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Nonword literacy

Language Log 2024-05-16

Upon first hearing, the very idea sounded preposterous, but when I searched the internet, I found it all over the place as "nonword reading / repetition", "nonsense words", "non word phonics / fluency", "non-word decoding", "pseudowords", etc.  In other words (!), it's a real thing, and lots of people take the concept seriously as a supposedly useful device in reading theory and practice, justifying it thus:

"as a tool to assess phonetic decoding ability" (here)

"contribute to children's ability to learn new words"  (here)

"a true indicator of the alphabetic principle and basic phonics" (here)

etc., etc., etc.

I would not have taken the topic of nonwords seriously and posted on it, had not AntC pointed out that it is actually being applied in the classroom in New Zealand.

I was brought up short by an article syndicated in today's New Zealand press:
 
the reported evidence is based on children’s ability to read non-words, and their ability to read words was not consistently assessed. The report suggests that the approaches are successful in teaching children to blend sounds together to decode words. What is not clear yet is if learning to decode benefited children’s writing and comprehension more than current methods.
 
There's a 'Bryant Test of Basic Decoding Skills', used internationally, where 'decoding' means being able to sound out words on the page. Seems to be the Bryant ref'd on this wikip.
 
Then the scenario Dr. Jesson seems to be highlighting is that learners can 'read' a text in the sense of sound it out; but not understand it. Then neither will that help their writing. The situation is particularly critical for newly-arrived immigrant families, where English is not their first language. NZ education has essentially no ability to teach in any other language.
 
The recently published "independent evaluations of the various structured approaches " seems to be this.
 
How is literacy education assessed in the U.S.A.? Particularly in districts where English is not the predominant language.
 
And how in Sinitic cultures, where there's no hope of 'sounding out' from the text?
 

The back story: New Zealand has a new Government as of late last year. They're now getting into their stride of changing everything the previous administration had initiated, including of course education. This week they've announced a new initiative. What this 'new' masks is that by cutting in-progress initiatives, they're effectively reducing the overall education budget for literacy skills. 'Expert commentary' here — including from Dr. Jesson.

The idea of "sounding out" nonsinoglyphs made me chuckle.  It reminded me of Xu Bing's "A Book from the Sky" that consists solely of characters that look real but that he had made up out of thin air.  These nonsense characters drove literate Chinese readers mad with frustration when they tried to make sense of them.  They also remind me of the "junk characters" we recently discussed, which — although "real" (they exist in some hyper arcane glossary or occurred once in the whole of history in an obscure manuscript, etc.) — their sound and meaning are known not even to one out of a million literate persons.  Do Xu Bing's made-up glyphs and the Kangxi's junk characters have an analogous function to the nonwords of English reading theory?

 

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