Reading With Phonics Apps
We are developing a number of apps for computers and laptops, smartphones and tablets, which will be freely available for parents, siblings, tutors, and teachers who are teaching children (or older English language learners) to read.
The apps are designed to support the rapid development of phonemic awareness in learning readers
We have identified a small number of "key" words that contain (so will let children experience) the 44 sounds (phonemes) of English and the 75 letter combinations (phonograms) that are alternative spellings for those sounds.
A printed book could contain all those words, but although books are wonderful, they are mute. They depend on a competent reader to pronounce all the alternative sounds for a learning reader while their eyes follow the letters representing those sounds.
Our reading with phonics apps are designed to dialog, using speech and print, with a child (or older English learning reader) to interact with those 75 print symbols and the 44 speech sounds used in 98% of English texts, as well as the 100 or so “sight” or high frequency words (with irregular spellings) that account for nearly half of the words found in everyday reading matter and speech.
We believe that in as few as three weeks of listening and talking to these apps, especially with the help of a caring parent, sibling, tutor, or teacher, the neural connections between the visual and auditory parts of the learner’s brain will be wired together permanently, providing him or her with a lifetime of automatic fluent pronunciation of English.
In the so-called “simple view of reading,” this pronunciation (turning print symbols into speech sounds) is called “word recognition,” the first part of the "SVR," also known as “decoding,” converting each letter or combination of letters into a sound (phoneme).
But what about “meanings?” Many critics of direct instruction in phonics say learning to read should always be meaningful, never just rote "drill and skill" training with meaningless letters and nonsense words. Reading with phonics apps talk to a child with the hundreds of words in a two-year old’s oral vocabulary (up to the five thousand words in a five-year old's vocabulary). The apps use words whose meanings children already know!
We find children are delighted to see in print and "sound out" familiar words that they use every day, words they already understand. In the the simple view of reading, this is called “language comprehension” in which sounds of known words are instantly understood.
In the SVR, the product of word recognition (WR) and language comprehension (LC) is called “reading comprehension” (RC) in the simple view of reading. It is of course simply knowing how to read.
Reading with phonics apps show children words in print being converted to speech sounds whose meanings they already know. The apps are designed to dialog with learning readers using their already known oral vocabulary.
Reading with Phonics apps listen to words spoken by the child, showing correct and incorrect words as print to the child. As needed, the apps will ask the child to try again, guiding him or her to improve speech sounds and to converge to standard English pronunciation.
Digital sounds adapted from our Merlin electronic game will signal the correct/incorrect letters when the learning reader is spelling (typing or speaking), reinforcing best behaviors, and making learning more a playful game than a dry lesson.
(We don’t believe that practicing the sounds of letters with ba, be, bi, bo, bu, are boring for a very young child, though they may seem so in a crowded classroom. This is why we want to teach kids to read before they go to school!)
We’ll add buttons to our user interface to support what we will call “standard children dialogues” modeled after the “standard English dialogues” of our iXO telecomputing system, which was cited on the cover of BYTE magazine for “human factors engineering” Buttons supporting dialogue will include Yes, No, Don’t Know, Go Back/Repeat, and Help.
The Reading with Phonics apps are incredibly lightweight compared to the new AI-empowered programs like Amira Learning, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Into Reading. And of course our apps will be free and will work on the smartphones, tablets and computers likely to be found in most American homes today.
We will make these apps freely downloadable from the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, and the Amazon App Store. And we hope it will be a new tool in the toolbox of the thousands of practitioners teaching Marie Clay’s Reading Recovery to readers struggling in elementary schools around the world.