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'DADDY, WHERE DID THE WORDS GO?'

HOW TEACHERS CAN HELP EMERGENT READERSDEVELOP A CONCEPT OF WORD IN TEXT

KEVIN FLANIGAN, P H . D .

Assistant Professor, Literacy DepartmentWest Chester University

This article focuses on a concept that has rarely been studied inbeginning reading research - a child's concept of word in text.Recent examinations of this phenomenon suggest that a child'sability to match spoken words to written words while reading -a concept of word in text - plays a pivotal role in early readingdevelopment. In this article, the author summarizes the researchon children's concept of word, relates this phenomenon to begin-ning readers' developing phoneme awareness, and describes a setof instructional recommendations that teachers can use to helpemergent readers take their first steps into contextual reading.

It's a warm June evening. The bedroomwindows are open to let in the cooling nightbreeze. Jack, my four-year-old son, is sit-ting comfortably in my lap for our nightlybedtime story routine. The covers arepulled up, the small lamp by the bedsidetable the only source of light, and a copyof "Sam, Sam the Baker Man" (a folk poemwe have read countless times) is in ourhands. Jack, who has memorized the poem.

is trying to point to the words as he reads;however, he quickly realizes that what heis pointing to and what he is saying are notmatching up.

Tuming to me with furrowed brow andbemused expression. Jack asks, "Daddy,where did the words go?" Clearly, Jackwas not matching his spoken words to theprinted words on the page. Just as clearly.Jack knew it - he had run out of printed

What Jack points to:

What Jack says:


What Jack says:


What Jack says:

Sam Sam the baker man,

Sam Sam the bake er

Washed his face in a frying pan

man washed his face in a fry

(There are no words left to point to, so he points to space)

ing pan

37

38 / Reading Improvement

words to point to before he had run out ofwords to say.

Why Young Children Don't Know Whatthe Word "Word" Is

Why couldn't Jack point to the printedwords on the page as he said them? Did-n't he already know what a word was?Initially, we might answer, of course Jackknows what words are; he's been speakingwords since the age of one. By the age offour, he has acquired a 7,000-word oralvocabulary (Clark, 1993) and can combinethese words into syntactically complex andgrammatically correct phrases that havenever been uttered before (e.g., "Daddy,can you tell me a Harry Potter story tonightwith the Rescue Heroes in it, but I don'twant Gracie (Jack's sister) to hear it, OK?).In addition, he can understand almost any-thing said to him. How could he not knowwhat a word is?

At least part of the answer lies in the factthat "there is no simple physical basis forisolating words in speech. A spectro-graphic examination of utterances spokenat a normal rate reveals that words are notseparated by pauses or other obvious wordboundaries; that is, there are usually no'spaces' between successive spoken words,as there are in printed text" (Tunmer,Bowey, & Grieve, 1983, p. 570). Think ofa time you have overheard two peoplespeaking a foreign language. You couldn'ttell where one word ended and the nextword began, because when we speak, wepause between phrases, not words.

Another part of the answer lies in thefact that we are hard-wired to acquire lan-

guage without having to consciously thinkabout it. According to linguist StevenPinker, we have an "instinct" for language(Pinker, 1994). When we speak or listen tosomeone else speaking, we focus on themeaning of the entire message withoutthinking about the fact that these utterancesare composed of separate words. Indeed,it is only in attempting to leam a writtenlanguage that a conscious awareness ofwords truly becomes necessary.

Research into children's awareness ofwords in speech confirms the somewhatsurprising fmding that most children, uponschool entry, are not able to divide thestream of speech into word units and, per-haps even more surprising, are not evenaware of what the term "word" means(Chaney, 1989; Downing & Oliver, 1974;Holden & MacGinitie, 1972; Karpova,1955). Holden and MacGinitie (1972)investigated kindergarten children's con-ceptions of word boundaries in speech byasking them to tap a poker chip as theysaid each word of a memorized utterance(e.g., given the sentence, "I went walkingwith my dog," the children were asked totap once for each word as they repeatedthe sentence). The researchers found thatfew kindergartners could segment speechconventionally. Instead of tapping the pokerchip for each word they said, the childrenoften combined function words with thefollowing content words (e.g.. The book/is in/ the desk) or tapped the poker chipsby rhythmic pattern as opposed to wordunits.

One study by Downing and Oliver(1974) also investigated young children'sunderstanding of the term "word." In thisstudy, the authors presented young chil-

Daddy, Where Did the Words Go .../ 39

dren with eight classes of auditory stimulithat included the following: nonverbalsounds (e.g., a cat meowing), isolatedphonemes (e.g., the /s/ in /sat/), isolatedsyllables (e.g., the /at/ in /sat/), short words,long words, phrases, and sentences. Thechildren were to say "yes" if they believedthe stimulus was a word or "no" if theydid not. The results indicated that all chil-dren confused syllables and phonemes withspoken words. In addition, children under6 ? years of age tended to confuse wordswith non-verbal sounds (like the cat'smeow), phrases, and sentences. Thus,Downing found that most children enter-ing school, and thus beginning formalreading instruction, were still unsure ofwhat the term word meant.

In sum, to young children, words aretools that they tacitly use to communicate,without a conscious awareness of theirexistence. As Adams explains (1990, p.298),

Surprising as it may seem, the evi-dence concurs that children are notnaturally prepared either to conceiveof spoken language as a string ofindividual words or to treat wordsas individual units of meaning. Whatthey listen for is the full meaning ofan utterance, and that comes onlyafter the meanings of the individualwords have been combined - auto-matically and without their attention.

What Ahout Phoneme Awareness?Over the past three decades, the most

carefully researched aspect of the begin-ning reading process has been phonologicalawareness - the ability to consciously

attend to and manipulate the sound struc-ture of spoken language. Research intophonological awareness has been so fruit-ful, in fact, that Stanovich and Cunninghamhave touted this line of research as repre-senting "one of the more notable scientificsuccess stories of the last decade" (1992,p. 12).

Specifically, what have we learnedabout phonological awareness and its rela-tionship to early reading acquisition? First,numerous correlational studies have estab-lished a robust relationship between earlyreading ability and phonological aware-ness. Further, phonological awarenessmeasured in children as young as preschoolhas been found to be a powerful predictorof later reading success. Perhaps mostimportant from a pedagogical standpoint,it has been demonstrated that explicitinstruction in phoneme awareness - theunderstanding that a spoken word can beconceived as a sequence of sounds (/bag/= Ihl IdJ Igl) - results in improved gains inreading achievement, and instruction thathelps the child match the phonological seg-ments to letters appears to be even moreeffective. In short, these experimental stud-ies strongly suggest that phonologicalawareness is not simply correlated withearly reading achievement, but indeedplays a causal role in leaming to read (forreviews of the literature on phonologicalawareness and its relationship to begin-ning reading, see Adams, 1990; Blachman,2000; National Reading Panel {NRP},2000; Snow, Bums, & Griffin, 1998).

However, phonological awareness doesnot come naturally or easily for all children.Why is this so? Part of the answer lies inthe fact that just as there is no physical


basis for dividing words in speech., thereis no physical basis for dividing phonemesin words. When a child hears the word /cat/,for example, the child perceives the wordas one single pulse of sound. This isbecause all three phonemes (c - a -1) arecoarticulated - they are blended or fusedtogether (A. Liberman, Cooper, Shankweil-er & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967; A.Liberman, 1997). In physical reality, thereis only one sound. The three phonemesthat constitute the word /cat/ are abstrac-tions that a child learning to read mustcome to construct through interactions withprint. In other words, children attain fullmeaningful phoneme awareness byattempting to match speech to an alpha-betic writing system.

Why Focus on Developing a BeginningReader's Concept of Word?

While we know that teaching phonemeawareness results in improved gains inreading achievement, the field of readingis still left with important theoretical andpedagogical questions for those interestedin beginning reading: exactly how muchphoneme awareness is necessary for a childto begin reading? Once a child begins toread, is additional instruction in phonemeawareness warranted? Does phonemeawareness develop in concert with othercritical early literacy skills, such as wordrecognition and spelling ability? If so, howdo we teach these skills in an integratedmanner that makes sense? Presently, wehave no definitive answers to these ques-tions. To this end, the National ReadingPanel calls for further research that iden-tifies "what teachers need to know and be

able to do to teach PA [phonemic aware-ness] effectively and integrate thisinstruction with other elements of begin-ning reading instruction or instructiondirected at older disabled readers" (NRP,2000, p. 2-7 - 2-8).

One small, but promising, line ofresearch that may help to answer thesequestions has centered on a concept that hasrarely been studied in beginning readingresearch - a child's concept of word in text.Clay was one of the earliest researchers tohighlight the importance of this wordawareness in text for beginning readers. Inher longitudinal study of beginning read-ers in New Zealand, Clay observed thebehaviors of these beginning readers overthe course of a year. She argued that "read-ing the spaces" -matching spoken wordsto written words in text - was an impor-tant milestone for beginning readers.According to Clay (1990, p. 141),

At first, children respond to captionbooks with the speed and fluencythat is typical of oral speech. As theydevelop skill in matching spokenwords with print, fingers are used topoint to those parts of the text thatthey suspect correspond to what theyare saying. Fluency gives way toword-by-word reading. At that pointthe child overemphasizes the breaksbetween words and points with hisfinger. He has taken a major steptowards integration of these earlylearnings when his reading slowsdown and even becomes staccato.He may be thought of as "readingthe spaces."

Daddy, Where Did the Words G o . . . / 41

The handful of other studies conduct-ed in this area suggest that a child's abilityto accurately match spoken words to writ-ten words while reading connected text -a concept of word in text - is significantlycorrelated with other critical early litera-cy skill such as spelling and phonemeawareness (Ehri & Sweet, 1991; Uhry,1999,2002). More specifically, accordingto Morris (1993), a concept of word in textplays a pivotal role in early reading acqui-sition that bridges a primitive form ofphoneme awareness (i.e., beginning soundawareness) with a more sophisticated formof phoneme awareness (i.e., full phonemesegmentation). In two separate studies(Morris, 1993; Morris, Bloodgood, Lomax,& Pemey, 2003), Morris and others devel-oped, examined, and found evidence for adevelopmental sequence of early literacyskills in which a child's concept of wordin text played a central role.

Morris's (1993) model can serve teach-ers of beginning readers as a guide fordevelopmentally targeted instruction thatbalances phoneme awareness, word recog-nition, spelling, and contextual reading ina manner that honors their reciprocal devel-opment. In addition, with increasing callsfor balanced literacy instruction amongeducators and researchers (Pressley, 2002),

a model of early reading development thataccounts for the reciprocal interplaybetween the development of importantskills (such as phoneme awareness, wordrecognition, and spelling ability) and expe-rience reading connected text seemsparticularly timely and practical.

In the following section, I will describeMorris's (1993) four-stage model of earlyreading acquisition.

According to Morris, the true begin-ning reader cannot accurately track wordswhile reading. Because the beginning read-er either does not possess or does not applyknowledge of letter-sound relationshipswhile reading, he or she has no informa-tion available to help detect where oneword ends and another begins. Thus, tothis reader, a line of text may appear as arandom string of letters, with no bound-aries between words, as shown below. Ifthis is the case, it is no wonder children atthis stage experience difficulty finger-pointreading a memorized text.

Child's perception of text:I l x x x t x p x x x x x x x x x x x x .

Text:I like to play with my cat.

Table 1

Morris's Model of Early Reading Development (1993)

Stage One Stage Two Stage Three Stage Four

Beginningconsonant -knowledge

Conceptof word-in text

Phoneme->• segmentation

ability

Word-> recognition


In Morris's (1993) first stage, neophytereaders begin using letter-sound knowl-edge to attend to the first letter or sound ofa word (e.g., the Ihl in /bat/). Using thisbeginning consonant awareness in con-junction with the memory support andknowledge of spacing between words,readers at this stage are able to beginmatching spoken words to printed wordswhile finger-point reading familiar text. Inother words, a beginning reader can usethe initial letter-sounds in words (e.g., the"1" in the word "like" below) to keep ontrack while pointing to each word as he orshe says it. To such a reader, the text mayappear as shown below.

Child:I lxxx tx pxxx wxxx mx cxx.

Text:I like to play with my cat.

With increased experience in support-ed reading activities (e.g., dictated stories,big books), the child will come to stabilizethis growing awareness of the matchbetween spoken and printed words. Specif-ically, with knowledge of initialletter-sounds in words and spacing betweenwords acting as anchors in text, the read-er is now free to examine other parts of theword. According to Morris, it is possiblethat as a reader examines these words, eachword's orthography provides importantinformation to the reader about its phone-mic properties. For example, afterencountering the word "cat," the readerbegins attending not only to the initial con-sonant "c", but eventually to the endingletter, "t," also. The reader, whether intu-

itively or through the careful nudging of askilled teacher, will eventually come torealize that the final letter "t" matches withthe final sound N of the word. At this stage,with the reader able to attend to the wordboundaries (i.e., beginning and ending con-sonants), s/he becomes increasingly adeptat tracking text while finger-point reading.At this point, the child may perceive thetext as below:

Child's perception of text:I lxkx tx pxxy wxxh my

ext.Text:I like to play with my

cat.

In the third stage, Morris theorized thatas the beginning reader stabilizes thismatch between spoken and printed words,attention might now be freed up to exam-ine the internal parts of the word - inparticular the often-elusive medial vowel.According to Morris et al., "it is quite pos-sible that once a concept of word in text isestablished, with concomitant attention toboth beginning and ending consonants, thisfreezes or highlights the interior of theword (where the vowel resides) for furtheranalysis" (2003, p.7). Put another way, itis only after the beginning reader has beenable to segment the stream of speech intowords that s/he is, at this stage, able to seg-ment the word into its constituentphonemes. The interior vowel letters mayprovide important information to the read-er about the interior vowel phonemes inwords. It is possible that the medial vowelletter (e.g., the letter "a" in "cat") providesthe reader with a concrete visual symbol


to aid in the abstract process of isolatingthe medial vowel phoneme (the /a/ in /cat/).Thus, this is one instance in which expe-rience with print may promotephonological awareness, and not neces-sarily the other way around. It is in thisway that acquiring a concept of word intext may facilitate full phoneme segmen-tation ability.

In Morris's (1993) final stage, the read-er's ability to fully segment a word into itsconstituent phonemes provides the neces-sary foundation for an increase in sightword knowledge. Specifically, fullphoneme segmentation ability allows com-plete processing of all letter-sounds inwords, enabling the beginning reader tocompletely and accurately store words inmemory (Adams, 1990; Ehri, 1998). Putanother way, full phoneme awareness canbe thought of as the glue that allows begin-ning readers to hold sight words solidly inmemory.

How Can I Develop An EmergentReader's Concept of Word?

Instructional RecommendationsEmergent readers, like my son Jack,

fmd themselves in the first two stages ofMorris's (1993) developmental model.Thus, two main instructional literacy goalsfor Jack should be developing his begin-ning sound awareness (a rudimentary formof phoneme awareness) and guiding himtoward stabilizing his concept of word intext. In fact, these two goals should gohand in hand for Jack. His ability to attendto beginning sounds in words will aid himas he attempts to match spoken words towritten words while reading (e.g.. The "S"

in "Sam" provides Jack with a clue to iden-tify the word). At the same time, as he isprovided supported experiences finger-point reading familiar text, he willincreasingly see the utility in using thebeginning letter-sound in a word as a cluein recognizing the word.

Simply telling Jack about beginningsounds and tracking will not accomplishmuch. Instead, it will be important to "stackthe deck" in Jack's favor by putting him inliteracy situations where he is able to con-struct and apply his burgeoning knowledgeabout how print works. It is not in thetelling, but it is in the very act of readingthat Jack will actually learn how to read.Following are instructional recommenda-tions for teachers of emergent readers that"stack the deck" in their favor by provid-ing them with enough support tosuccessfully take their first steps into read-ing. These instructional recommendationscenter on helping the emergent reader learntwo important early literacy skills: begin-ning sound awareness (a rudimentary formof phoneme awareness) and a concept ofword in text. Further descriptions of theseand other activities for supporting emergentreaders can be found in The Foundationsof Literacy (Holdaway, 1979), The Lan-guage-Experience Approach to theTeaching of Reading (Stauffer, 1970),Words Their Way (Bear, Invemizzi, Tem-pleton, & Johnston, 2003) and The HowardStreet Tutoring Manual (Morris, 1999).

Read AloudThe teacher can read a story aloud to the

child the first time he or she hears it. The


adult should read in a fluent manner andshould stop at certain points to allow thechild to make predictions about what willhappen next. During this initial reading,the adult can encourage the child to discussaspects of the books such as the title, thepictures, and the storyline. This read aloudactivity serves several purposes. It pro-vides a model of fluent reading for thechild. It allows the child to experience theentire story without having to worry aboutdecoding or word recognition. Finally, andperhaps most importantly, it provides anurturing and supportive environment inwhich the child can successfully participatein the act of reading.

Model Finger-Point Reading of FamiliarTexts

After reading aloud the story with thechild, the teacher can retum to the text andmodel for the child how to match spokenwords to printed words. Supportive textsfor establishing a child's concept of wordinclude simple, predictable pattern books,rhymes, and dictations. During this mod-eling, the adult can point to each word ashe or she says it, and stress the first letter-sound in each word as an aid toidentification (e.g., when pointing to theword "Sam" the adult can stress the "s"sound "SSSSSS-Sam!" to model for thechild how to use beginning sound knowl-edge to identify words in context).

Echo ReadingFor the child who needs a lot of support

(particularly during an emergent reader'sfirst reading of a story), echo reading is asimple and powerful technique for scaf-

folding emergent reading instruction. Theadult simply reads part (e.g., 1-2 sentences)of the story aloud, pointing to each wordas s/he reads it. Next, the student rereads,or echo-reads, the same part, pointing toeach word as s/he reads it. This echo read-ing continues until the story is finished.Echo reading provides a fluent model forthe child and, because the child is reread-ing a part of the text immediately after theadult, it allows the child to use memorysupport to idenfify difficult or unfamiliarwords. The adult can increase the level ofdifficulty for the child by simply increas-ing the amount of text read (e.g., movingfrom reading 1-2 sentences at a time toreading 2 pages at a time).

Choral ReadingIn choral reading, the adult and the child

simply fingerpoint read a story together,the adult again providing a model of flu-ency for the child. Choral reading workswell with poetry and short stories that con-tain repetitive phrases or sentences.

Partner ReadingPartner reading is an excellent tech-

nique for children who require less supportthan echo or choral reading. For example,some children may need only a few pagesof echo reading before they pick up thepattern of the book and can begin readingon their own. In partner reading, the adultfingerpoint reads a section of text (e.g.,one page) and then asks the student to fin-gerpoint read the next secfion of text (e.g.,the next page). When the adult senses thatthe child can read independently, he or shecan hand over the job of reading the rest


of the story to the child.

Buddy ReadingTeachers can use buddy reading as an

independent follow-up activity after intro-ducing a story to a reading group. In buddyreading, two children are paired to rereada familiar story together. The buddies canuse any of the techniques described above.I have found it successful in buddy read-ing to pair a stronger reader who canprovide a model of fluent reading with aweaker reader (for parents, this could bean older brother or sister who can "showoff' their reading ability to their youngersibling). Quiet areas placed strategicallyaround the classroom are ideal places forthe buddies to go and read. Buddy readingis a highly motivating activity that pro-vides the children with multipleexperiences rereading connected text.

Text CopiesWhile emergent readers undoubtedly

need and use picture support to keep them-selves afloat while reading, they canover-rely on pictures and memory, to theextent that they are not attending to theprint. Text copies are a simple way to solvethis problem. Text copies are renditions ofthe text rewritten on a single page withoutpictures. For certain students, teachersmight substitute these text copies for theoriginal texts on the third or fourth read-ing of the text. These emergent readers arethen forced to begin attending to the print(specifically the beginning letter-sounds)while reading connected text. I recruitedparent volunteers and middle-schoolerswho were fulfilling service hours to retypethe simple pattern books into text copies

for my classroom.The Language Experience ApproachThe language experience approach is

one of the oldest and most popular tech-niques for supporting emergent andbeginning readers. The child simply dic-tates to the adult an experience he or shewants to share (e.g., field trips, playgroundepisodes, soccer games, etc.). While writ-ing down the child's words, the adult canstress and model some basic concepts aboutprint (e.g., "Another word is coming up, Ineed a space here."; "Soccer - what letterdoes soccer start with?"). The adult andchild can then fingerpoint read the dicta-tion together, using any of the supportstrategies described above. Finally, thechild can illustrate the dictation. Becausethe text is written in the child's own lan-guage, it is particularly motivating andsupportive. Dictations can be done in agroup format or individually. A highlymotivating activity for children who haveindividual dictations is to pair children upand ask them to "teach" each other to fin-gerpoint read their respective dictations.As soon as they are done, the pair can splitup and reform another pair. The cycle cancontinue until each child in a group has"taught" all of the other children in thegroup his/her own dictation.

Concept of Word CenterIn this center, children reread familiar

poems, songs, stories, and dictations, track-ing each word as they read it, forapproximately 10 minutes a day.

Cut -up - a -SentenceIn this activity, the adult writes a sen-

tence from a familiar book or dictation on


a sentence strip, and then cuts it up in frontof the child, stressing the breaks betweenthe words while cutting. Eventually, thechild can take over the task of cutting. Next,the adult mixes up the words, and thenchallenges the child to put the words backin order and reread the sentence to checkhim or herself For more support, the adultcan have a second copy of the sentence asa model for the child to match the cut-upwords with. This was a favorite activity ofmine because it required the child to rereadthe sentence very carefully, paying partic-ular attention to the print.

Be the SentenceThis activity can be thought of as a

highly motivating variation of "cut-up-a-sentence." As in cut-up-a-sentence, theadult writes a familiar sentence on a strip("I love my mom"), cuts it up, and givesa word-card to each child ("Joe, you arethe word /. Jamie, you are the word,love). The children, holding the wordcards in front of them, are mixed up andmust put themselves back in order.Another child can reread the sentence tocheck the direction and order of thewords. The children can sit down and"pop up" as their word is read.

Why not focus on developing an emergentreader's sight word vocabulary?

It is important to note that none of theabove recommendations centers on devel-oping an emergent reader's sight wordvocabulary - their goal is developing achild's concept of word in text. This is asubtle, but crucial, distinction. Accordingto Morris and colleague's developmental

models (1993; 2003), children may profitmost from instruction in a sight wordvocabulary after they have attained a solidconcept of word in text. This makes sense.How can we expect a child to develop acore sight word vocabulary before he orshe really knows what a word is? Put anoth-er way, as long as a child is pointing to oneword while saying another (e.g., pointingto "baker" while saying "man"), how canwe expect them to acquire sight wordsthrough contextual reading? For practi-tioners who subscribe to developmentallyappropriate instruction, simply forcing theissue with high-frequency word fiash cardswon't help a child who is not yet match-ing spoken words to printed words incontext.

As a former reading teacher and cur-rent reading clinician who has worked withmany graduate literacy students and kinder-garten and first grade teachers, this lastpoint may be the one that resonates mostfor teachers of emergent readers. It mayalso be where the concept of word researchhas the most direct impact on instruction.That is, these teachers explained to me thatunderstanding this concept of word phe-nomenon has directly led to changes intheir teaching. Before, many had assumedthat if a child had little or no sight wordvocabulary, then acquiring a certain num-ber of sight-words was a reasonable goalof instruction. Now, these teachers of emer-gent readers first assess a child's conceptof word before developing an instruction-al plan. One first-grade teacher I workedwith said that before learning about chil-dren's developing concept of word, sheknew that she was supposed to be teach-


ing her children speech to print match,phoneme awareness, invented spelling, andword recognition, but she never reallyunderstood when to teach what skill foreach child. "Now," she said, "I know thesequence kids learn and the sequence Ishould teach. I realized I had been skippingan instructional step for many of my at-risk readers."

Jack, Four Months LaterIt's a cool October evening. The bed-

room windows are cracked to keep outmost of the nighttime chill. Some of theneighbors have already begun to put upHalloween decorations in their windows.Jack and I have the covers pulled up andare ready to begin our bedtime reading rit-ual.

I pull out a copy of "Sam, Sam theBaker Man." Jack has read Sam a numberof times since last June, but has not seenthe poem in about a month. I ask Jack ifhe remembers the "Sam, Sam, the BakerMan" poem we used to read. His eyes lightup as he yells, "yeah!" I pull out the poemand model fingerpoint read the poem. ThenI ask Jack if he would like to read the poem.Jack reads as follows:

At this point, instead of going on. Jacknotices something is wrong and stops. Hethen goes back and rereads this first linethree times until he gets it right - touch-ing each word as he says it. Interestingly,as he says "baker," he still touches the wordtwice as if he still needs to honor both syl-lables in the word. I ask Jack how he knewthat one word was "baker" and that theother word was "man." He responds bysaying, "Because 'baker' has a 'b' and'man' has an 'm."

Jack tracks the rest of the poem accu-rately, matching each word he says to thecorresponding word on the page. He tumsto me, face aglow with success, and says"I did it all right. Daddy!"

What does Jack know now that he did-n't know four months ago? Whatknowledge or skills enabled him to suc-cessfully track this poem? And whatliteracy experiences did we provide overthe last four months for Jack?

First and foremost, Jack's bedtime rou-tine over the last four months consisted ofabout 5-10 minutes a night of finger-pointreading simple, familiar pattern books. Mywife and I used echo reading, choral read-ing, and partner reading with Jack, all the


What Jack says:

Sam Sam the baker man,

Sam Sam the bake er


while pointing to each word as we said it,and asking Jack to do the same as he read.Jack thrived in these supportive and naturalreading experiences. He was motivated bythe knowledge that these books were famil-iar and he would be successful in reading,and rereading, and rereading them. Thesesupportive reading experiences didn't takeany extra materials or preparation time formy wife or me. They simply became partof our bedtime reading ritual every night.

To add variety, Jack would sometimesdictate stories to me that I would write inhis "joumal" - a collection of papers wekept in a folder. Stories about his week-end soccer games, riding his bike, ormeeting his new friends at preschool werecommon themes. While writing, I wouldask Jack to attend to the first letter-soundin words as I spelled them (e.g., "Jack,what is the first sound you hear in bike?").He loved illustrating and then rereadingthese dictations. These dictations, alongwith familiar stories and poems, becamepart of our steady diet of nightly bedtimerereadings.

As Jack became more proficient track-ing words, I began to write down sentencesfrom books he was reading and cut themup into word-cards. It was a challenge forJack to put the words back in order after Imixed them up. This activity forced Jackto attend to the initial letter-sound as heattempted to identify the words. AlthoughJack has not completely mastered a con-cept of word in text, he is still able toperform this activity successfully with sup-port.

What has Jack leamed from all of these

experiences? First, Jack is leaming to usememory, picture support, and beginningsound knowledge to accurately track wordsin familiar texts. In addition, when thewords "don't match up" (as happened inhis most recent reading of "Sam, Sam, theBaker Man"), Jack is leaming how to mon-itor his reading and self-correct using thesedifferent cues. Second, Jack is also leam-ing how to apply his beginning soundknowledge in his invented spellings (e.g..Jack wrote "HBDD" for "Happy BirthdayDad.") Finally, and perhaps most impor-tantly. Jack is beginning to believe thatreading is an enjoyable, exciting experi-ence that he can accomplish with success.And with the proper support. Jack is right.As Jack recently said to me after reread-ing a pattern book, "I'm reading all bymyself!"

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ing and leaming about print. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press.

Bear, D.R., Invemizzi, M., Templeton, S., & John-ston, R, (2003). Words their way: Word studyfor phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruc-tion (y ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: PrenticeHall.

Blachman, B. (2000). Phonological awareness. InM. L. KamiL, P. B. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson,& R. Barr, (Eds.), Handbook of readingresearch: Volume III (pp. 483-502). Mahwah,NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Chaney, C. (1989). I pledge a legiance tothe flag:Three studies in word segmentation. AppliedPsycholinguistics, 10, 261-281.

Clark, E. (1993). The Lexicon in Acquisition. Cam-bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Daddy, Where Did the Words Go ... / 49

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