“Thumper, it’s 10:30pm, you need to go to sleep.”
“Oh oh, but this is the exciting part! Just 5 more minutes!”
Never thought I’d see the day that Thumper is engrossed and binge reading in English. To me, the road to reading in English was actually way more painful than learning to read in Chinese. In my faulty mind, I spent maybe 3-4 painful months, max 6, zooming through Sagebooks, learning zhuyin, and then we were off reading. In the year since then, we went from learning the first 500 characters and not reading to reading without zhuyin (~4th grade).
On the other hand, learning to read in English seemingly took us two years. Okay, so maybe half of that was only half-ass attempt at teaching phonics. But still, I definitely feel like the effort has been much, much, much more painful. Heck, for a period of time, Thumper actually said that she would much rather read in Chinese than English. I was starting to worry just a little because it seemed her English and Chinese reading level had a 2+ year gap.
After some dedicated work this past semester, she’s now at grade level (beginning 3rd grade). What I realized, now that we’ve gone through both the hump of learning to read in Chinese and English, is that success is predicated on only one factor.
All I needed was consistency in Guided Reading.
Looking at Thumper and her great difficulty in learning English vs. Chinese, whereas other children easily learned to read English and are slower on the Chinese, I realized it is only because there is a teacher, in a public school, who is consistently teaching children English phonics daily. It takes a teacher from K-2 to get most of the children up to chapter books.
Now obviously, some children went to preschool, had parents at home helping, and read higher levels earlier. But curriculum-wise, the teachers are spending 1-3 years teaching children to read in English. Compare this with learning Chinese in Taiwan. Children learn to read zhuyin in 4-6 months and are off reading. They spent the next 2.5 years learning enough characters to read without zhuyin.
So, in a way, children in both countries spent similar amount of time to learn how to read, with Taiwanese children able to start reading higher level books faster than English children due having zhuyin. Of course, I’m assuming here that the child can speak either language well enough to read. Otherwise, past a certain point, you cannot get up to the chapter books due to lack of comprehension.
In any case, if we don’t, like the public school teachers, consistently and doggedly, teach and guide the children to read in Chinese, as a priority over writing, then of course it takes them a long time to learn to read. And by reading in Chinese, I mean either learning zhuyin+characters or massive amount of characters in first 2 years of elementary.
So how did Thumper learn to read in English?
- Thumper learned her basic phonics in preschool at age 4 & 5.
- First year homeschooling, age 6, she coasted by what she learned in preschool, writing with inventive spelling and copying sentences I wrote down for her.
- Second year, age 7, we started reading through Primary Phonics. It was a struggle to get to set 6. I now know it is because she didn’t actually learn her blends, diphthongs, and digraphs in preschool well.
- Third year, age 8, we started by reviewing Primary Phonics then worked through All About Spelling book 1 and book 2. That, combined with reading English books by level, then more intense guided reading in the Spring semester, allowed us to catch up.
Once she was able to read in Chinese without zhuyin earlier in the school year, I finally hunkered down and paid attention to the English. The minute I started consistently reading with her daily, 10-15 minutes each time, in addition to other phonics work like All About Spelling, and providing English books in the environment, she started making progress from early reader books like Little Bear to chapter books, such as Heidi Hecklebeck and the Critter Club, the books she could not put down.
With homeschooling, daily life can easily sway us from actual schooling. So by consistency, I mean that even when we were packing and moving, I still kept borrowing books from the library. Even on my most busy packing days, and we do no schooling, I still ask her to read aloud to me.
Without this consistency, progress isn’t made.
I feel like I’m contradicting myself saying it was so much harder to teach English phonics. On the one hand, it takes a lot of my effort. Heck, once basic phonics is down, you now have to add Spelling to the curriculum! Till 6th grade!
On the other, it only took us 6 months to jump up to a second grade reading level (Level M/O). Just this week, she picked up Matilda by Roald Dahl (Level S, 5th grade) and is slogging through it because she loves the book.
My point is not about how fast she’s jumping through levels. The book’s probably too hard for her. For me, Thumper’s a clear example of how you don’t need to teach reading very early if there’s consistent progress made in comprehension. (I should specify I mean academic comprehension, of vocabulary in books, not just speech.)
BUT, I’m amazed at just how fast you can acclimate to reading and writing English once you’ve learned your phonics. If I hadn’t deliberately put off learning to read in English until she was reading without zhuyin in Chinese, I don’t see how her Chinese would ever catch up.
With her phonics learned, I can already see through daily school work that she would prefer writing in English than Chinese later down the road. With the wide array of books available from local library, I’m also starting to feel the inadequacy in my Chinese library in keeping her interested in reading Chinese.
Assuming one has the comprehension, the hard part is putting in that consistent effort in teaching the kids to learn characters at a fast pace, and also working with them in reading. With zhuyin, it is actually much, much easier to get children to start reading in Chinese. You just have to put in the consistent effort in teaching them to read.
But the pain should be shorter than English!
Especially once the kids are in elementary school and have all those extra curricular, and English homework, and start speaking more and more English. If we don’t treat it like a job much like the English teachers in school, and consistently teach the children Chinese, it’s no wonder eventually the English surpasses.