Understanding the cognitive processes involved in reading has maintained its relevance throughout the years. Today, we seek more answers to how we are able to extract meaning from written text in order to provide different options and responses to the reading needs that arise daily in classrooms.
Methods for Learning to Read
When we follow a cognitive perspective, we find that there are several methods for learning to read. On one hand, we have the more alphabetic methods, which are more focused on letters, phonemes, or syllabic methods. And, on the other hand, we have the more global methods, which focus more on words or phrases themselves. From these types of teaching, the dual-route model emerged, which explains that children can read through the visual/lexical route or the phonological route.
My objective in this post is to share with you what these two reading routes are and how each of them works.
What is the Lexical Route?
When we talk about the lexical route, we refer to the route that reads the word globally without needing to break it down.
Consequently, when we read through the lexical route, we manage to compare the form of the word in front of us and read it with words that already exist in our visual vocabulary. This route is very useful when we encounter word families that we use frequently, such as “mom,” “dad,” “car,” etc.
Within this lexical route, it is also common that, in cases of rapid reading and lack of attention, similar words are substituted, for example: “truck” with “song.” The ideal is to increasingly expand the student’s visual lexicon. We can achieve this through various activities or exercises using concrete materials that motivate their learning, such as: using colored flashcards, markers, etc.
What is the Phonological Route?
On the other hand, the phonological route refers to reading words using grapheme-phoneme conversion, meaning that letters are identified and transformed into sounds. This route serves to read all types of words, whether they are unknown words, long words, invented words, or words from other languages.
Reading through the phonological route involves the following processes:
- Visual analysis of the written word.
- Assignment of phonemes.
- Joining of phonemes.
- Activation of the articulatory program.
- Auditory analysis of the oral output.
- The activated representation in the auditory lexicon activates the meaning in the semantic system.
- Activation of the representation in the phonological lexicon.
- Activation of the articulation program and subsequent oral reading of the word.
It is important to note that those who do not know the rules, whether simple or contextual, tend to substitute some letters for others. For example, in the case of the letter /c/, when reading a word like /cima/, they will read it as /qima/.
Succeeding in Teaching Reading
Referring to the above, authors Peter Bryant and Linette Bradley (1998; p. 111) state that “the idea is that to succeed in teaching the indirect reading route, we must:
- Foster sound awareness in students.
- Teach them to establish orthographic generalizations.
- Highlight and demonstrate the relationships between reading and spelling and between the phonological and visual aspects of reading and writing.
- Bear in mind that each struggling reader may begin reading in a different way.”
Finally, let’s look at an example: If we try to read the word “cama” (bed) or the word “lexo,” both have four letters, which should represent the same difficulty. However, we tend to read the word “cama” much faster because we have it in our mental lexicon, unlike the word “lexo,” for which we perform an internal process before reading it. The same happens with longer words, for example “televisor” (television) or the word “fabuladora” (fabulist), both have the same number of letters, but reading the first word is easier due to the access we have to the lexical route.