Misspelling and Comprehension

This was discussed extensively here about a month ago. Not sure what you would search on to find the thread — which was very good! Upshot was that the research was a hoax, and the ability to comprehend words with jumbled-up interior letters is limited to highly predictable words. This was proved by several people who went to the trouble of jumbling up interior letters of words in text that is not highly predictable.

Nancy

If you scroll down this board, past the first page, there’s a relevant post under “Scrambled Spelling Thing”. There were other threads too, but perhaps on other boards than this one.

Nancy

Questions:
1) Is it possible that fluent readers reorder the letters in misspelled words?
Yes.
2) Are fluent readers able to pronounce misspelled words correctly that they cannot comprehend?
Yes.
3) Is there any loss in reading speed for fluent readers as they encounter uncommon misspelled words?
Of course.
4) Does phonics training enhance one’s ability to decode misspelled words?[/quote]

In my experience, the most fluent readers are ‘naturals’ at reading and they come internally programmed to read phoentically and almost don’t need training at all.

The reality is though we need not concern ourselves too much with fluent reades. Our concern must lie with the not fluent and the poor readers. They cannot decode misspelled words or reorder the letters but more importantly they simply struggle to read. Their struggles are what good research should focus on rather than on the parlor tricks of fluent readers.

Thing is– this isn’t real research, but a hoax. (It may have been taken from some real research but the research wasn’t on reading but the brain’s ability to fill in gaps, not sure here. But it was NOT real reading research and was never done at Oxford).

This thing has made the rounds all sorts of places including a forum for aquarists.

The thing is it may “prove” that the brains of fluent readers can fill in gaps, it does nothing for poor readers. If you scramble uncommon words, it would be very difficult to read, even if you are fluent.

—des

And why the concern for an enhanced ability to read misspelled words? I do try to give my students quality reading :-)

(But, as has been said, this one has been discussed… pick a misspelled word and do a search for it. It’s like that little poster that says “paris in the the spring” — except most people miss the second the. Doesn’t have a whole lot at all to do with reading a *good* book — you know, where the words count and the author thought about exactly which one to use).

Yes it’s a parlour trick; no, it doesn’t have much real-world application.

But this kind of game is used by the anti-phonics camp to supposedly support their claims that reading letter by letter is a bad idea, and to teach people to guess, so be careful where the discussion leads.

Yep, not that I read them but I wonder re the conversation on this “research” that may be going on right now in the whole language camps. I’m sure it is there too as it is everywhere else. I can imagine this validating their spurious claims.

—des