The Dinosaur in the Room: Why Kids Can Read "Dinosaur" But Skip "the"
Have you ever watched a child read and noticed something puzzling? He might successfully sound out a long, complex word like "dinosaur" or "excavator," only to stumble over, misread, or completely skip a tiny, simple word like "the," "an," or "for" in the very same sentence.
It’s a common phenomenon that can leave parents baffled. How can a child read the big words but miss the small ones? The answer is fascinating, and it reveals a deep truth about what reading really is—and exposes a fundamental flaw in many popular reading instruction methods. At Eulexia Tutoring, we believe understanding this puzzle is key to helping your child become a truly proficient reader.
Two Kinds of Words: Content vs. Function
To understand this phenomenon, we first need to recognize that not all words are created equal. English words can be roughly divided into two categories:
Lexical Words (or Content Words): These are the words that carry the primary meaning of a sentence. They include nouns (dinosaur, pizza), verbs (jump, sing), and adjectives (happy, green). They are easy to visualize and define. You can draw a picture of a dinosaur.
Functional Words: These are the grammatical glue of our language. They include conjunctions (and, but), prepositions (of, from, with), articles (a, the), and many common verbs (is, was, are). You cannot draw a picture of "of" or "was." These words have a grammatical function, but no inherent, concrete meaning on their own.
The Flaw in "Meaning-First" Instruction
Now, consider how many children are taught to read. Many popular approaches, from the refuted "whole language" philosophy to methods like "embedded phonics" and "balanced literacy," are predicated on a core idea: that reading is, from the very beginning, an act of getting meaning from print. Children are often taught to use context, pictures, and their sense of what "would make sense" to predict and identify words.
This entire approach is built on the assumption that words are inextricably linked to meaning. And this is precisely where the problem of functional words arises.
The "Functional Word Blindness" Phenomenon
What happens when a child, trained to read by looking for meaning, encounters a word that is essentially meaningless on its own?
The guessing strategy breaks down. There is no picture cue for "from." There is no strong contextual clue for "was." These words are so common and their function so grammatical that they become almost invisible to a child who is hunting for meaning-bearing, lexical words.
The result is a perplexing phenomenon you could call "functional word blindness." The child’s brain, trained to prioritize meaning, skips right over these small, high-frequency words because they don’t offer the semantic payoff he has been taught to look for. Even if a word like "for" or "the" is phonetically regular and simple to decode, it seemingly gets ignored. The child reads "dinosaur," a meaningful word, but skips "was," a meaningless one.
Why This Is More Than Just an Interesting Quirk
Skipping or misreading these small but mighty functional words has devastating consequences for comprehension. These words govern the relationships between the content words in a sentence. Missing a "not" reverses a sentence's meaning entirely. Reading "from" as "for" or "the" as "a" can subtly but significantly alter the information being conveyed.
This is why a child who relies on guessing can seem to "read" a passage but be unable to accurately tell you what it said. His brain has skimmed for the big, meaningful "dinosaur" words while ignoring the small, functional words that provided the essential structure and logic.
The Solution: Decoding is Ambivalent to Meaning
This phenomenon powerfully illustrates why a systematic, explicit phonics approach is so critical. A child taught to decode properly learns a strategy that works for all words, regardless of their meaning or function.
The process of decoding the word "was" involves mapping the sounds /w/ /ŭ/ /z/ to the letters w-a-s. It is a technical skill. The word's lack of concrete meaning is completely irrelevant to the act of decoding it. A child with strong phonics skills reads "dinosaur" and "was" using the exact same reliable strategy: he analyzes the letters and links them to sounds.
Conclusion: Trusting the Code Over the Context
The puzzle of the skipped functional words isn't a puzzle at all; it's a direct result of instruction that mistakenly prioritizes meaning over the mastery of the alphabetic code. While the debate over instructional methods continues in some circles, the evidence remains clear. By providing children with the tools to decode any and all words, we empower them to read with precision and accuracy. Only after achieving automaticity in decoding can the minds fully attend to the words and their meanings and begin to understand the full and subtle meaning of the texts before them.