly, having been taught to read already with Engelmann's Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons.

It was funny to see the teachers' faces change when I told them that my child had never done sight words. You'd think sight words were some sort of absolutely indispensable part of learning to read. A good phonetic reader can read most sight words without ever seeing a sight word flashcard; the rest can be taught as they come up in other reading instruction.

Training versus education, or Why don't constructivists like phonics?

Why don't constructivists like phonics?

I had always assumed E.D. Hirsch's account explained it: constructivists are the philosophical descendants of Romantics, and Romantics believed that nature is a whole and should not be dissected, analyzed, broken down into component parts, etc. Wholeism, in other words. Romantics extended this belief to teaching and learning.

Constructivists are Romantics, and Romantics are Whole-ists, so: whole child, whole language, whole math, histogeomegraph....

Here's Hirsch:

The romantic poet William Wordsworth said, “We murder to dissect”; the progressivist says that phonemics and place value should not be dissected in isolation from their natural use, nor imposed before the child is naturally ready. Instead of explicit, analytical instruction, the romantic wants implicit, natural instruction through projects and discovery. This explains the romantic preference for “integrated learning” and “developmental appropriateness.” Education that places subject matter in its natural setting and presents it in a natural way is superior to the artificial analysis and abstractions of language. Hands-on learning is superior to verbal learning. Real-world applications of mathematics provide a truer understanding of math than empty mastery of formal relationships.

Reading Matthew Hunter's article on constructivism in British schools, though, I saw the constructivist antipathy to phonics in a new light:

The much publicised debate over "phonics" versus "whole word" methods sounds arcane, but it is really quite simple. "Phonics" involves teaching pupils to match individual letters to sounds, so that they can combine these sounds to make words. The teaching of phonics requires an orderly, teacher-led classroom, and in its technical approach is often characterised as boring and off-putting for young children.

For that reason, "whole-word" methods have been promoted for the last half-century as a more child-centred alternative. Instead of didactically instilling an understanding of which letters make which sounds, whole-word teaching encourages pupils to "discover" how to read by first matching words with meanings, then slowly building an understanding of letter-sounds. This method promises that pupils, to a large degree, will teach themselves. As one whole-word apostle claimed, it will lead to the "withering away of the teacher".

The most important distinction between the two methods is that one works, and one does not. This has not stopped generations of "progressive educators" from eschewing the teaching of phonics, not because of any perceived ineffectiveness but because its didactic methods are repugnant to their ideology. As a result of these teachers indulging their romantic ideals, 11-year olds arrive at secondary school unable to read and write.
Child-Centered Learning Has Let My Pupils Down
MATTHEW HUNTER| June 2012

I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I had never thought of this.

During the Summer School Institute at Morningside Academy, Kent Johnson talked about the difference between training and education. Most of what he was teaching us was how to train students, not how to educate them. Training comes before education.

from my notes:

[The] test for training [is]: “I’m teaching them something I know & they don't know. I want them to be as smart as I am.”

That's training, and for Kent training is (generally) not about discovery, while education may be.

For some time now, I've been frustrated that schools aren't giving students the practice they need.

But now, reading Hunter in the wake of attending the Institute, I think it's probably more accurate to say students aren't getting the training they need.

The reason they aren't getting the training they need is likely to be the fact that the concept of training seems almost intrinsically to require, or at a minimum suggest, an "orderly, teacher-led classroom" and a "technical approach."

and see:
balanced literacy - the video
histogeomegraph: preventing the tragedy of content isolation

advice for adults with reading problems

resources in the comments thread

And here are The Phonics Page and Don Potter.

gobsmacked

I'd read chemprof's and EM's descriptions of very bright students with serious reading problems, and I'd been appropriately horrified. But until this morning I'm not sure I really, truly grasped what they were talking about. Which is: very bright, very talented students who have major problems reading and who haven't been diagnosed with dyslexia.

This morning, one of the smartest students I've ever had reluctantly showed me the thesis statement he'd just written. He didn't want me to look at it because the spelling was bad, and I won't post it without permission. I'll just say that he had misspellings on the order of 'charitturs" for characters; "sirve" for serve; and "morle" for moral. Of 19 words, 9 are misspelled, and the words spelled correctly include only one noun.

His spelling is so bad, he said, that spellcheck doesn't work. At some point his laptop decided he might be writing in Spanish, so half the time spellcheck serves up a menu of Spanish options. When Microsoft Word does present him with a selection of words in English, my student often has no idea which one to pick.

I had him read out loud a difficult paragraph, written by Maria Tatar, on fairy tales. He could more or less do it (he's very sharp), but he kept missing the short words: prepositions and short verbs, too, I think. He kept missing the short words because he automatically filled in whatever word he thought would come next instead of reading the word that actually did come next. (I guess somebody taught him to 'make predictions.')

Here's an example of what I mean (I don't remember whether he misread this section):

Like many fairy tales, the Grimms’ narrative begins by framing a prohibition

He would likely trip over 'by,' reading it as 'with' instead (or whatever word seemed most likely to appear). Although he can spell all the prepositions -- prepositions are the main words he can spell -- he often misreads them.

Another problem: he doesn't read left-to-right. Instead, he jumps around in a sentence looking for words he can base his reading of the sentence in: he's looking for a kind of anchor word, I think. Once he's found an anchor word, he goes back to the beginning of the sentence and starts over. Then, if he has no luck on the second go-round, he'll jump forward again and look for a second anchor word that might help.

He couldn't read the word "prohibition" at all, but he demonstrated for me the method he would use to tackle it. He would start with the syllable "pro," which he could read; then he would hit "hibition," which he couldn't read at all. Then he would skip to "tion" at the end (which he saw as a separate syllable - that's good). Then he would try to guess "prohibition" on the basis of "pro" and "tion."

And he would fail, in spite of the fact that he does indeed know the word 'prohibition' and recognized it the moment I said it.

He's in his mid-20s, he's extremely intelligent, and he cannot read "prohibition" using phonics and syllables.

I know very little about dyslexia, so I don't know whether that's an issue. I do know a little about phonics, and it seems clear that he doesn't read phonetically. At least, not fluently. I'm sure he was taught to read using whole language or balanced literacy. As a child he memorized all the words he was taught and then, via high IQ, high energy, and a scrappy personality, figured out how to reverse-engineer paragraphs in order to wrest some meaning from them.

Interestingly, his problems have led him to a theory of paragraph development I've been mulling over myself: he believes paragraphs typically have a concluding sentence that sums everything up. He reads that sentence first, then goes back to the beginning of the paragraph to try and decipher the whole thing.

I've been wondering whether paragraphs have conclusions and have been operating under the theory that most of them do not. Now I wonder.

He can't really write at all (he says -- he's so verbal, I find that hard to believe). But he has somehow figured out how to think in whole paragraphs -- maybe even in whole 5-paragraph essays or perhaps beyond. Today he actually came up with a sophisticated thesis sentence AND three coherent supporting topic sentences almost entirely in his head. He says he got through high school on oral presentations, and by oral presentation he doesn't mean Powerpoint. He means thesis, topic sentence, elaboration, and specific support. He produces more content talking than I have the working memory to deal with: he's got to figure out how to write if only so other people will be able to follow what he's saying.

This is a guy trading in complex ideas entirely inside the oral register. You can't do that! (Well, you can, but most of us can't 'hear' it ---- )

He told me a few weeks back that when he was a kid his school introduced a new reading program that was so terrible, and left him with such profound spelling deficits, that his parents had wanted to sue the school. No surprise there.

Of course, as we know, a parent can't sue a school for failing to teach their very bright child to spell. Educational malpractice doesn't exist.

Question. What is the way forward here? (If he wants a way forward, that is. He's not a kid, and he's figured out work-arounds that are serving him reasonably well.)

It strikes me that he needs to look into voice recognition software ---- although to use voice recognition software for writing anything more serious than a short email you have to be able to read what you've dictated. So I'm sure about that.....

He says he's often thought he needs to take ESL classes in English.

That doesn't strike me as a bad idea -- I've begun to rely upon lessons in English as a second language myself -- but I think what he really needs is phonics. Phonics and a lot of practice reading left-to-right. His jump-around habits are ingrained; he'd need to practice until he developed a new ingrained left-to-right habit.

Is there a phonics program anyone out there would recommend for this student?

Other thoughts or suggestions?

chemprof on masked deficits in high-achieving students

chemprof responding to "EVERY PARENT SHOULD PAY ATTENTION TO SPELLING"

Absolutely. I think I've told the story of my first research student before, a very bright biochem major. She got a low C in biochem (after A's in organic) because of exactly this kind of problem. She was an early reader who basically memorized words, but really only read the first 3-4 letters. So she couldn't keep what she called the "glys" straight - glycine, glycolysis, glycogen, etc. all looked the same to her. She really needed explicit phonics, but no one noticed early enough.

That is an amazing story. Amazing, and chilling.

In the early grades, a strong ability to memorize, which C. had and has, is going to mask deficits if the only data anyone cares about is a passing score on the state tests.

C., too, was an early reader with a quick memory; he was one of those kids who 'taught himself to read.' But when he was in fourth grade, I discovered that he could not read a two-syllable nonsense word.

And he couldn't spell at all, which I knew was not right. Everyone in the household thought he'd naturally learn to spell if he just read more, but he had abruptly stopped reading, and his school didn't give many reading assignments.

Interestingly, at some point after C. enrolled in his Jesuit high school, he told me that "The kids are better readers" -- meaning they could read out loud better than kids in his public school. He also heard stories of parents who put their kids in Catholic school "because they couldn't read."

Catholic schools still teach phonics, I believe.

---------------

from the annals of All the answers are belong to us: trying and failing to buy a Direct Instruction spelling book

Jennie on what parents know

I think most parents have NO CLUE that this is how reading is being taught in the schools. This approach is used even in schools that claim they teach phonics. After all, they do teach some letter-sound correspondences for consonants and vowels, and they do encourage children to use that information when looking at the first letter of a word, as you see this adult doing with the "c" in "cat."

Many parents therefore assume, when their child struggles, that the problem lies within their child.

Until a year ago, I was in the NO CLUE category. Just a couple of years ago I would have looked at this video and thought the mom was using phonics.

Molly on strategies used by adults who can't read

re: the balanced literacy video

About 20 years I ago, I took part in a training program for Literacy Volunteers of America. It was a fairly intense training for volunteers who would be working with illiterate adults. One thing we learned was the coping strategies that illiterate adults use. This video is a great demonstration of those strategies. Figure out the first letter and look at the picture to guess. We are actively teaching children to use the coping strategies of illiterates, rather than teaching them to read. There is something very wrong with the whole process.

Lynn G on grandma with a pencil

When my littlest kid was about this age, I remember going to a restaurant with my mom (a retired reading teacher). While we were waiting for the food, and everyone was talking about stuff, I saw my mom with a little notebook working through lists of words that she was handwriting and teaching my daughter to sound out.

She picked rhyming families and concentrated on a single internal vowel sound at a time. Then they wrote simple sentences.

By the time the food arrived, my daughter was reading sentences with no picture clues. And every now and then my mom would throw in a new word without warning that was similar and in the same family, but required my kid to look at the letters and think about what was happening.

Good teaching can take place anywhere, anytime, with the simplest of tools. You can keep your technology integrationist. I've got Grandma with a pencil.

what do parents want?

Reading this Brian Mickelthwait post, I was inspired to conduct my own investigation.


whole language products for sale on eBay: 199



balanced literacy products for sale on eBay: 22




look and say products for sale on eBay: 60




phonics products for sale on eBay: 7,260




Of a piece with the observation that nobody ever hires a constructivist tutor.

effect size

Dan Dempsey says:

By Golly .. the insanity just will not stop .. another educational pack of lemmings is ready to follow the "Whole Language" rodents into the sea of ignorance.

Hattie Visible Learning effect sizes:

Phonics = 0.60
Whole Language = 0.06
(1/10 as effective and good for a decade of educational malpractice)

So now we are off to the decade of the twins I trust: "Problem & Project Based Learning"

Nope we don't want any of that effective stuff like Worked Examples, Direct Instruction, or Mastery learning.

Not when Problem Based Learning = 0.15

You know what?

I'm going to start talking about effect size at school board meetings.

Something new and different.

children taking risks

The subject of very young children "taking risks" in school came up the other day, in a comments thread, I think.

Here's where it comes from.^* Whole language. Children being taught to read in a whole language classroom are risk-takers.

I think we can take it on faith no one teaching children to read using a field-tested synthetic phonics program would conceive of his or her students as risk-takers.

There's a reason for that.


^* NCTE links to this group.

Sarah on balanced literacy vs phonics

You can't balance whole language and phonics because they are opposites. "Balanced literacy" as taught to my 1st grader meant (in part) "if you don't know a word, look at the first letter and guess." Phonics is "if you don't know a word, sound it out." Those two points of view contradict each other and cannot be "balanced."

A friend here described her child's experience with balanced literacy.

It was exactly as Sarah says: the kids were supposed to guess what the unknown words were, using context.

But - and here's something I hadn't heard before - every day the kids would read the same authentic book and guess the same words.

I can only guess that that happened because no matter what curriculum they're using, teachers know that kids need repetition in order to learn. So instead of giving the kids repetition via decodable books, like the Bob Books, they gave them repetition via the same authentic children's book.

But I don't know.

60 lessons a week

Have I mentioned lately that I am not a fan of differentiated instruction?

I've just this moment discovered Miss Brave, by the way. She's wonderful, but her school is a dystopian futureworld of guided reading, "strategies," goals, literacy coaches, and "APs." And paperwork. And more, more paperwork. Your tax dollars at work.

Lucy Calkins has a lot to answer for.

The good news: at least they're using phonics.

First use of the phrase "4th grade hump?"

In the earliest mention of the phrase that I have yet found, it is called instead the “4^th grade hump.” For a few years after that, it is called a hump, then it appears as the phrase “4^th grade slump.” If you search Google books for the two phrases for various time periods, you find a number of interesting links. Also, over time, there are more and more hits for the phrase.

Here are the phrases, from Edward Dolch, the creater of the Dolch sight words, in his 1948 book, “Problems in Reading.” The first is on p. 56:

There is the famous 'fourth-grade hump,' the sudden difficulty of reading matter that strikes the children without warning. The difficulty keeps on climbing through grades V and VI.

This mention on page 251 also has a very interesting table:

Every word not on the list of 1,000 [most frequent words] was underlined and counted every time it appeared. Therefore a percentage of hard words means a percentage of the running words, that is, the total words read. We are aware that if a word appears a second time it is not now a hard word if it were learned the first time, but there was no way of allowing for this factor.....

The percentages of hard words for the books of each grade were averaged, and then the figures were rounded to the nearest whole number. The result shows the following:

TABLE V

Word Difficulty, According to Appearance on First 1,000 Words for

Children’s Reading as Found in Ten Series Of Readers

Grade

I II III IV V VI

Hard Words (Not on List)

4% 6% 8% 12% 14% 16%

These figures show the well-known “fourth grade hump,” a difference between the third grade books and fourth grade books that is twice the difference between the other grades.

There were several interesting links to later use of the phrase “4^th grade slump,” I’ll link to two of them:

1. The Trouble With Boys by Peg Tyre, p. 142-143

(The whole thing is interesting, here’s an excerpt:)

Around fourth and fifth grade, another factor comes into play as well. Good readers take a leap forward as they move from learning to read to reading to learn. The curriculum demands it. It’s no longer enough to be able to “sound out” words. Children have to comprehend sentences and paragraphs from history and science books and make inferences from those texts. Kids who don’t make that jump fall into what experts have dubbed the “fourth-grade slump.” They are stuck trying to figure out how to decode the word everglades, for instance, while other kids are learning about the kinds of animals that live in those Florida swamps. It’s an important cognitive leap.

By every measure, the fourth-grade slump hits boys harder than it hits girls.

2. The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind by Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin, p. 143

As predicted by the theoretical model of reading used for our study (see Chapter 1), the students’ scores started to slump at about grade 4. For the below-average readers, the slump began early (in grade 4) and was intense. By grades 6 and 7, they were reading almost two years below grade level on all the reading tests. For the above-average readers, the slump began later (around grade 6) and was less intense. Many of the above-average readers were still reading on grade level or above in the sixth and seventh grades on some of the reading tests.The slump started earlier on some tests than on others.

The first to slip was vocabulary.

If you teach properly, with a good phonics method and less than a dozen sight words, there are few "hard words;" disadvantaged elementary children (including several 1st graders) taught with Webster's Speller were able to sound out what Dolch called "hard words," but Webster called "easy words of X syllables."

Here are some "easy words of 3 syllables, accented on the first and third"

O-VER-TAKE, IN-COR-RECT, IN-TER-MIX

and "easy words of 4 syllables, full accent on the first, and the half accent on the third"

MIS-CEL-LA-NY, OB-DU-RA-CY, PUR-GA-TO-RY

children with large vocabularies

Phonics is considered a "bottom up" approach where students "decode" the meaning of a text. The advantage of phonics, especially for students who come to schools with large vocabularies, is that once students get the basics down, they can go to the library and read a wide variety of children's literature.

The Reading Wars: Phonics vs Whole Language: Phonics

by Jon Reyhner, a phonics skeptic

That certainly explains why my district, heavily populated by small children possessing large vocabularies, would be dumping Open Court for Fountas and Pinnell.

missed the memo

End of the reading wars.

In the past seven years, a new view of reading instruction has taken hold in school districts nationwide.

The issue these days isn't whether "phonics" or "whole language" is the better approach for beginning readers, but how to blend those philosophies and other elements in a reading program tailored to the individual child.

For a growing group of educators, the reading wars, waged so ferociously in the 1980s and '90s, are past. Or at least passe.

"I think more schools are moving toward a balanced literacy program," said Tina Chekan, co-principal and literacy coach at Propel McKeesport, a charter elementary school. Propel also operates elementary schools in Homestead, Kennedy and Turtle Creek.

"There's not one program that fits all," she said. "We know that our students are on varying ability levels. We work to really focus on the individual."

[snip]

Some educators now downplay the significance of the reading wars, calling them the over-publicized rants of academic extremists. Dr. Roller, of the International Reading Association, considers the wars a dead issue.

"I wish somebody would hold a big funeral service and bury this casket," she said.

I don't think that's going to happen. 

precise & fluent thoughts

le radical galoisien writes:

For a writing system to express precise and fluent thoughts, it must be dependent on sound -- because that is the basis of communication. Sure there's art and music ... but you can't really communicate fluent and precise ideas with them, only gists. Could you communicate something like Newton's laws of physics to someone who didn't know them based on a picture, or a series of pictures?

That's what I thought!

Thank you!

This may be the aspect of 'balanced literacy' that makes me most crazy: the obsession with 'meaning.' For balanced literacy folk, reading is about extracting meaning from texts. That's if you're lucky; here in my district reading in Kindergarten is now about 'making meaning' from texts. So we are told.

Having Kindergarten children who can't read spend their time extracting meaning from (authentic!) texts is nonsense on stilts. The simple fact is that you cannot extract meaning from text without knowing what the words on the page are, which means knowing the sounds for which the printed words stand.

Spoken language is sound; printed language is a visual representation of sound. It is a translation of an aural medium into a visual medium. Like cued speech.

Thus, your basic 5-year old learning to read does not need to know the 'meaning' of the letters c-a-t. He needs to know the sounds that the letters c-a-t stand for; he needs to know that the letters c-a-t stand for the spoken word kat, or kæt in the IPA spelling.

That's because your basic 5-year old already knows the meaning of 'cat.' Seriously. Both my autistic kids knew what a cat was at age 5. They knew what a cat was at age 2, for god's sake.

What they didn't know was that the letters c-a-t, printed on a page, stood for the spoken word kat. That was the missing knowledge, not 'what is a cat?' or 'what do you make of cats?' or 'what is the author saying about cats?'

(Andrew also had to learn that the spoken word 'cat' stood for the animal. For many years he had severe auditory processing problems, if that is the correct term. I assume he still does. What I don't know - what I'd like to know - is whether he and Jimmy also have some kind of 'core' deficit in language per se. Why can't they talk? Is it because they can't 'hear' & thus can't learn the grammar of the English language the way typical children do, or is it because of .... something worse. I don't know.)

Back on topic: I remember, a couple of years ago, watching an online video of Siegfried Engelmann saying kids should be taught to read words in isolation. (Pretty sure that's what he said.) I remember finding that almost a scandalous statement at the time, and although I was inclined to take on faith anything Siegfried Engelmann said, I experienced a mild failure of nerve contemplating the image of young children reading aloud lists of words in isolation, outside of "connected text." I'd been too long in the public schools not to have had drilled into my very soul the notion that teaching anything in isolation is wicked.

It wasn't until I enlisted in the reading wars that I realized what Engelmann was talking about: he was talking about the fact that printed language is a representation of, or code for, spoken language. Printed words represent spoken words. Not meanings. Kids need to be able to read words fluently strictly from the printed letters on the page, without any context to "help" them. All good readers are able to read words outside of context.

This is not to say that good readers -- fast readers -- don't use context. They do:

Confirming the psychologists and educators who emphasize phonics, mechanistic letter decoding, L, accounts for the lion’s share (62%) of the adult reading rate. This is recognition by parts. Holistic word recognition, W, accounts for only a small fraction (16%) of reading rate. The contextual sentence process, S,^* accounts for 22% of reading rate, on average, but is variable across readers (mean +/- SD= 87630 word/min), which may reflect individual differences in print exposure.

[snip]

Understanding individual differences in reading rate would be invaluable. The breakdown in Table 2 compares the contributions of each process across observers. There is surprisingly little difference in the contributions of each of the 3 processes across our group of 11 normal readers. However, note that observers JS and KT, our fastest readers, also have the highest percent contribution of the S (context) process. This supports the idea that the context process reflects differences in print exposure [19]. Even so, these readers are fast mostly because their L processes are fast.

Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation by Denis G. Pelli*, Katharine A. Tillman

PLOS One August 2007 Issue 8

Fast readers are fast phonetic readers who also use context and word shape.

International Phonetic Association
International Phonetic Alphabet (pdf file)
Thank You, Whole Language at Illinois Loop
Whole Language Lives on by Louisa Moats
Whole Language High Jinks by Louisa Moats

^* "Contextual sentence process" = context, i.e. the meaning of the preceding text. When a fast reader reads the next word (partly) on the basis of the meaning of what he has read thus far, he is using "S." If you're reading a blog post about balanced literacy and you spot an upcoming word that starts with 'ba' you're going to very rapidly read 'balanced' instead of, say, 'ballast.' 

what do linguists think?

My copy of The Roots of Phonics: A Historical Introduction A Revised Edition by Miriam Balmuth just arrived, and on page 11 I find this:

The question raised is: Can a marking that conveys a general idea be called writing, or must all writing represent specific units of speech?

To this question, the great linguist Leonard Bloomfield apparently gives his answer when he states, "Writing is merely a device for recording speech." This statement narrows writing down to only those markings that are directly related to spoken language. It reflects the attitude of linguistic theoreticians from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

How do linguists define 'writing' today?

miscue analysis

at D-Ed Reckoning

Invaluable.

Check out this conclusion contained near the end of a 31-page case study of a 5th grade boy's reading:

John’s comprehension at his current fifth grade level is excellent when he is relieved of the task of recognizing words.