eliminating voicing and lip movement behaviors

I’ve actually spent more time encouraging subvocalizing (because so many of my students don’t actively process the words as “speech” at all). I just haven’t had a problem with ‘em getting “stuck” there and am not sure that it causes harm, especially when the reading is difficult.

I don’t see any reason to try and work on that either. I encourage any of the following if the student needs it— subvocalizing, pointing to words, etc. I am quite sure some of these are necessary for processing the words (try comprehension with and without), following the exact words, etc.

Of course we are dealing with kids with reading disabilities. I might feel differently if I were dealing with normal readers, which I am not.

—des

I don’t recognize the name of that book or the author. I think as teacher’s our job is to get kids reading. Whether they subvocalize or move their lips is completely irrelevant to me. They must need to do it if they do it.

Janis

Welp, I remember some of my classmates being encouraged not to subvocalize and if they were ready for that it would make things faster — I could see it being a habit to break, too. I am rather grateful that we’ve gotten past it being an insult — “He’s so stupid he has to move his lips when he reads” — but unfortunately the reason it’s no longer an insult is that so many people don’t read well enough to have gotten to that stage :(

Yes — my two responses to the question are: Why?? and Don’t!!

Back in the dark ages when I attended school, specifically the late 1950’s, we were constantly being advised that it was a Very Bad Thing to move your mouth when you read. There was all sorts of advice on this, anything from putting an eraser in your mouth to chewing a wad of gum (I’ll take a vocalizer over a gum-slurper or eraser-chewer any day, thanks.)
This advice was based on research even further back, as it always takes ideas a while to trickle into the classroom, and when I started to read the research I found that the Never Vocalize theories came from the 1920’s and 1930’s. Back then the first scientific psychological researchers were fascinated by the developing technology and for the first time were able to measure things in the lab, what with having electrical gear for the first time. The tachistoscope was a really big thing, to flash images on a screen for very short periods of time and then measure responses to these “instantaneous” stimuli.
Well, the researchers didn’t know much about eye response times — instruments fast enough to measure it hadn’t been developed yet — or about persistence of vision (the afterimage that stays on your retina after a bright light) and also statistical reporting standards for psychological research hadn’t really been developed yet, so they made a few misjudgements. Unfortunately these misjudgements got into the literature as the Holy Writ and are still referred to, even though they have been shown to be misleading by later studies with better equipment and better controls.

The “sight word” programs of the 1930’s and 1940’s were based on faulty studies that concluded that good readers could read words faster than they could fixate on individual letters, and therefore children should be taught NOT to look at individual letters. The Never Vocalize advice was based on studies that with 1930’s quality equipment could not find signs of vocalizing in good readers and therefore concluded that children should be taught NOT to vocalize ever.

Of course to begin with there is the questionable pedagogy of dumping new learners off the deep end and having them imitate the behaviours of the most expert adults rather than working up to this through stages.

Besides that, the old studies have been shown to be badly flawed. When a word is flashed on the screen even for a very short time, there is a persistent retinal image and a brain image which the viewer can analyze in more detail, so the “see words as wholes” advice is not good.
Modern studies have shown that ALL, repeat ALL, readers vocalize. Electrical impulses are sent to the throat muscles; the motions may be suppressed to almost nothing, but they are there with delicate electric measurements. Furthermore, in all readers and MORE in good readers, the speech centers of the brain light up under PET scans.
These facts have been reported in Scientific American and in various education journals. I believe the National Reading Panel report made a passing reference to these facts as well.

The early researchers certainly did the best they could and bear no blame for reporting as much as they could find. Seventy and more years and hundreds of studies and development of computers and PET scans later, we need to make ourselves better informed.

Since ALL readers vocalize, telling students not to do so can in fact be harmful — they may lose whatever tenuous connection they had between print and language comprehension.

Personally in tutoring, I do the exact opposite. I have my students read orally, every day several pages of a novel for a few thousand running words, and all the instructions in their workbooks. I get complaints; they say they read better silently. I try to avoid being unpleasant, but if they were such hot readers silently, why are their parents paying me a large amount of money to fix the problem?
I find that what they were doing may have been silent, it was rarely reading. After staring first at the page and then into space they cannot tell me a thing about what it was about. Or they give off-the-wall answers that depend on some strange misinterpretations plus imagination. In the workbook, they completely ignore the lesson they are supposed to learn and jump straight to the blanks, which they proceed to fill in as fast as possible without any reference to meaning. If this is the result of many years of careful training in silent reading (and it is), I’ll take reading aloud any day.
I have mentioned before a student I had when I first started tutoring,in a school system with a very carefully designed reading program where kids were never forced to “perform” aloud, who had succeeded with A’s and B’s from kindergarten to Grade 3, and who started to fail in Grade 4 — when I tested him, I found he had a primer reading ability, about fifty words and those not too accurate. Highly intelligent, great oral vocabulary, excellent social skills and able to “read” teachers beautifully — just a minor detail that he was a total illiterate. I’ll take reading aloud over losing this kid any day, too.

Once kids are actualy *reading*, getting the words accurately, and comprehending what they read, then it is usually an easy matter for them to read very very quietly, first a mumble and then a whisper and then “silently” just saying the words in their heads.
And if they don’t ever get silent, I don’t really care, as long as they can read.

Oh gosh, I remember the awful dreaded tachistoscope sessions back in the 50s. Eventually the text was flashed at such a high speed that I lost any and all comprehension (wasnt’ a strength anyway). Yes there definitely is the after image though at slower speeds. And I didn’t like that much either.

I would guess that for someone who is actually really reading (and fairly well) then subvocalizing with the lips would slow someone down. But that presupposes they really do know how to read and actually are reading very well. I would guess if they really need to do this then they are needing the extra aural feedback, and I might work on comprehension at that point. I don’t know, as I have not actually had anyone that reads that well. Yes we all use our speech centers in the brain when we read. So some of us just do it louder than others.

—des