Re: Lteter Oerdr?

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Sun Sep 21 2003 - 07:56:36 PDT


David, Don, John...... et al

When David writes:

I think what is titillating and unsettling about this phenomenon is that it
lays bare how deceived we are by the sense of executive control we
attribute to the conduct of our lives. We don't really have introspective
access to the processes that govern our construction of words from letters.

In this context, think of the plight of the novice reader of an alphabetic
script. We are incapable of pronouncing a phoneme in isolation, we learn
the NAMES of the letters of the alphabet and in English we face the
daunting task of dealing with a hybrid language such that any given letter
of the alphabet represents phonemes differentially given local context of
surrounding letters.

I had never thought of the issue from this angle before. Thanks for helping
me make the connection back to our argument that the acquistion of reading
is a creative process which cannot be directly taught, but can be
arranged for.
mike



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