The Use of Context in Learning to Read

This chapter examines the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence in support of three views of the use of context in beginning reading. According to the first view the development of reading ability is largely a matter of learning to rely increasingly on the syntactic and semantic redundancies of language to generate hypotheses about the text yet to be encountered. In contrast, the second view holds that progress in reading can only occur if children avoid using context to identify words and instead concentrate on taking advantage of the systematic mappings between subcomponents of written and spoken words. The third view proposes that using the constraints of sentence context in conjunction with gradually improving word-level skills enables beginning readers to identify unfamiliar words and thus increase both their word-specific knowledge and knowledge of spellingsound patterns. The available evidence tends to support the third view, although more research is needed to determine whether phonological factors and sensitivity to context contribute differentially to the use of context in reading as a function of age.