Phonics vs. whole language

If lipreading is - a bit - like reading, maybe we can learn something from all the research that has been done to find the best way to teach young children to read print.

In a nutshell, there are two approaches to teaching reading: phonics and 'whole language'.

This is what Wikipedia says about them:

"Phonics" emphasizes the alphabetic principle – the idea that letters represent the sounds of speech, and that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken words, which is specific to the alphabetic writing system. Children learn letter sounds (b = the first sound in "bat" and "ball") first and then blend them (bl = the first two sounds in "blue") to form words. Children also learn how to segment and chunk letter sounds together in order to blend them to form words (trap = /t/, /r/, /a/, /p/ or /tr/, /ap/).

"Whole language" is a method of teaching reading that emphasizes literature and text comprehension. Students are taught to use critical thinking strategies and to use context to "guess" words that they do not recognize. In the younger grades, children use invented spelling to write their own stories.

Comparable to the analytic approach of teaching lipreading, and the synthetic approach. Right?

[Oh.. I wasn't sure if it was 'analytic' approach, or 'analytical' approach so I asked Google. And stumbled on an article that I hadn't seen before: "Teaching lip-reading: The efficacy of lessons on video", by Barbara Dodd¹, Geoff Plant² and Mark Gregory¹. In the British Journal of Audiology 1989, Vol. 23, No. 3 , Pages 229-238. I will download it, read it, and tell you about it, later.
I do know now that it is the analytic approach vs. the synthetic approach.]

The confusing bit is that in reading, they also have 'analytical phonics' and 'synthetic phonics', and these are just the opposite of what you'd expect:

• analytical phonics, also known as the Whole Word approach, is an approach to the teaching of reading in which the phonemes associated with particular graphemes are not pronounced in isolation.
• synthetic phonics involves the development of phonemic awareness from the outset. As part of the decoding process, the reader learns up to 44 phonemes (the smallest units of sound) and their related graphemes (the written symbols for the phoneme).

In Dutch, we call this 'hakken en plakken', which Google translates into 'cut and paste'... which isn't too bad.   Cutting: = cutting a word into smaller bits. Pasting = pasting smaller bits together to make a word. Analytical = cutting. Synthetic = pasting. 

For now, the main thing is that there are two approaches to teaching reading: from letters (graphemes) to words to sentences to stories. And: from stories to sentences to words.

Also called bottom-up versus top-down processing:

• bottom-up: from the letters on the page, up through your eyes, to the visual, then language, then cognitive processing centers in your brain, and finally: to awareness.
• top down: from your expectations of the text (awareness) through your eyes, to the words on the page: does it say what I expect it to say?

Although the reading experts go back and forth about the best way to teach reading, the solution is obvious. In fluent reading, we do both, it's an interactive process. We predict, then we check if our predictions are correct. If they are not, we look more closely to see what the text really says, and feed our brain the new information.  So in teaching reading, we have to teach both. 

In teaching lipreading, we see the same two approaches. Some tutors / therapists start by teaching visemes, then short words, then words in sentences: the analytic approach.

Others start by teaching learners to use their world knowledge and their knowledge of the language, to predict what a speaker may say: the synthetic approach.

And most lipreading tutors and therapists of course teach both!

Many older books and websites, however, seem to favor the analytic approach: they start by teaching visemes. But I think that is mainly because all they had, were photographs of lip-patterns. Static lip-patterns, of the kind that you rarely see in real speech. 

Because we don't speak in single phonemes / visemes, we speak in sentences. In words and sentences, phonemes / visemes change their sound / shape, depending on their position in a word, and the letters /phonemes before and after! 

But if all you have are photographs, all you can do is show single visemes. Those photographs may make lipreaders aware of the things people do with their mouths when they speak. But they don't teach lipreading.

Speech is dynamic, it is a temporal pattern. You cannot cut speech up into single phonemes, well, you can, but then you'll have a hard time understanding what is being said. In the same way, you can't cut up speech into single visemes, because you lose the dynamics and the temporal pattern: the changes over time. If you do cut up speech into visemes, you'll have a very hard time understanding what is being said!

We read, and lipread, interactively - by predicting, then recognizing whole words and even phrases, and checking our expectations against what we see. 

Thanks to video, we can now use 'moving pictures' to show 'real-life', living and moving visemes in their natural context: connected speech!

Two other things that we can learn from reading:

• When we read, we convert the words on the page into sound. First we read out loud; later, we hear the words that we read, with our mind's 'inner ear'. This is called 'phonological coding', we convert visual patterns (written words) into sound patterns (spoken and/or heard words). In the same way, many lipreaders recode what they see, into a 'phonological' code: they watch someone speak, but with their inner ear they 'hear' his/her voice. Is this a requirement for good lipreading? Should we teach it? I'm not sure.
• Some reading teachers say that children become better readers, if we teach them to recognize morphemes. I think that would work for lipreading, too: we should teach morphemes, instead of visemes.
  

... to be continued!