Students’ ability to decode proficiently may depend on how well they teach themselves. According to the extensively researched self-teaching hypothesis, as students decode words that are unfamiliar in print, they match letters to sounds in order to read the words and create representations of these words in memory. Reading past for paste, the student notes that it doesn’t make any sense in the sentence he is attempting to read: “Sam will paste the torn paper.” The student, who has a good grasp of short-vowel patterns and is learning final-e words, changes the pronunciation to paste. This begins the process of adding paste to his lexicon of known printed words but also reinforces the final-e marker pattern. After a number of similar encounters, the student begins reading final-e words correctly. Final-e words, such as paste, and the final-e pattern are being orthographically mapped into his mental lexicon. (Gunning, 2025, pp. 205-206).
As Share (1999), explains ‘‘…phonological recoding acts as a self-teaching device or built-in teacher enabling a child to independently develop the word-specific orthographic representations essential to skilled reading and spelling’’ (p. 96). In an intervention study in which kindergarten children in New Zealand made significant progress, the researchers explained the gains in terms of the self-teaching hypothesis.
The self-teaching hypothesis (Share, 1995) proposes that successful early word decoding attempts help young children establish orthographic representations in memory which they can then quickly access in future reading and spelling encounters. This provides them with an advantage for continued self-learning and helps to build their reading fluency and confidence” (Gillon et al., 2019).
Self-teaching works best in programs that provide thorough, systematic sequential instruction in a full range of foundational skills but provide ample opportunity for applying and extending skills in extensive reading.
The self-teaching mechanism can be put into play in the early stages of reading as soon as students have learned several consonant correspondences and one or two vowel correspondences so that they have the skill to decode some simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant: h-a-t) words. As students progress and move beyond CVC words, they develop a more sophisticated understanding of the spelling system. A flexible, ever-expanding tool, the self-teaching mechanism can be used over a lifetime. The key to its effective use is ample opportunities to apply it by reading text on the appropriate level during the various stages of learning to read. (Gunning, 2025, pp. 205-206)
Assuming Share’s self-teaching hypothesis is valid, how might a teacher implement it? Instruction in critical foundational decoding skill is still absolutely essential. However, the self-teaching hypothesis emphasizes the crucial role of coherent contextual reading. Students use context to check their responses. As Share notes, the effectiveness’ of using coherent, contextual print will depend, in part on “the quantity and quality of print exposure” (p. 168). Extensive reading is critical and may well be the missing piece in many intervention programs. However, the kind of reading matters. The reading must be on the appropriate level so that students’ understanding of the material being reading is sufficient so that they can use context to check their self-teaching decoding. As Share advises,
Too great a number of unfamiliar words will disrupt ongoing comprehension processes by siphoning off available cognitive resources (Perfetti,1985), but the occasional novel string [words unfamiliar in print] will provide relatively unintrusive self-teaching opportunities. It also follows that a judicious mix of visual and phonological recognition processes should, by and large, characterize the word recognition processes of readers at most ability levels,provided of course that reading material is pitched at the appropriate level of difficulty. In other words, the occasional self-teaching opportunity should constitute the “cutting edge” of reading acquisition for both unskilled and skilled readers alike, enabling a gradual, unobtrusive expansion of the orthographic lexicon. (Share, 1995, p. 158)
References
Gillon, G., McNeill, B., Scott, A., Denston, A., Wilson, L., Carson, K., & Macfarlane, A. (2019). A better start to literacy learning: Findings from a teacher-implemented intervention in children’s first year at
school. Reading and Writing, 32(8), 1989–2012, 2019.
Gunning, T. (2025). Creating literacy instruction for all students (11th ed). Hoboken, NJ: Pearson.
Share, D. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55, 151–218.