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When we listen to a developing reader read aloud what we hear is
the stumbling and stuttering which happens when, during the flow of
reading, the reader encounters a word with ambiguous letter sounds.
Given the difficulty just outlined and the
comparative ease of relating to other media, such as
television and movies, it’s no wonder that so many
children have difficulty sustaining motivation when
reading. Whereas the child's oral language world is rich
with range and power, the clumsiness and inefficiency of
the reading process makes their written language world
frustrating and tedious. Compounding this is the fact that
this ‘barrier’ forces authors and publishers to
"dumb down" to a level most children find boring
as well. Again,
not because they can't understand the meanings -- the TV
programs they watch and the conversations they engage in are
radically more complex -- but because their process for
processing the written word is so poor. Reading is not
exciting until you really learn to read -- why work to
learn to read when what is being read is so boring?
The need for explicit phonemic awareness,
and the ability to link letters and letter combinations
with their sounds, only becomes necessary when we need to
decode words from letter-symbols that represent the word's
components of sound. These aren't natural processes of
the human brain, they are the
'interface requirements' of our reading technology.
Furthermore, their processing is made unnaturally
confusing by the ambiguity involved in how the letters of
the alphabet 'encode' the sounds of our spoken language.
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