As the Government continues to champion the use of phonics, Pat Farrington, freelance researcher/writer, former teacher and BBC Schools Television producer who worked on three ‘Look and Read’ series, writes about the need to consider using context cues in the teaching of early reading.
The Rose Report on best practice in teaching reading (2006) stated that there should be a ‘clear and early emphasis on phonic instruction, reinforced by complementary reading strategies, such as context, grammatical knowledge and word recognition’. Due to some misreporting in the press, a number of teachers and others have thought that synthetic phonics ruled, so it seems useful to revive interest in context cues, that is, anything in the text that helps a reader identify a word or meaning, even though the current thinking is that context is a fall-back strategy that comes under the heading of comprehension.
There is no doubt that young readers need to be taught phonics and high frequency words as a priority, but children also need to learn how best to tackle unknown words, especially those that are irregular, using a range of strategies which give them flexibility and encourage their confidence as readers. With the current emphasis on synthetic phonics for beginner readers, the use of some of the simpler context cues can help to avoid over-reliance on this one method in learning to read a language in which nearly a third of the words are not phonically regular. Later on, readers should find context cues helping them both to speed up and grasp the meaning of the text as a whole. This article focuses on using context cues to identify a single unknown word for a beginner reader, rather than cues for large portions of text. The theory is largely based on the OU reading development course (1973) and an article by Kenneth F. Goodman, ‘Reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game’ (1976); the examples and the paragraphs on pictures cues and collocation come from my teaching experience.
Guess and check
The aim is to help children find the most productive context cue (if one does not work, try another) and then use the guess and check strategy to see if they are right, using vital clues from the structure of the word, using phonics. For example, in the sentence ‘Monster likes to eat his breakfast in bed’, where a child does not know the word ‘breakfast’, they can use the guess and check strategy to guess that it must be food because of the context and the verb ‘eat’. They then check their guess by sounding the word out. Working things out for themselves will empower children as readers.
The idea of being a reading detective might help to diminish negative feelings that low ability readers may have about a text that refuses to give up some of its secrets. One such Year 3 reader said, for example, she felt “sad when she couldn’t read a word”. It is useful to explore how young readers respond to unknown words, something which will of course depend on their confidence and the stage they have reached. A Year 1 child who found reading easy said that a word they did not know looked “a bit nonsense”, while a Year 3 child who found it difficult said the words looked “funny”. If all children were to see themselves as ‘reading detectives’, looking for clues to work out the meaning of a text, it would help them to become more independent readers. Hopefully, this feeling of power over the written word would encourage them to read for pleasure.
Kenneth F. Goodman introduced the idea of reading “as a psycholinguistic guessing game” (1967) on the basis that efficient reading did not result from “precise perception and identification of all elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses that are right the first time” [my italics]. This research has now been discredited as being ‘top down’ in approach and encouraging children to guess too much when they should be decoding words using phonics, but I think there is still something to be learnt from it. Although the beginner reader obviously needs more graphic information in decoding unknown words and therefore needs to be more precise than the skilled readers Goodman refers to here, evidence from his study of first-graders [six-year-olds] showed that they begin unconsciously to sample and draw on information around the unknown word almost from the beginning (see Unit 4 of The Open University Reading Development course, 1973).
The Clue Song
In ‘Look and Read’, the BBC School Television series, I used an animated character called ‘Dog Detective’ and a sing-along Clue Song, quoted here because parts of it might be useful with Years 1 to 3:
What a word!
But don’t take fright,
Have a go, you might be right.
Look ahead, look behind,
See what clues you can find.
Use your head, think it out,
What’s the sentence all about?
Have a guess. Still in doubt?
Look at the letters and check them out.
With a word you don’t know,
The main thing is to have a go!
There are two main types of cue: structural and context. Structural cues are found within the structure of the word itself and rely on readers using graphic and phonological knowledge. As we know, it is very useful if, as well as individual sounds, children learn letter clusters such as ‘ight’ or ‘ing’ to help with longer words that are not regular.
Context cues are found around words, which help readers to reduce the number of anticipated words using their grammatical and semantic knowledge. They can make informed guesses and then check them out using structural cues. For example, in the sentence ‘I’ll write a story about a giant, a very big giant’, if the children does not know the word ‘giant’ then reading to the end of the sentence will tell him or her that the unknown words means something very big beginning with ‘g’. Looking back to the previous sentence where they skipped this unknown word the first time, ‘I like stories about giants, witches and magic’ should also help them to guess that the word is ‘giant’, providing, of course, they know the words ‘witches’ and ‘magic’ and can then put ‘giants’ into a fairy tale setting.
Miscue analysis
I did some small-scale research in the mid-1970s on miscue analysis which is a way of assessing a learner’s reading comprehension through analysing their mistakes. This was carried out with my class of six-year-olds (explored in more detail in the article on miscue analysis published in Literacy Today, No 52, September 2007 and also on this website). Examples from this research are used in the section below to illustrate how context cues work.
Syntactic and semantic cues
In terms of a single unknown word, there are two main kinds of cues that help the reader to reduce the number of anticipated words: syntactic (the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences) and semantic (the meaning of a word, phrase or sentence). Syntactic cues are provided by the syntactic structure of the sentence. The child’s working knowledge of syntax and grammar (mostly gained at this stage from oral language) usually enables him or her to anticipate the particular class of words that will follow. For example, a Year 1 child in my miscue analysis substituted ‘walked’ for ‘worked’ in the sentence from a reading book which said ‘All day long the old Indian woman worked in her garden’. Although the word was not actually correct, he knew the slot must take a ‘doing word’ or verb by its position in the sentence. He just needed to have his attention drawn to the structural cues in the word and would then gradually learn to do this for himself. (“Have a guess. Still in doubt? Look at the letters and check them out.”)
Semantic cues are provided by the meaning of the context. The majority of errors in reading are semantic rather than syntactic. In the same story about the old Indian woman, he went on to say: “She made a noise from a pine cone”, instead of a nose for the scarecrow she was putting together. Again, he knew instinctively that the slot required the name for something, a noun, but did not look carefully enough at the surrounding context to make the right guess, nor did he check the letters. ‘Noise’ must have seemed a reasonable enough guess to allow him to steam on through the text, though in the process he lost the build-up of detail in the making of the scarecrow. He needed to have had his attention drawn to the lack of the letter ‘i’ in the hope that in the future he would look at individual letters more carefully and so get the full benefit of the text. (“Use your head, think it out./ What’s the sentence all about?”)
Not surprisingly, a forward-acting cue is one that acts forward to limit anticipated meaning and a backward-acting cue is one that acts backwards to restrict previous meaning. In the sentences from the same story ‘She went to the fir trees and filled the big pot with gum. She poured the gum over the scarecrow’, if the word ‘poured’ is outside the child’s vocabulary, they are helped by reading on to the end of the second sentence and finding out that the gum went over the scarecrow, suggesting something liquid. Then the child can go back to have another go at the unknown word with more information to help them, checking out their guess with structural cues such as the letters and length of the word. In the sentence ‘I can read the book about birds and the one about the birthday party’, the words ‘the one’ refer back to ‘the book’, so pinpointing the meaning of the word ‘one’, if this is unknown. (“Look ahead, look behind,/ See what clues you can find.”)
Context cues can also operate across sentences, e.g. ‘I can read the book about birds and the one about the birthday party. I can write too.’ Here ‘read’ and ‘write’ are related ideas and, helped by the word ‘too’, hopefully a child will guess (and check) the more difficult word ‘write’. The first sentence usefully limits the possibilities.
Quite often the reader’s previous knowledge is the best thing to limit the possibilities of the unknown word. Take, for example, the two sentences ‘All day long the old Indian woman worked in her garden growing vegetables. She grew green cabbages, red carrots, yellow beans, Indian corn and fat pumpkins.’ If the child did not know the word ‘vegetables’, but used cues across sentences, stacking up in their mind all the cabbages, carrots, beans, corn and pumpkins (on the assumption they knew most of these words), they could then go back to ‘vegetables’ and with the first-letter cue of ‘v’ and the structure of the word have a good chance of getting this word right.
Picture cues
These have been downgraded in recent research, because low ability readers often think they can ‘read’ the pictures to get the story and therefore do not attend to the text. Another problem is where the artist and writer are different people or do not work closely enough together and this can sometimes give the young reader ‘visual miscues’. However, picture cues can often help, especially in a simple picture book with a single word on a page, where the connection between word and picture is very clear. At a later stage, as teachers know, asking a child what is in the picture that accompanies a page of text is useful in getting them to understand ‘where they are at’ in the story as well as orally ‘rehearsing’ the vocabulary they will need to read the story.
Collocation cues
Collocation is the probability that a word or words will be near or next to each other. The clearest example is ‘Once upon a time’, where only ‘time’ can finish this phrase, even if the word is not in a child’s sight vocabulary. As we know, reading over a well-known phrase together and stopping just before the word that is unknown to the child often results in them going on triumphantly to finish the phrase for themselves. Collocation, plus structural cues, is very helpful in solving unknown irregular words.
If, as reading detectives, children are clued up on cues, they can achieve success with unknown words and gradually internalise the strategies they need to help them in the future. By encouraging children to ‘have a go’, using both structural and context cues with the guess and check strategy, teachers can help them to become more confident and take off into independent reading.
References
BBC Schools Television, ‘Look and Read’ series
N. C. Farnes, Unit 4, Reading Development series, The Open University, 1973
Kenneth F. Goodman, Reading as a Psycholinguistic Guessing Game, 1967
Published in Literacy Today, No 51, June 2007