The Shape of a Word

My Mother, a primary school teacher, used to say that when children are learning to read, it is usually the short words that baffle them. No one, she said, ever has any difficulty recognising 'elephant'.

I was reminded of that yesterday when Radio 4 reported on the 60th anniversary of the opening of the M1 motorway. They interviewed a lady who helped design the road signs. She said that they had to be redesigned to make them readable by people travelling fast, and that required the use of lower case. Signs in block capitals would have been harder to read because all the letters would have been the same height, which would have concealed the shapes of the words.

It has become fashionable to demand that children be taught to read by only one method, synthetic phonics, in which they are taught to deduce the pronunciation of a word from the sounds of the component letters, and from those alone.

That is not how most people read most of the time. We usually glance at a word and recognise it immediately; we use the 'look say' method.

By insisting that children attend only to the individual letters and ignore the shape of a word, we are denying them a useful clue. Perhaps some children can't recognise the shapes of words, but that is no reason to try to conceal that clue from all.

That is a bit like making everyone walk with crutches because some are crippled.