Hopefully, now, you share the opinion that a root cause of our reading problems and their attendant self-esteem and financial consequences result not from something 'wrong' with our people, but rather, something inflexible and entrenched - something 'wrong'  with the 'code'  we are forced to read with (generally speaking, there are of course a small percentage of people with mental processing disabilities that effect their process of learning to read).

There isn't really many parallels to this. Under what other circumstances do people spend years trying to learn something that continually makes them feel bad about themselves when they do? Most children and adults have very limited patience for repeatedly trying to do something that results in self-esteem lowering feelings. We must compel people to learn to read. They can't function in our modern world if they can't. And yet, the way things stand the technology is causing real and significant damage to people's lives (and costing us billions of dollars).

We get all up in arms about how much TV our children watch. We are concerned about the computer and arcade games they play. In other areas we exercise prudence and responsibility for our technologies; we have eliminated lead from gasoline, banned many engineered substances that can cause physical or mental deformity and set up agencies, like OSHA, to regulate safety issues in our work places. We wouldn't tolerate computer operating systems that cause dyslexia, yet somehow we think of writing and reading as something other than technology -- something, sacred and unchangeable rather than something we invented - as subject to change as any other poor performing technology or human invention.

If you have grasped these facts, then you realize that we need to channel a significant portion of the energy and passion we have about education, self-esteem and illiteracy into finding ways to address this underlying cause. If so, then the primary mission of this work has been accomplished. The proposal which follows, outlines a way, certainly not the only way, to address the problem. If you find fault with our proposal don't let it deter you from demanding we find other ways to overcome this ongoing injustice.

Our General Proposal:

First, provide some relief to the children, their educators and the adults suffering with reading problems by getting this understanding of the real problem into wide circulation - let them know that the shame they feel in their struggle to read is normal and natural but that they are not at fault here and have nothing to be ashamed of - that they are suffering from a kind of interface incompatibility with our reading technologies that is the fault of the technologies, not them!

There are realms of research on reading and reading difficulties, at the rate of above 3000 articles a year and hundreds of books. These see the problem as belonging to the learners who fail. These inadequate people must be located, assessed, diagnosed and remediated. New ways of reading instruction have constantly been tried, dropped and recycled. This recycling is still happening. Yet a questioning attitude is needed as to whether the stuff of the writing system itself could be improved, and if so, how.
                  Writing Systems of the World

"Reading is the means by which the world does a large part of its work.... The slightest improvement either in the page or in the method of reading means a great service to the human race” 
                  Edmund Huey The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading

‘Is it not time that the alphabet—the one major tool of civilization that has remained unaltered for a thousand years—be reforged into a more modern instrument?’
                  Frank Denman - Type Talks: an article entitled ‘How Old-Fashioned Is Our Alphabet?’

The General Concept:

The number of possible ways that letters in a word can sound, individually and in combination with each other, potentially requires correspondingly numerous iterations of ambiguity reduction before the word's intended pronunciation can cohere The greater the number of ambiguous letters (and letter combinations) coexistent in a word, the longer the span of attention necessary to resolve them. The longer the span of attention required, the greater the vulnerability to miscues in decoding causing a stutter or drop out from the decoding-stream-flow-rate necessary to sustain reading. 

The problem is ambiguity overwhelm. Up to this point, absent a new alphabet or a way of spelling phonetically with the one we have, our only course of action was to facilitate the development of explicit skills and attention span increases such that developing readers might be better able to process the ambiguities we can't spare them from experiencing. This is the work of explicit phonemic awareness exercises and explicit, systematic phonics both of which are attempts to compensate for, not directly address, the ambiguity introduced by the technologies.

But what if we could, without changing the alphabet or the way English is spelled, present our letters (on paper or screen) with cues embedded or accompanying them that could significantly reduce the letters-to-sounds ambiguity involved in reading?

This kind of thinking was impossible until very recently, until computers and modern font technology.

A short detour into some background:

The publishing revolution which led to the educational revolution of the Renaissance wasn't the result of the printing press. Though serving only the elite, the printing press had been around long before the Renaissance. It was “moveable type” that made it possible to easily set-up or “program” the press and that brought the cost of publishing down to a level that eventually enabled the masses to experience the diversity, richness and learning opportunities previously available only to the few.

However, since the revolution, nearly everything about the publishing process has improved, except the publication. In fact, one of the most important aspects of some publications -- their role as the learning environments through which children learn to read -- hasn't changed since Gutenberg, despite "desk top publishing."

Though the moveable type of the printing press was a breakthrough innovation in its day it restricted us to thinking about printing through a paradigm that was based on what was and was not possible in a mechanism that used real physical objects to print letters with. Whereas it was easy to set up any number of alternative typefaces, once within a typeface it was impractical to offer letterfaces or optional variations on the way each letter might appear. While this was a real-world practical limitation of the printing press, retaining this thinking today is another example of the thought-constraining side affects of an enabling technology.

With modern font technology it is possible and relatively easy to add another dimension to the idea of a character or letter. Specifically, it is possible to print (paper or screen) letters with shape, size and intensity variations, that while retaining unambiguous letter recognition features, allows the presentation of the letter to convey additional information or cues about how it sounds in the particular word in which it is being encountered.

The P-CUES Concept:   Mind your Ps and Qs - Phonemic Cues for better mind-reading - P-Cues

44 sounds spelled in English with only 26 letters results in children having to remember and apply (during real-time flow) a large number (some experts say dozens, some hundreds) of 'rules' in order to disambiguate the letter sound combinations they encounter when reading. Moreover, there is significant neural processing overhead associated with the number of iterations of applying such rules as the method of disambiguation. Using 4 to 6 variations in letter presentations as cues, we can reduce the ambiguities we have been speaking of dramatically - 50 to 90%. In contrast to having to remember a large and complex body of rules, children can learn less than half a dozen cues that require far less processing overhead to operate. By reducing the number of encounters with ambiguity and its attendant processing overhead, developing readers will be able to better sustain the decoding-stream-flow-rate necessary to progress in reading. 

There are two distinct conceptual terrains involved in understanding how P-Cues work. The first requires an understanding of the kinds of ambiguities involved in decoding letter sound correspondences and how variations in the presentation of letters could cue their reduction. The second requires an understanding of a new kind of font family and how it is to be used in conjunction with software that automates the integration of the P-Cue letter variation system with common word processors.

P-CUES: Morphic Varations in Letterfaces Corresponding to Specific Kinds of Letter-Sound Ambiguities  

Our intention is to CUE the reader with unambiguous signals that reduce the number and complexity of the instances of ambiguity encountered during the immediate decoding-stream-flow of the reading process.  

For a detailed description of the cues click here. 

P-CUES: The Software and Font Technology Involved   

For General Use: Conceptually, the technology involved is relatively straightforward. The first component is the "carrier" or shell that extends the font family to have the added capacity to store the alternate presentations for each character of a font. The second component is the "P-Cue presentation dictionary" which, like a spell checker in a standard word processor, scans the words in documents and looks them up in its database. When a word match is found, the P-Cue dictionary reads the character presentation variations (P-Cues) for the letters in that word and substitutes the letters of the word in the publication to match.

 

For P-Cue Authoring: The third component is an on-line, font generator with tools to augment the user's ability to manually adjust a character's appearance and create the alternate character presentations. A forth component is the additional user interface extensions that enable the manual manipulation of alternate letter presentations. Finally, a fifth component builds the P-Cue dictionary.

For  greater detail on the technology click here

P-CUES: Steps to Realization   

In Closing   

The examples we have put forth are placeholders.  We realize there is significant work ahead to map the territory of letter-sound ambiguities and to determine which metaphors of letter presentation will best serve developing readers. With that said, we believe it is possible to develop a system of variations that will cue developing readers in a way that reduces the 'overhead' involved in reading by many times the 'overhead' involved in processing the cues.

What we are proposing bridges the phonic and whole language ideologies.  Instead of having to create ‘dumbed down’ reading materials or having to design reading materials around the awkward pedagogical requirements of cryptic decoding, the P-Cue model reduces the ambiguity involved in decoding and allows developing readers to access more meaningful materials faster. Finally, it does this without changing the alphabet or English spelling

This is not meant as an alternative to learning other rules of decoding as it won't eliminate all the ambiguities. Rather, what we are proposing will provide the developing readers the means to quickly filter out a significant portion of what would otherwise be ambiguities leaving them with a less dissipated attention span to apply whatever rules remain appropriate (arguably new rules based on a an integrated approach to using this technology with phonemic awareness and phonic instructional pedagogies)

We call this 'Training Wheels for Literacy" because this system is not intended to replace our colossal inventory of written materials, but rather to provide developing readers with an 'on- ramp' and Training Wheels that enable them to develop better phonemic awareness, phonic skills and greater attention span by making it easier for them to keep themselves from 'falling' out of reading.  By enabling them to extend their reading flow, they will learn to associate the P-Cues with the phonemic distinctions available in written word structures and ultimately take the 'wheels off' -  stretching into the next step of becoming an empowered reader. 

We also recognize that this an intermediate and hopefully not-to-long-before obsolete step. Someday, some years from now, children will have safe, intelligent teaching tablets, learner interfaces, that listen to their reading and in real-time, intimately, coach them through learning to read. However, until then...P-Cues have a role to play.

Learning to read is a process of acquiring an inner-interface between our biologically native all-at-onceness processing and our enculturated mind’s one-at-a-time thought processes. Indeed, reading is a significant part of what creates the later. Taking up this challenge could create a breakthrough in literacy, reduce damage to self-esteem, reduce the waste of billions of dollars and, perhaps, beyond all of that, change the ecology and efficiency of the "inner interface" that regulates our learning, and, who we are.

 

Thank you for reading - now let's help those that can't!

 

1) alphabet-or-not: in an ideal learning-to-read developmental sequence, learning the alphabet's letter names would come after learning the English language's 44 sounds and how they correspond to letters and letter combinations (phonics like). However, as so many children do and will probably continue to learn the ABCs before they begin reading then we must consider that fact in our pedagogy. Because so many children 'know' the alphabet's discrete letter sounds our cues must refer to and leverage those letter sound distinctions, and, in this case, transform what is causing ambiguity into cues that reduce it.

 

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