Why Kids Skip and Mangle Words

Q. My son is in fifth grade. When he reads aloud, he skips over words and sometimes skips whole lines of text. He inserts words that aren't there, and messes up the pronunciation. His grades are good, though. Should I worry?

You describe a common reading weakness that tends to be exposed at that age. It may hamper his academic progress as the textbooks get more challenging in secondary school and beyond.

Here's what causes it: most public schools have quit teaching proper phonics in the early grades, and rely on sight-reading instead. Instead of teaching children to systematically "decode" words based on the sound-symbol relationships of alphabetic text, schools teach them to use their sense of sight to try to figure out what a word is and what it means. A word becomes more like a pictograph to be viewed than an alphabetic set of symbols to be logically decoded.

Take the word "skip." Children are taught to look at the first letter and the last letter, where the word is in the sentence, and what the context might suggest the word is. They're taught to look at any illustrations, too, as a clue. If all else fails, they should just guess. When the child sees the word "skip" with a picture of a jump rope, the child sees the "s," the "p" and the picture. He thinks the word might be "jump" or "skip" because both end in "p." But look! It starts with "s." Maybe it's "skip."

A phonics-trained reader would, excuse the pun, skip all that, and simply decode the phonograms smoothly and automatically: "sk � short vowel i � p."

It's easy to see how problems with reading comprehension, pronunciation and visual perception would arise from the sight-reading methodology.

Solution: phonics for grades K-2. For your son, try reading aloud with him for 20 or 30 minutes each night. Teach him to sound out unfamiliar words. Alert him when he skips or muffs words. If the schools won't insist on accuracy in reading, it's up to you.

Homework: See the National Right to Read Foundation, www.nrrf.org