Suzanne Pfeiffer

Introduction & Influences

Lexical Spellings & Phonological Rules

The Epiphany of Write First, Read Later

Repeated Readings

After Chomsky: What?

Conclusion

References

Introduction & Influences

Noam and Carol Chomsky

Born Carol Schatz in Philadelphia she earned her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania where her husband and future linguistics pioneer Noam Chomskyalso studied. Carol Chomsky earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard University in the 1960s and has since worked in the fields of language development and psycholinguistics. Some of her most influential work appeared while teaching in the Department of Reading and Language at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Although married to one, if not the most, controversial linguists, Carol Chomsky’s linguistic views are not as infamous but just as influential. Her definitive works have been cited over 380 times by reading researchers. Charles Read’s spelling research influenced the views Carol Chomsky presented in that paper due to the “linguistic implications of young children’s original spelling systems” (Chomsky, 1971).

Lexical Spellings & Phonological Rules

Carol Chomsky referred to the spelling found in the dictionary as the lexical spelling of a word. Many students, and adults, wonder why we spell words the way that we do. If we are so concerned with phonics, shouldn’t we spell words the way that they sound? (This question was addressed again in the 1999 Templeton & Morris article Questions Teachers Ask About Spelling.)

When words maintain their conventional orthography as phonetic variations occur, such as anxious/anxiety, courage/courageous, and photograph/photography/photographic, it becomes easier for readers to identify the word and therefore meaning. By teaching students phonological rules to deal with variance like reduced vowels or Schwa the reader begins to ignore the “phonetic transcription” of the orthography and read without hesitation while maintaining meaning; this lead to the theory of automaticity and the study of word families.

The Epiphany of Write First, Read Later

Look at reading research before and after Write First, Read Later and you can practically see the light bulb clicking on in 1971 with the words, “Children ought to learn how to read by creating their own spellings for familiar words as a beginning.”

What Chomsky was encouraging a teacher of young children to do was to allow children to create their own spellings based on their current abilities without correction. We call this practice invented spelling today. As a student’s knowledge of letter-sound relationships grows, he will naturally revise and correct his own spellings. Chomsky urged, “let him trust his linguistic judgments, and expect of him only perceptions using the means available to him.”

Repeated Readings

What do you do with a student who can decode but lacks fluency? A common answer today would be repeated readings – one of Carol Chomsky’s early contributions to the reading field. “Memorization” of text is how Chomsky presented it in the 1976 article After Decoding: What?

Faced with the problem of good decoders but poor readers she found high interest reading materials at their instructional levels and then tape recorded readings of the materials. The students then listened to the recordings as they read along in the book themselves which took away any threat of failure. As the students shifted “focus from the individual word to connected discourse” they developed automaticity with the vocabulary that transferred to other non-“memorized” text.

After Chomsky: What?

As mentioned above, Carol Chomsky has been cited in over 380 works of reading research since the early 1970s. It seems then that merely calling her an influential fixture of the reading world doesn’t do her justice. Rather, let’s look at what came after Chomsky, what knowledge she, through her research, helped to create.

Shane Templeton relied on Chomsky’s work to support his work establishing the relationship between orthography and phonological knowledge in older students.

Repeated readings are now common practice in reading classrooms due to their effect on fluency development, but before Carol Chomsky asked the question After Decoding: What? teachers struggled to help students who decoded well but were poor readers. It was she who introduced the concept of repeated readings to develop unconscious word recognition to improve the reading rate and thus comprehension of students. LaBerge and Samuels would later cite Chomsky in their 1977 work which has become the cornerstone of the theory of automaticity.

Conclusion

Although sometimes overshadowed by her husband’s celebrity status in the world of linguistics, Carol Chomsky herself plays a vital role in the development of our current beliefs and understandings in the field of reading research. She has helped to develop and expose strategies that many teachers today would be lost without, and has influenced every major reading researcher of the past three decades.

References

Chomsky, C. (1970). Reading, writing, and phonology. Harvard Educational Review, XL, 287-309).

Chomsky, C. (1971). Write first, read later. Childhood Education, 47, 296-299.

Chomsky, C. (1976). After decoding: What? Language Arts, 53 (3), 288-296, 314.

The Way They Were (Are) by Samuel Hughes of the Pennsylvania Gazette

Internal Links

External Links

Interview with Carol Chomsky about her career and her marriage to Noam

George Branigan’s ode to Carol Chomsky’s “Core Ideas”

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