Hello again. This week in E339 we read a very interesting article that proved to be very insightful. However, there were some points that I strongly disagreed with. The whole article was about "sounding out", and how it is a cultural thing and that it doesn't really work all that well. It described other strategies that children use while reading and that parents and some teachers should encourage. The article never really went on to say what "sounding out" was. The writer did a study on children and asked them what "sounding out" was and they gave him several, but mainly two answers. These two were saying each sound of each letter of the word, or "chunking" the sounds together in a word. Basically, he discovered that sounding out can mean an array of things.
I made a big comment at the end of this article. I kind of had an epiphany. Why can't "sounding out" just mean a lot of different strategies? Instead of just saying to students to "sound it out", we should be encouraging all the different strategies that mean "sounding out". There's nothing wrong with encouraging students to "sound it out", just as long as they know that "sounding out" is a vast umbrella that covers several methods of decoding a word.
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