Interesting!

I received this in an email today:

More Brain Stuff . . From Cambridge University.

O lny srmat poelpe can raed tihs.


cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy,

it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm.

Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if
you can raed tihs psas it on !!

Psas Ti ON !

I immediately though of Glenn Doman's method of teaching very young children to read. His technique centers around teaching a whole word as a unit rather than the phonetic style of deciphering each letter by sound to read a whole word.

I had used the Glenn Doman method with S, and according to Doman, it is best if the child does not know the individual alphabets beforehand. This is because, the typical knowledge of the alphabets inhibits (to a certain degree, because S did know the individual alphabets when I started her on the Glenn Doman method) the speed at which the child can acquire reading the word as a unit. She will tend to try and decipher it if she recognizes each letter in the word.

In teaching a child to read using this method, one has to show a card with the word only for one second per word, not less, not more. So it is very suitable for very young children. In fact, his book is titled How To Teach Your Baby To Read. He talked about pathways that are developed in infants, and that when you show the infants these cards with red words that are of a certain size, you are helping the development of these pathways. We all know how a newborn cannot see clearly in the first few weeks and can only see the outline of his mother's face.

Doman also says that the child will automatically know how to read other words that has not been shown to him if they are of the same word/sound patter of the words that they have been shown. For example, I had a card with the word 'book', and after a while, S knew how to read the word 'book'. But, when I showed her the word 'cook', she automatically knows how to read it without having been taught the word before. This is because the child acquires the pattern and spelling rules of words from repeated exposure to the words themselves. I see similarities between this and the Malaysian IQRA's style of teaching children to read Quranic Arabic. In the IQRA' method, the tajweed rules are embedded in the words. So the child learns to read the Quran with proper tajweed without learning the rules of tajweed.

In the class Chain of Command, Abdulbary talked of how the early scholars are very well versed in Mustalah al Hadith (The Sciences of Hadith) without necessarily knowing the logical breakdown, terms that we have today. This is because they lived the Hadith, and the later scholars didn't, so they had to develop the Sciences of Hadith that we know of today. An analogy that Abdulbary gave us was that of a native English speaker.

"I be going to the store," sounds grammatically wrong to a native English speaker, but he will not necessarily know the grammatical rules/jargon that would help in explaining why it's wrong.

On the other hand, a person who learns English as a second language, or a non native, will be quite well versed in the jargons of English grammar, but s/he will not necessarily speak English better than a native speaker. And this is because the Native speaker lives English, whereas the non native has to learn it.

This makes a lot of sense to me, and after pondering upon it, and observing other kids learning to read using the phonetic style, and after using the phonetic style with them under OHVA, I realize this:

It can be very frustrating for a child of 5/6 years of age to learn how to read using Phonics. The process can be very slow, and in the process, they can be discouraged from reading altogether, because it takes too long to read a sentence, let alone a whole book! Sure, the developers of the Phonics method provide ways around this, but I can see how a child can be discouraged if s/he does not have a love of reading beforehand. If the parent is used to reading aloud to the child before, or if reading is very much a part of the family's culture, then there is probably less probability of this happening, inshaallah.

According to Doman, the older the child is, the less effective the Doman method, and this is largely due to the ability of the brain in absorbing information. The younger the brain is, the easier it is to absorb, and the higher the speed is for absorption.

When I enrolled S in OHVA, she was already reading by herself, but the Kindergarten curriculum, of course, included a Phonics kit, and required that I go through the Phonics lessons with her. Being inexperienced and gullible, I followed the curriculum to the T, which didn't make any sense, because she was already reading and knows the phonetic rules automatically. After a while, I just skimmed through it.

One thing that bothered me was,

"Is she gonna suck at spelling?"

It turned out that she initially did suck at spelling, but then again, that just may be my perfectionism seeping through, for she did later become the Spelling Bee Champion at OHVA's Pee Wee Spelling Bee, and was among the four last contestants of the 4th to 8th graders Spelling Bee.

One thing that I did notice also, is that, her reading speed is pretty fast, and my mother also did say that my sister (whom she did the Doman method with but later forgot how to read) also has a pretty good reading speed. We were talking about how the method benefited her even though she later forgot it. However, there is one thing I see lacking in S; comprehension of the text. It was the one thing I worried since she was reading things so speedily. I can relate to it too, because when I read adventurous fiction, i tend to gloss over the descriptive part of the text and focus on the action, and rush to get to the ending. When I'm reading non fiction, my speed is a little slower (or is this the case with everyone else too? Hmm).

Nevertheless, in one way or another, once a child is able to read, his world gets much much more interesting. Truth be told, I actually dread teaching a child to read. With S, it was an experiment that I undertook just to see if it truly works. It did do me a lot of good though later on, because once she was in Kindergarten, we no longer had to focus so much on learning how to read (though I did out of gullibility still focused on it), but we were able to explore other subjects at a whole different level. However, N and H weren't exclusively taught to read using the Doman method, and they're still avid readers, alhamdulillah.

Yet, isn't it interesting how we had labored in the process of learning how to read by deciphering each letter, only to abandon it for a more efficient way later on?