As many online have pointed out, he is recognizing shapes and symbols, rather than truly readingā¦
As if the difference is obvious.
Or they spend an inordinate amount of time on drilling for a parlor trick.
Given that he was able to recognize the word ācircleā and the actual circular (well, cylindrical) toy, it seems like more than just drilling the kid on cards.
I taught my girl to read at 3 1/2. But she did most of the work. She also had a lot of books memorized, so sometimes it was hard to tell if she was reading or reciting.
He recognizes that they are both called the same, but that doesnāt mean that he can apply any of this outside of this specific task or that he is anywhere close to understanding the ideas behind it.
If he canāt, then I am not sure that it is really āopening up babys mindā much.
Watch out everyone! We have a child developmental psychologist commenting in this thread!
We thought my little brother was only memorizing his books until he also started reading comics from the paper out loud.
I remember the first time I āread.ā I had a book with pictures, beneath which was the word for that picture. My parents would read it to me. I essentially just memorized the look of each word. When I would see those words in other contexts, I could tell people what they said so they thought I could read, but it was entirely limited to the words Iād memorized in that book. I always felt like I was cheating and not really reading.
In retrospect though, I think that counts as reading.
After all, English spelling and pronunciation is all over the place. Cough and Through donāt rhyme, donāt involve the same sounds, and donāt even involve the sounds weāre taught go with the letter g. We memorize them, just like I did with that book so many years ago. Iāve just memorized a lot more since then and learned a bunch of phonetic rules (and exceptions) on top of that to help me deal with words I havenāt yet memorized.
And if you think about how you read, itās not like you go syllable by syllable. You recognize the shape. Isnāt that essentially why itās easy to read things like:
āI cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg,ā despite the fact that (except for I), none of those are real words?
Well, fuck you, too!
I am just a simple computational linguist who doesnāt see any value in that and suspects that there are better ways to spend time with your kid.
This is also basically the only option for learning to read Chinese (memorizing words), so if thatās literacy in Chinese I think it counts in English too.
Big deal! Throw those same cards on the floor and I could pick up the right ones, too!
My kids have been reading text from flashcards since they were a few weeks old. The trick is to just buy some blank index cards and write āTHBBBBBTGGGTTTā on them.
Iām not sure how old I was when I started reading, but I know I was young enough that people told my parents, āoh, heās not reading, he just memorized those words.ā My parents insist they never taught me half the words that I supposedly read, though. My mom believes I was actually sounding the words out, though she knows that I didnāt always know what they meant, and I was too young to remember so I donāt know what to thinkā¦
On the flip side, I have a friend who babysits a kid in her neighborhood. Heās the only kid of his age in the neighborhood who isnāt talking yet. She asked his parents how much they talk to him and they said, āwe donāt, he canāt talk yet so what would be the point?ā When she explained how she got him talking, they insisted that their son was just mimicking her and didnāt understand what he was saying. Meanwhile, my friendās own kid, who is the same age, is already speaking four languages (and actually speaking them ā his mother will tell him to say ādziÄkujÄā to me and heāll turn to me and say āthank youā (unless Iāve been speaking French to him, in which case heāll say āmerciā)).
Donāt we āreadā words by recognising the general shape of them, rather than sounding each one out phonetically in our mind, for the purpose of reading speed?
Is that not why you can sometimes have a comprehension fail and have to go back and actually read/spell the word properly, rather than assuming what it is given the first and last letters, general shape and position and context. Which this kid seems to be getting very good training in.
Also, encouraging a learning environment etc. But no. Parlour trickery!
Concerning Concern trolling at some of its finickyest.
You are always welcome to disagree with me, but I swear i am not driving trollies.
Yelp! That should be spelled āConcern Trollingā.
I suspected as much, but I am not doing that either.
My point is that many of the things you ascribed to literacy (recognizing applications outside of the context in which it was learned, or understanding the ideas behind something) are fairly advanced concepts for a kid this young.
I do a lot of work promoting preliteracy in kids age 0-5: the main goal is to demonstrate the connections that words have to ideas and sounds. It includes things like simply identifying that words exist, or that we tend to read from left to right.
Developmentally speaking, it is impossible to teach kids reading (in the traditional sense) when they are this young; they schema just arenāt fully developed enough to support the kinds of abstraction that reading requires. This doesnāt mean that parents canāt take steps to lay the foundations for literacy by strengthening a childās command of the cognitive strategies that are available to them (pattern and symbol recognition, word repetition, etc).
And it certainly isnāt a āparlor trickā any more than teaching a kid any other skill would be.
As others have pointed out Chinese definitely fits the bill here. Moreover, most adult readers āchunkā their words. When we see a word like āpuppyā, we donāt read it phonetically, we just see a combination of shapes that stands for āpuppyā in our head. Thatās how we read quickly. Chinese speakers and this little kid have just skipped the phonetic bit (which is a misrepresentation: there are phonetic components to Chinese characters, but thatās neither here nor there).
