The connection between phonological,syntactic and semantic skills and children’s reading and spelling

In recent years two radically different views have dominated discussions about the way in which children learn to read and write. The first view is that the crucial hurdle in learning to read is the discovery of how to do the correct phonological analysis. The second view is that the crucial factor is the use of context, and that children use what they know about the meaning — and particularly the semantics and the syntax — of the passages that they are reading to help them decipher and learn about difficult written words. Learning to read is ‘a psycholinguistic guessing game’ according to this view and children set about it in much the same way as they set about learning to speak. Thus according to the first view children’s semantic and syntactic skills will determine their progress in reading and according to the second it will be their phonological skills. We present longitudinal evidence about a group of children in their first year at school which shows that both kinds of skill do play a part, but that they make entirely different contributions. Semantic and syntactic skills determine how well children make use of the context of what they are reading. Phonological skills affect their use of letter-sound relationships.