Understanding Reading Development

I'm writing a book on Phonics with Kathy Goouch. Below are some thoughts and observations about the nature of learning language both written and oral. Do these observations make us think about how we 'teach' about language - including learning to read?

“Though we share the same earth with millions of kinds of living creatures, we also live in a world that no other species has access to. We inhabit a world full of abstractions, impossibilities, and paradoxes...We tell stories about our real experiences and invent stories about imagined ones, and even make use of these stories to organise our lives. In a real sense, we live our lives in this shared virtual world. And slowly, over the millennia, we have come to realise that no other species on earth seems able to follow us into this miraculous place” (Deacon, 1997:22)

The unique way that human language can represent the world – objects, events and relationships – facilitates an infinite variety of representations and a powerful means of predicting, organising memories and planning actions (Deacon 1997). This form of representation of the world shapes our thinking and the ways with which we know our world. Our acquisition and our uses of language are natural, honed by thousands of years of evolution, and are inseparable from our intelligence. As teachers, our understanding of general human abilities and the awe inspiring phenomena of human intelligence and mental capability will direct our approach to curricula and pedagogy. As we begin to realise our role as mediators of a culture and nurturers of young minds we recognise that teaching has no place for amateurs or ill-informed technicians; it is a position for fully informed, creative professionals.

The linguist Chomsky (1972) puzzled over how children as young as four seem implicitly to know an enormous amount about complex grammatical rules and their application, without any kind of teaching – indeed this form of knowledge is arguably far too complex for children to learn in any formal way. Chomsky argues that a child’s incredible feat of learning results from some kind of ‘innate competence’.

Goodman (1996) contends that written language is learned later in life, after oral language, but is in no way less natural than oral language acquisition. Both, he argues
“develop out of the need of humans to think symbolically and to communicate in a growing range of contexts and functions, as individuals and as societies. Written language is an extension of human language development that occurs when it’s needed: when face-to-face and here-and-now language is no longer sufficient.” (p. 177-125)