If it were
not for the presence of the items themselves or the smaller explanatory labels
in English, I would not know to what these words referred. Nevertheless, I
could read them all aloud easily (if not necessarily pronounced totally correctly),
as could most young fluent readers who have been taught the alphabetic
principle of letter sound correspondence, also known as phonics. In fact,
walking through IKEA and reading the signs is a bit like taking the sort of reading
test we give young children to find out if they are making good progress in the
basics of learning to read.
Such tests
of ‘nonwords’, words that are phonically regular but have no meaning in English
like ‘snitsig’ or ‘gorm’, can be very useful. They help to tell us how well children
are able to decode unfamiliar words that they have not learned by sight as a
result of frequent repetition. If we were to use actual English words that are
phonically regular (like ‘tractor’, ‘comment’ or ‘chapter’) we could not be
sure that children were using phonic decoding skills; they may have memorised them
as whole ‘sight words’ from reading books.
Some
educators get hot under the collar about the use of nonword tests. They argue
that reading is about deriving meaning from the written word and since nonwords,
by definition, have no meaning, testing nonwords has to be a totally pointless
exercise. This argument misses the point about the use of nonword tests. I
don’t think anyone would claim that reading is only about accurate decoding
using phonics but knowledge of the alphabetic principle is a necessary (although
not, of course, sufficient) precondition for reading for meaning. If children
do not understand the words they are reading, they may indeed be said to be
merely ‘barking at print’. But if they cannot decode the words on the page in
the first place, they have no chance of utilising their existing knowledge of
word meanings
By using IKEA
type tests of meaningless nonwords, we can help to determine whether children
are progressing well in the important precondition of being able to decode
words. If they are, when they encounter unfamiliar words in future, they will
be able to use their phonic skills to sound out the word, relate it to a word
already in their spoken vocabulary and, hence, derive its meaning. Of course,
we also need to assess other aspects of a child’s reading skill such as reading
fluency and, especially, reading comprehension per se. But it would be a mistake to dismiss nonword tests as
irrelevant in the quest for meaning. Something to think about the next time you
go past the sniglar and the mammut in your quest to find that elusive IKEA exit.
