Real Life Reading Inquiry

Real Life Reading Inquiry

When reading the article “Letting Go of Letter of the Week”, I became very interested in the different strategy they used to teach reading. I did not believe that students could use informational print from their environment that they already “know how to read” in order to read other words. I conducted a study with a six-year-old boy to see whether or not he could actually read the environmental print and therefore could use chunking to read other words, or if he simply recognized the print only when it was seen in its usual context (i.e. M on the McDonald’s sign and the red and yellow colors included). I studied his ability to read movie titles, his name, restaurant names, and cereals.

I had confirmed my hypothesis that children could not read new words based on familiar chunks from words they know after my very first test. The article gave the example that because students could “read” the word Burger King when seeing the logo, they could use that knowledge to know “-ing” when they see it at the end of a different word. I will not provide a last name for sense of confidentiality but I must provide the first name of the little boy I worked with in order to describe my first test. The boy’s name was Tanner. Based on the article of “Letting Go of Letter of the Week” I should be able to teach Tanner how to read the word “tan” by using his experience and knowledge of his own name. Tanner can read and write his name, but when asked to read the word “tan” he broke down and could not read it. On one hand I was honestly surprised that he could read his 6-letter name but not read a 3-letter word that starts with the exact same chunk of letters. On the other hand, I was not surprised because I never believed the teaching strategy discussed in the article could work, at least not for all students.

The way I tested Tanner for all the words I used in my study was by first showing him environmental print and asking him to read the words. He could “read” the environmental print words with 100% accuracy. Immediately following an environmental print word, I wrote down the exact same word in black ink on a plain piece of paper and asked him to read the word. For example, I would show him a box of Lucky Charms cereal and ask him to read the words on the box, then I would write the word Lucky Charms on a piece of paper and ask him to read the word. Not to my surprise, he could read all the environmental print but could not read one single word I had written on the paper. I used McDonald’s and Chick-Fil-A (his favorite restaurant) for the two restaurants to read. I held up the case for The Little Mermaid because that is his favorite movie and asked him to read the words on the case. He told me it said The Little Mermaid but then he could not read the words when I wrote them on paper. I went over several different words with Tanner, including the word Cars (hoping to relate to the movie) for a simpler word.

I was really fascinated during this study and the information I obtained is very useful to know when teaching someday. In the article the teacher argues that all her students can read after they all recite the words of environmental print accurately. However, I know now that children cannot actually read the words in environmental print. I loved the concept of using familiar words from the environment to teach students how to read, but I just don’t understand how I could make it work in my classroom someday.

*Most of my research was based on the information in the article “Letting Go of Letter of the Week” by Bell and Jarvis. A second source that I used information from to conduct my study was “Reading Is All Around Us: Using Environmental Print to Teach Beginning Literacy Skills” by Dede Dodds.