Good day everyone!

Today, we are going to share with you one of the processes in defining reading
which is linguistic process.

How is reading a linguistic process?

To begin with, let me define reading.

In simple words, reading is what we do when we understand writing. More fully, it’s a cognitive process
of understanding information represented by printed or written language. It is a way of getting
information and insights about something that is written.

Reading is manifested in different processes such as linguistics.

So, what is linguistics?

Linguistics is the study of the structure of the English language and its study enables the pupil to
discover how spoken language is set down in writing. The printed symbols (words) are viewed as a code
and, according to the linguist, breaking the code involves analyzing the basic speech patterns of our
language.

So how does linguistics relate to reading?

The earliest proposals to use modern linguistic knowledge in the teaching of reading apparently came
from Leonard Bloomfield, who was disturbed by certain aspects of school instruction, particularly the
instruction given in language and in reading. For example, in a statement published in the very first
volume of Language in 1925 explaining in part why the Linguistic Society of America had been founded,
he wrote as follows:

Our schools are conducted by persons who, from professors of education down to teachers in the
classroom, know nothing of the results of linguistic science, not even the relation of writing to speech or
of standard language to dialect. In short, they do not know what language is, and yet must teach it, and
in consequence waste years of every child’s life and reach a poor result.

Bloomfield felt that the methods being used to teach his son to read were unenlightened and revealed a
lack of knowledge about language. Consequently, he devised his own method of teaching his son to read
and shared his opinions, methods, and materials with those of his friends who had like interests. These
later became known as the Bloomfield system for teaching reading when they found their way into Let’s
Read. Bloomfield rejected the “code-breaking” approach known as phonics as a way of teaching reading,
claiming that the proponents of phonics confused statements about speech with those about writing to
the point that they often appeared to be teaching children to speak, whereas all they were really doing
was teaching them to associate written symbols with already known words. He objected to practices
such as breaking up words into smaller parts corresponding to letters, crediting individual letters with
having sounds; sounding out words (e.g., cat as [ka ze ta]), and blending sounds in an attempt to decode
written words. Not only did Bloomfield reject a “code-breaking” or phonics approach, but he also
rejected the competing “whole-word” approach, claiming that it ignored the alphabetic nature of the
English writing system in that it treated English as though it were Chinese Bloomfield believed that
children learning to read should first be trained in visual discrimination and then be taught to associate
visually discriminated objects (letter and word shapes) to already known sounds and meanings. The
story line (the meaning of the reading materials) was, he believed, far less important than the regularity
of the connection between sounds and symbols, the phoneme-grapheme correspondences. In order
therefore to guarantee that children should easily acquire a mastery of these correspondences,
Bloomfield insisted that they be trained to discriminate in a left-to-right direction and also to name the
letters of the alphabet without error. He believed that requiring children to name the letters in new
words from left to right guaranteed both visual discrimination and correct word attack. Just as linguists,
and presumably children (intuitively in their case), could segment an utterance into phonemes,
beginning readers had to learn to segment words into graphemes, and the teacher systematically had to
teach children to relate the two discrimination abilities. The Bloomfield approach is, therefore, one
which is based on the introduction of regular sound-symbol, or phonemegrapheme, correspondences so
that children can acquire the fundamental understanding they must acquire in order to read, the
understanding that writing is a representation of speech, and, on the whole, quite a systematic one.
Bloomfield was also concerned with the notion of contrast, seeing a need to teach whole written words
such as can, van, and fan in contrast with each other and to introduce all the contrastive details of the
English writing system gradually and systematically, so that the child learning to read would realize, as
Bloomfield wrote, that “printed letter = speech sound to be spoken.”~ It is not surprising therefore that
the. resulting lists, exercises, and testing materials look something like the old “word family” lists in
many of the old-fashioned nineteenth century readers. Here is an example of some testing materials
from Let’s Read:

ban, can, Dan, fan, gan, ...

bat, cat, fat, gat, hat, ...

bad, cad, dad, fad, gad, ...

bap, cap, dap, gap, Hap, ...

bag, cag, dag, fag, gag, ...

According to Bloomfield, the basic task the child learning to read had to master was that of
understanding the spelling system of English not that of understanding the meanings of English words
and sentences. Therefore, it was quite possible for teachers to use nonsense syllables and nonsense
words in order to allow their students to achieve such mastery. He wrote as follows on this point:
Tell the child that the nonsense syllabIes are parts of real words which he will find in the books that he
reads. For example, the child will know han in handle and jan in January and mag in magnet or magpie.
The acquisition of nonsense syllables is an important part of the task of mastering the reading process.

Later, Robert Hall, gave very much the same kind of advice, claiming that the “ultimate test of any
method of teaching reading is whether the learners can deal with nonsense syllables. . . .’’7 Both
Bloomfield and Hall are really advocating an emphasis on a “code-breaking” approach, but not the
particular “code -breaking” approach known as phonics. In his work, Bloomfield was concerned almost
exclusive 1 y with monosyllabic words and polysyllabic words received very little attention. In defense of
this emphasis, he claimed that his son found no difficulty in transferring to polysyllabic words once he
had achieved a mastery of the monosyllabic patterns. This observation is a very interesting observation
to which I shall have further occasion to refer in connection with the work of contemporary linguists.

Believing that the major task the beginning reader must master is one wholly concerned with the
interpretation of words and not one concerned with guessing at the meanings of words by using
accompanying illustrations, Bloomfield rejected the use of illustrations in reading materials on the
grounds that they are either irrelevant or misleading. Some of the materials for teaching reading that
Fries and his followers were to develop following Bloomfield’s example likewise do not contain pictures
so that children may be left free to focus their attention on the words themselves rather than on the
illustrations accompanying the words. The results of applying Bloomfield’s theories to reading are
reading materials like the following.

A rap.
A gap.
Dad had a map.
Pat had a bat.
Tad had a tan cap.
Nan had a tan hat.
Nan had a fat cat.
A fat cat ran at a bad rat.

There is much that is admirable in Bloomfield’s ideas on reading. First of all, his work on English
phoneme-grapheme correspondences was based on a good knowledge of the important surface
phonological contrasts in English. Bloomfield also stressed the fact that the English writing system is
basically an alphabetical one and that it is not as inconsistent as it is often made out to be, particularly
when it is approached from the viewpoint of how sounds are represented in writing and not from that
of how letters are pronounced, or, even worse, should be pronounced. Then, too, there is in his work on
reading a welcome insistence that the proper content 01 reading and the basic insights necessary to
understand the reading process are to be found in linguistic rather than in social and psychological
factors. However, the Bloomfield method has much more to say about the linguistic content of reading
materials than about an actual method of teaching reading. What comments on methodology there are
in Bloomfield’s writings seem to be based on an extrapolation of some procedures, such as contrast,
which linguists have found useful in their work as linguists, and not on procedures derived from teaching
reading.