Monday, December 6, 2021

Orthographic Mapping by Stephen Parker (Part 1)

 



Here are extracts of an article by Stephen Parker and my comments. You may read the article here.

I have decided to break this up into bite sized posts.

Stephen Parker:

Orthographic mapping is the connection-making process that automatically creates sight words – words that are simply recognized at a glance, with decoding no longer necessary.

The connections that need to be made, according to Ehri, are between the letters seen in a word’s spelling and the sounds (phonemes) heard in that word’s pronunciation. This is precisely what decoding (sounding out) a word accomplishes. For most students, decoding a word successfully 2-5 times creates a new sight word.

 

My comment: Many of these guys who write on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media write as if they are experts on the subject. Unfortunately, they do not respond to any questions and do not correct the mistakes pointed out. Here is one such post in my blog on misrepresentation by Stephen Parker.

I have written several posts on orthographic memory but find it necessary to write this post. Does a child have to sound out a word to have it orthographically mapped? Definitely not, as reasoned in my blog post in response to Lyn Stone's video clip you may find here

Stephen should ask his Twitter friend londonjohn how he is able to read as fluently as he does without knowing the sounds of the letters. OR ask Diane Ravitch and her classmates who learned during the whole language period. How did they and thousands of others map words orthographically?

All my dyslexic students orthographically mapped the 220 Dolch words by rote memory using letter names and not by sounding them out.

Stephen Parker:

Less Than Ideal: Dyslexia

There are many children in school – and countless adults in our communities – whose language comprehension skills (LC) are fully (or nearly) appropriate for their age (so, for example, 0.9 < LC < 1), but whose word recognition skills are poor to non-existent (0 < WR < 0.2). These individuals might know a couple hundred consciously-memorized sight words, but they don’t have the ability to sound out and decode unfamiliar words. Thus, they have little ability to automatically create new sight words through orthographic mapping. Their reading is slow and labored. As a result, their ability to engage with the text is severely constrained – as are their educational and vocational prospects.

Dyslexics can’t learn to read because they can’t decode, resulting in too few words recognized, quickly and efficiently, as sight words.

My comment:

Yes, reading may be slow and labored for a majority and not only for the dyslexics. They struggle with reading because they cannot blend sounds of letters taught wrongly by teachers. I have several articles on this in my blog.

Fortunately, most of these kids are able to figure out by patterns and analogies and begin to read when they are in grades 4 to 6.Once they figure out the 'mystery' they become fluent readers in no time. You may read more on Patterns and analogies here.

Unfortunately, about 20 % of these kids disengage/ shut down from learning to read and are wrongly lumped in the dyslexia category.

I hope, Stephen Parker will not block me as he did when I questioned him. I hope to have a decent discussion, with him, for the benefit of all readers. 

 

 

 

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