Learning to read: whole word vs phonics?

[Tatimax]

I am wondering what is the most common way autistic kids learn to read. Please reply to the poll and comment if you want. Thanks!

 

[Fino]

I probably used both, but I don't really know. I've never thought about this.

 

[AprilR]

I don't know how i learned to read, i was 5 when i started reading, probably memorized words while my grandmother was reading me fairytales

 

[Rodafina]

Ditto to those above, I don’t recall. But now that you ask, I realize that with my nieces and nephews, I taught phonetically without thinking about it, so perhaps this is how I learned, too.

 

[Shamar]

My parents taught me phonics, the school taught whole word. Whole word is good if you know all the words of what you are reading. Phonics is necessary when you read something with a lot of new words.

Take, for example, the words "horse" and "house." The shape of these words are identical, and the ends are identical. The only difference is two letters in the middle. In the whole word system, they are the same word. I don't know about others, but I have never lived in a horse. Neither have I ridden on a house.

 

[Stuttermabolur]

I actually know the answer to this question as I remember the moment when I learned to read.

I was in five year old class, and the teacher had been trying to teach us how to read for a while. I could memorize the letters (the teacher pretended the letters were worms and made stories about them), but didn't really "get" reading.

Once, when my mother was driving us somewhere, I saw a road sign, and suddenly, it all clicked into place. During the drive, I read a bunch of advertising posters and signs and that was pretty much it. For me, it was definitely phonics, and quite exclusively so. It meant that I could speed read at quite a young age. Memorizing words sounds like a pain.

 

[Nervous Rex]

I imagine everyone starts by learning to sound out words. If we can't sound out words, we can never learn how to pronounce new words. Then, after we become fluent, we start "sight reading" - learning to recognize a word at a glance.

I don't remember learning to read - I've been able to read for as far back as I can remember. My mother says I taught myself to read around the age of 3 or 4 and tells stories of me sounding out new words as proof that I could read and wasn't just repeating what I had heard. It reinforces my understanding of my brain - that I am very skilled with text and have no "picture" abilities. I read very quickly. For a while after I read something, I can picture the text in my head well enough to reread it verbatim. But I can't remember anything about pictures, faces, etc., and can't picture them in my head.

 

[Nervous Rex]

I also had a serious reading compulsion when I was younger. If there were words around me, I had to read them. It didn't matter what else was going on around me, whether someone was talking to me or what else I was supposed to do - if there were words, I had to read them. I think that went away sometime in high school.

I still involuntarily read almost everything that passes through my field of view. When I am walking through the store, sometimes words will pop into my mind like "Cholesterol Free!" And then I have to stop and look at what I just passed by to figure out where I read it.


I also have a fast way to scan through something that I learned to do it when I was reading hundreds of patents every month for my job (The ones I read were typically 50 to 100 pages long). I would look for verbs and nouns and ignore everything else. It let me get an impression of what a paragraph was about in a fraction of a second and decide whether I need to read it or whether I can skip it and move on. It helped with quickly figuring out the central idea of a patent in a few minutes, but then I would come home and try to read a book for fun - I would quickly skim through a few pages, then realize what I was doing, stop, flip back a few pages and try to actually enjoy reading the book.

 

[Crossbreed]

We learned the alphabet and their usual sounds first (including common combinations) and those exceptional words that cannot be sounded out thusly. Silent k's & g's are a good example of the latter.

 

[Stuttermabolur]

We learned the alphabet and their usual sounds first (including common combinations) and those exceptional words that cannot be sounded out thusly. Silent k's & g's are a good example of the latter.

Your post got me thinking that perhaps the reason I learned reading in a phonetic way is because our language is phonetic so we don't need to worry about edge cases. I was genuinely confused by why it seems easier to some people to memorize words, but it makes sense to me if it depends on the language. I still need to do that for some words in English.