Sound it out?

While reading, Sounding Out: A Pervasive Cultural Model of Reading, for class this week I was forced to look at my own use of the phrase "sound it out". I am ashamed to admit that I have been using this phrase with students frequently. I am currently shadowing a third grade teacher and on my first day in her classroom I heard the phrase at least three times. This article has made me look at what teachers and students really mean when they use this phrase.

Even though I have been learning about different reading strategies for the past few months, I find that when I start working with children I catch myself saying "sound it out" when thats not really what I want them to do. I could relate to one example from this article in which the student is reading a sentence and says "bee" instead of "dragonfly". The teacher tells her to sound out the word but is also pointing to a picture of a dragonfly on the page. The teacher is saying to "sound it out" but is actually using a very different strategy. I believe that it is very important for teachers to be able to state the different strategies to students instead of labeling them all as "sound it out". I believe that this is why when students were asked to explain what makes a good reader, most of them used the phrase "sound it out" when many of their peers where doing other things that were making them successful readers.


The author of this article also points out that this strategy is a cultural model that will not serve all students well. Using this phrase may cause students who experience difficulties with pronunciation to feel discouraged and "bad" about their reading skills. As we discussed last week it is very important to children to enjoy reading and not to be discouraged. If we are only offering children one tool to use, we are setting them up for failure and disappointment. 


As mentioned in the article teachers should be trying to get students to combine letter sounds but to also do many other things like looking at the rest of the sentence to see what words make sense. I know that it is my responsibility as a teacher to make sure that children have a range of strategies to solve words and help them effectively use those strategies to access visual information in efficient ways.