This is the text of an article published by The Times Educational Supplement, Feb 14 1992). It remains relevant, and I have added some notes to clarify the context of the time.
Susan, who is nine and finds reading very difficult, chooses to read The Magic Key, from the Oxford Reading Tree, Stage 5. She looks at the picture on the first page, and begins to read the text, which is “The box was by Chip’s bed. Something was glowing inside it.”
She gets stuck on “something”, but scans the illustration, which shows a box with a bright light coming from it. Susan reads “shining” instead of “something”, then cannot make sense of the rest of the sentence as this has led her into a semantic blind alley. Asked how she knew that the word was “shining”, she replied confidently that the picture tells her.
This is only partly true. Susan had used light sampling of the phonological information in word – the error has the same initial letter and the same letter as the word in the text – and her reading makes sense in the context of what she has just read, even though it prevents her from making sense of what comes next.
Stopping at the full stop might have helped, but the use of punctuation in reading receives only a passing mention in the non-statutory guidance for the national curriculum (1989 version), while picture cues appear as the first point of reference at Level 2, both as a source of meaning and as an aid to deciphering new words. This formulation is based on the well-established idea that young children use all available strategies to make sense of text, and that concentration on one approach limits their effectiveness as readers.
It does not, however, give any guidance as to the relative contribution of these strategies to the development of independent reading. This lack of differentiation, combined with the cramming of so many of the word-recognition and decoding aspects of reading into Level 2, has blunted the impact of the national curriculum on the quality of children’s reading. More specifically, the prominence given to picture luces, re-inforced by the use of heavily-illustrated books in the assessment procedures, could easily lead many more children like Susan into problems which are largely the result of following their teacher’s advice.
Part of the problem is that the illustrations have so much to offer. They attract children to books, help sustain their interest, and offer an additional channel of communication that enables the author particularly in the early stages of reading, to conevy greater detail than is possible through words alone. But the disadvantage to this use of illustration to extend meaning is that it makes them much less reliable as cues to individual words in a text.
Put simply, if the picture contains more than the text, how is the child to know just what it is in the picture that provides the connection to the word he or she is trying to read? To the fluent reader, to whom picture and text are equally and instantly comprehensible, the connection is obvious, and it seems equally obvious that the child should be encouraged to use it. However, there has been very little research into the practical benefit of encouraging children to think in this way rather than concentrating on text-based strategies. What research there is suggests that clues derived from pictures do not help children to remember words outside that specific context.
Susan’s error is not uncommon. Weak readers often allow information from a picture to override the print when they do not recognise words on sight, even when it means departing from the text completely. (Note, 2019. Morag MacMartin’s PhD thesis, Factors Affecting Reading Comprehension in Primary Pupils, OU 1992, confirms this point and explains it in detail). Where text and picture are designed to convey the same meaning, this is less likely, but in most real contexts, where the connections are more sophisticated, the strategy of prediction becomes a two-edged weapon for a would-be reader.
The solution is not to deny the role of pictures in the process of learning to read, but to clarify it and set it in the context of other factors that have been clearly identified by research. These included the effectiveness of phonological teaching, to tune children into patterns in sound before expecting them to attach them to letters, (Note, 2019, more accurate to say that letters and sounds are taught together, not that phonological awareness is taught on its own) the importance of fast, accurate word identification in the development of phrasing (Perera, K, Phd, Manchester 1989); and the detailed instruction in sound-symbol correspondence in the Reading Recovery programme (2019 note: The element “Hearing the Sounds in Words” is not enough to secure this connection in the context of the program as a whole, which has taken scant, if any, interest in the research in phonics). Using pictures as cues to words is a pre-reading skill, and should be moved to Level 1. (2019 note: this again relates to the 1989 NC – levels are now abolished.)