Sound Literacy Connections

Yes! Yes! Yes! 💯 agree with this. The purpose of reading is to impart information to our brain 🧠, be that non fiction, or a narrative. There are many ways to do this. Reading with our 👀 eyes, ears, 🎧or fingers, in the case of those with a visual impairment. Individuals with dyslexia or DLD have brains that process language differently. Often with appropriate instruction they can learn to read, but it can be exhausting and take longer to digest the text. Please spread this message. It is a life goal to impart this truth and dissemble this antiquated, ableist belief. 💙

Audio books are not cheating!
Being read to or listening to books is just a different way of getting information into our brains.
There is so much controversy and snobbery about whether audio books can be considered ‘reading’ and 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐚𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝, but what about those of us that continue to struggle with reading, should we be denied the joy of books?
After all, aren’t both braille and talking-books, legitimate options for those with vision impairments?
Despite my dyslexia, I love to read and we need to make sure EVERY child can experience that joy.
Sometimes my brain is just too tired from being overloaded and I listen to an audiobook.
And sometimes school and uni can be too much and I need to re-listen to my lessons or textbooks.
I know there are still lots of people who think this isn’t reading or that it’s ‘cheating’ in some way.
Until somebody has been inside your brain, they don’t know how hard it can be.
To me, reading is reading, no matter how you get the information to your brain.
So don’t give up!
Until we are all taught to read the way our brains are wired, we should read in any way that works for us.
Keep reading and listening so you don’t miss out on the joy!
After all, wasn’t our very first literacy experience a read-aloud!

Image is from our favourite ❤️

Our orthographic conventions can be introduced in the early years of literacy acquisition. It is so important that students understand our system with clarity from the outset .

This is one of the most charming experiments in linguistics.

The “wug story” comes from a classic experiment by Jean Berko Gleason in 1958. She wanted to figure out whether children actually learn rules of language, or if they just memorize words.

She showed the creature in the image below to a child nd said:

“This is a wug.”

Then she showed two of them and asked:

“Now there are two of them. There are two…?”

The child didn’t hesitate:
“Wugs.”

The word wug is completely made up; the children had never heard it before. So when they correctly said “wugs,” they weren’t recalling memory. They were applying a rule, namely adding -s to make plurals in English

This showed that even young children have internalized grammatical rules, a huge point in debates about how language is acquired (especially in the era of Noam Chomsky and generative grammar).

This little experiment reveals something very fundamental about how we learn languages: we don’t just memorize language — we build it. Even children are quietly extracting rules, patterns, and structures from the chaos around them.