BONNYVILLE - A teenager in Bonnyville is studying how people learn to read as part of her project for the Lakeland Regional Science Fair – and she needs more volunteers.
“I’m starting this really early because I need the time to get the study all worked out,” said 16-year-old Kathryn Graham.
Graham noticed some of her peers had trouble with reading certain words in an acting course.
“Which was really surprising to me, since I’ve been reading since I was four, I think,” said Graham.
She started researching how reading is taught, and learned there are three main methods used - phonics, sight words, and language experience.
Phonics assigns sounds to symbols, and the reader sounds out the words. Sight words assign a meaning to the word, and the reader commits the vocabulary to memory. With language experience, the reader works with transcribing whole words and sentences rather than letters and parts of words.
“So, I wanted to look in to all the different ways of teaching kids how to read, especially since over the last few decades or so it’s a ping pong between all these different methods,” said Graham.
So, she invented an alternate way of writing English using symbols instead of the Latin alphabet.
“I thought that would be the best way to replicate the situation, which kids first learn English,” said Graham.
She sorts her adult volunteers into three groups, “and then there are short lessons and some assignments afterwards to test the effectiveness of each method compared to the others.”
Graham said she plans to run her study from Sept. 15 through Dec. 15, with participants spending about an hour a week for eight weeks on the project. She has eight mini-lessons and assignments planned and will wrap up with a reading comprehension test given to all the participants to see if one method outshines the others for how well the participants learn.
Asked how she became interested in language and reading as a science to be studied, Graham said she’s always really liked language.
“I go to a French school, meaning I'm already surrounded by a bunch of people who speak another language. And then I've always been interested in science, and a lot of scientific words come from Latin,” said Graham, who approached her parents about learning Latin during the pandemic and expects to have finished the last book in the textbook series she is using by the end of this school year.
“And then, just in 2023 I decided to start learning Japanese because I really like the music, and my mom's from South Africa, so I also have Afrikaans,” said Graham.
Despite her passion for language and translation, Graham said she expects to study medicine when she goes to post-secondary, most likely pathology or lab medicine.
People interested in volunteering to participate in Graham’s study can contact her through her mother, Ademine at 780-573-7446 or [email protected].
