Reading Practice

Reading practice is generally essential to move quickly from decoding to actual reading. Some children will never be good readers without the use of a reading practice program that effectively builds a necessary phonics foundation. Others, who are more talented, will seem to achieve fluent reading ability, but will not achieve the level of which they are capable. They will be sight readers. Most reading programs try to shortcut the phonetic reading process by introducing some phonics and then trying to speed up the process by adding some level of sight reading. Sight reading occurs whenever a word is recognized by any other method than "sounding out" the word, except when the word defies all phonics rules. Sight reading involves memorization of words, and it occurs whenever there is a phonics weakness. Whenever a word cannot be read, the child will try to remember it. This is why children who memorize well seem to learn to read well in some reading programs, while non-memorizers often do not. However, there is a limit to the number of words that wiill fit in one’s memory, and that memory needs to store other things. That is the reason for languages being based on phonics. With real reading, phonetic combinations are recognized instinctively and reflexively, so there is no need for guessing or remembering, and there is thought power available for comprehension.

Every child must move beyond decoding before he can begin really comprehending at even a modest rate. The sight reader seems to do this, but usually stumbles over words that have not been encountered and memorized previously, often guessing at the pronunciation. The phonetic reader usually reads new words as if he had always known them because each word—old or new—is simply a combination of phonetic sounds which is instinctively assembled correctly. Sight readers usually prefer to avoid reading aloud. New phonetic readers, as a rule, love to read aloud because they are thrilled at hearing themselves improve as readers. They will often read aloud even when alone.

We now use Succeeding at Reading for this phase of reading development. We have developed Succeeding at Reading as a result of over five years of testing and refining exercises used in making phonetic reading not only instinctive, but also easy to master. See Succeeding at Reading in this section for more details.