When Aleka Titzer was nine months old, her father showed her simple words, such as “head”. “teeth” and “arms up”. Her father never said the word, only showed her the written word and she did each action. At eighteen months, Aleka then could say all of those words plus many more. How is this possible? The father, Dr. Titzer, explains, “Brain Development is roughly 90% complete at age five” (Titzer). With the proper approach, an infant can understand and produce both their native language and even other languages.
There are many other stories and videos that showcase the reading talent of young children. Through the program Dr. Titzer created, a video series called “Your Baby Can Read”, infants and toddlers learn to read words through repetition. With the program, between the ages of nine months to twelve months, the child can see a word and either sign or point to the object he or she is reading. By eighteen months, the child can verbally speak the word showing that they understand the word. For example, one girl was shown the word cow and she said “cow” and then said “moo”. So not only does the child know how to read the words, they are able to relate them to real life objects. The only problem is that many of the words the child says are hard to understand. The syllables of the words are not stressed like they would be of a child who is six.
However, there is a significant jump by the age of two and three. Many of the children who used this program were able to speak clearly when shown the words. Reading the words was not a struggle for them. These children could also read picture books and non-picture books rated at an eight-year old level with ease.
Many people think that children begin processing words and are ready to read when they are enrolled in kindergarten. As Titzer said, the development begins much earlier than that. Chomsky’s notion of the language acquisition device (LAD) also was a major breakthrough; it illustrated that children acquire the rules to generate complex syntactic structures long before formal schooling” (Hall 36). Chomsky also supported an innate grammar position in his arguments. He believed that children are born with the ability of grammar. This could be the reason why many young infants are being able to understand words.
Through the program Dr. Titzer created a Skinner approach is taken. It can be argued that words are memorized in chunks. The children can read words such as “head”, “foot” and “ear” because they have been exposed to it at least one hundred times. The regurgitation of the words could simply just be a memorized act, rather than cognitive learning. However, a Chomsky view can then be taken once the child hits age two or three. The children from the series are able to read books with words they have never seen before. For example, a little girl named Emily at around eighteen months appeared on one of the morning shows and the host, Ann, wrote, “Good morning, Ann” on a card. The child never was asked to read Ann, yet she did without hesitation. The same thing happened when the host wrote the word “baby” in cursive. The parents tried to argue that their child did not know cursive, but Emily read “baby” without hesitation.
Further more, she was given a book with names such as “Hercules” and “MaClary” and “Potts”. She read all of these words without hesitation. She did not stop to sound them out. The reasoning behind this could be that since Emily learned the basic words at an early age, she was able to tap into her innate universal grammar, as Chomsky suggests, and read other words easily using grammar rules. It can then be argued that when a child goes into the classroom at age five and six and we give him a list of words and tell him to sound it out, we are setting him up for failure. Should we actually be exposing him to the words and sounds and then have him make word connections through his innate grammar rules? It is possible that if you show and tell a child the words “hog” and “dog” and then “ball” and “boy”, that when he is shown the word “bog”, he would be able to take the repetitive nature of “og” and combine it with the stressed “b.
On home videos, Emily, age seventeen months, can differentiate between reading “baby” and “babies” as well as “read” and “reading. There is a possibility that baby Emily memorized “baby” and “babies” in separated chunks. It would be interesting to see if she would be able to differentiate between “one baby” and “two or more babies”. There is no proof that she knows the aspects of proper grammar in forms of plurals.
In the book Your Child’s Development, Richard Lansdown describes the auditory and visual importance to a child’s reading. He says, “Children must be able to see in order to read print” (Lansdown 328). This is the method that Dr. Titzer used. In his video, he introduces pictures, words, and children saying the word to visually teach the watcher the word. This is why formal education has difficulties teaching children to read. By age five, many children already know what a dog is and what the car is used for. When they were young, the child was taught that dog equals soft animal with four legs that barks and has a wet nose. So asking the child to draw the dog at age five is simple. However, asking the child to read the word without prior exposure is impossible. The written word is now a second language to the child by the age of five. He associates with images and the spoken word, his first language. Therefore first seeing the word dog at age five is like an adult seeing an unrecognizable Spanish word. It does not matter if the adult can sound out the Spanish word, if the adult has no experience with that one word, there is no way he will understand it.
I believe that teaching a child to read at the age of five is like taking a Spanish speaking five-year-old and placing him in an English classroom. Yes, the Spanish child will eventually pick up English, but the jump to get there is extreme. In Why Our Children Can’t Read, the editors present the example of “ytoxto hrusxz ub ldyyuos xtmo” and ask for the adult reader to determine what it is using small hints. They say, “The point is this: if you stared at this passage for years, you wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to decode it. Why then should we expect a child to teach himself to decipher the English alphabet code, one of the most complex ever designed, without instruction? Yet, this is precisely what is going on in classrooms through out the English-speaking world” (McGuinness 17-18).
This reasoning seems to point that one should teach their child to read as early as possible. However, another website states, “Finland has a literacy rate of 99.9% yet they don’t start teach children to read until they are seven years old”. The problem with this statement is that the truth is that Finnish students do not receive formal education until they are seven. They most likely already know how to read by that time. Another article states, “One explanation for the Finns’ success is their love of reading. Parents of newborns receive a government-paid gift pack that includes a picture book. Some libraries are attached to shopping malls, and a book bus travels to more remote neighborhoods like a Good Humor truck” (Gamerman). The Finnish people introduce reading early in their households through relaxed use of entertainment. Children watch a lot of television, however, unlike in the United States, the Finnish television shows all have English subtitles. The children are then absorbing the written word instead of just the verbal word, like children in the States do.
It is interesting to see how television actually helps the Finnish child read. For America, it is quite the opposite. Television, in the form of entertaining cartoons and even entertaining educational shows (i.e. Elmo), hinder children from reading. In the book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman makes the point that that television entertains the child without really teaching him. Therefore, when a child goes into formal education, if the teacher is not as entertaining as Sesame Street, the child tunes out and has a hard time learning.
The same concept applies to reading and television viewing. Again, children are learning their first language of the spoken and visual word. After a lot of television viewing, the child may even be able to produce higher level words. However, once the written word is introduced, it is as if the foreign language is being introduced. Since it is hard and not entertaining, children tune out immediately. This is also the reason why many children are way under their reading level as they progress through school. The average high school is only reading at a Jr. High or lower level. Then once the high school pupil is presented with Shakespeare of Thoreau, they automatically tune out because it is too hard and not entertaining.
Reading comprehension and levels are a huge issue in American today from kindergarten educators to college educators. This is because language is not fully developed when the child is younger. To successfully cure America of illiteracy, parents and educators need to expose children to the spoken, visual, and written word at an early age. It is a bottom up processing but also a dual processing. If infants know the basics early on, as toddlers they can reach the next step.
However, what the typical parent and educator does is teach single processing early on and then try to tie it in with dual processing. For example, as an infant and toddler, one teaches their child simple words and which object that simple word belongs to. They may even teach them how to string together words. That is all single-processing. Then when the child enters school, he is taught another single processing method, but expected to be able to tie it in with his earlier verbal expression. The child must now see “dog” written out for the first time and is expected to not only say the word correctly, but to also visualize it and abstract the idea. Starting a child on the written word while teaching them the verbal words helps the child to being the dual processing that human minds were creatively designed to do.
In conclusion, infants can be taught to read and understand words. They can be taught in both Chomsky’s methods of “innate grammar” as well as Skinner’s memory based learning. Exposing infants and toddlers to words early helps them transition into formal education much easier.
Works Cited
Gamerman, Ellen. “What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? – WSJ.com.” Business News & Financial News – The Wall Street Journal – WSJ.com. 13 May 2009 .
Hall, Nigel, Joanne Larsen, and Jackie Marsh, eds. Handbook of early childhood literacy. London: Sage Publications, 2003.
