Context Clues Gone Bad

My two cents for today ---

As I think back, I remember that when I taught my brother and two sisters how to read I used context as an aid in reading. But my use of context was connected with phonics and was only to assist a reader who was close with the sounding out, but just not there yet, particularly when there might be alternate ways to say the word. At that point, it sometimes makes sense to think about context to get to the right sounding out. And the reader's reasonable expectation of being correct in such a case, in my opinion, should be very high. So, I think context should play a part, including the rest of the words in the sentence but only when phonics rules have been applied first and only when the reader is having a lot of trouble.

But using the context, such as the first letter of the word, the ending sound, the relative length of the word, the text in the rest of the sentence, and pictures, if available, seems almost destined to have an exponentially high error rate. For instance, one time, my daughter read biting as bringing. Both start with b, and both end in "ing." And, I don't remember the sentence, but bringing made perfect sense to my daughter as a correct word. If she had applied phonics, then bringing would not even be considered as an option. She might have instead read the word as bitting, and then realized her mistake by the fact that it's not a word she knows (not a word at all) and it doesn't fit in with the story, but biting which sounds close would have fit into the story and is the only other alternative because there's only two possibilities for the word if you know phonics. Further still, if you knew that biting was made from bite with the e removed and ing added, your level of certainty would be 100%.

So, I remember saying back all those years ago, "Does that make sense" when a sibling had sounded out a word incorrectly and did not make a correction. I have resisted that statement with my daughter, but it does make sense to me to make the statement (no pun intended) but only judiciously. But as to the other context clues used by proponents of whole language, such as using the first letter, a picture and even the last sounds of a word (while ignoring everything in the middle) are not appropriate.