Learning to Read- Good to Know

One thing I meant to mention was something important I learned regarding how children learn to read. As it happens, I had a misconception of my own corrected by a teacher recently and I’ve been a little more persistent in my attempts to correct pronunciation issues in the kids’ speech.

My reasoning, prior to being corrected, was that I was sure I hadn’t pronounced words perfectly at their current age. So, I figured, I must have learned proper pronunciation once I learned to read since then I would understand spelling and would know the letters, how they sounded and thus, how to pronounce them.

Turns out the causality runs in the other direction. In fact, proper pronunciation allows kids to learn how to sound out words and learn to read faster. In retrospect, this knowledge seems so obvious I’m embarrassed that I got it wrong in the first place.

Now, I’ve always worked to correct their more egregious pronunciation errors so the kids pronunciation has always been pretty good. There have just been some words that I’ve allowed them because of their age and, to a degree, assumed time would correct those mispronunciations. However, since being corrected I’ve been more aggressive in getting them to pronounce sounds like “tr”, “dr”, “th” and “ss” properly all the time.

Under the premise that others might be making the same mistake, I wanted to pass this little nugget along. If I’m the only one, well no harm reinforcing good habits now, is there?