The Elegant Code and a Singularity
While this website relates to the full spiral of reading acquisition, it delivers a special focus upon the breakthrough rediscovery of letter-sound patterns as presented within the book, The Elegant Code. This discovery returned Modern English decoding from a deep to a shallow transparency—the work provides an exceptionally clear and the highly predictable redundancy of letters and letter combinations and their sounds.
The unexpected transparency became possible through identifying three highly transparent primary grains of English—singlets, di-trigraphs, and compounds. These grains represent one step for English decoding, but a giant leap in unraveling its letter-sound relationships for students learning to decode. This disentangling of English transparency wills to present and future generations efficient access to the reading goal: reading comprehension—an unending, impactful treasure.
Introducing Lou Gates
Dr. Louis (Lou) Gates, an educational consultant to schools and school districts, provides in-service opportunities that showcase the elegance of the English letter-sound system. He then guides teachers in the application of this elegant code to help dispel illiteracy, to assist dyslexic learners, and to support student comprehension and its subset, vocabulary. Dr. Gates served as a classroom teacher, reading specialist, principal, school superintendent, and as a member of the faculties of four colleges and universities. He wrote numerous research and curriculum-related articles, which he published in a number of journals, such as The Reading Teacher, Instructor, Annals of Dyslexia, Reading Horizons, and Reading Improvement. He also folds his research and new discoveries into the book, The Elegant Code, which he wrote as lead author with invaluable input from Dr. Alicia Roberts Frank.
What did America’s Reading Ambassador say about The Elegant Code?
Dr. Danny Brassell
Every School Should Have Copies of This Book for Teachers & Parents
I've worked in education for over 25 years and been astounded by how many mediocre reading programs are adopted by states at great cost to taxpayers. What I find superb about this book is that it is data-driven instead of "marketing-driven." Drs. Gates and Roberts Frank provide a clear path for educators desperate to help students who are learning to read. This may be the most important tool created for reading teachers in the past 50 years. EVERY school should have multiple copies available and provide trainings to its teachers in how to apply the principles that these authors provide in this seminal work.
FAQs about The Elegant Code
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How did three transparent grains of English bring elegance to decoding?The unexpected singularity of letter-sound relationships became possible through the discovery of just three letter-sound grains—(1) singlets—single vowels and single consonants; (2) di-trigraphs—vowel digraphs (see, sea, cee) and consonant di-trigraphs (chip, ship, whip); and (3) simple compounds—semaphores and phonograms compounded from combining at least one vowel and one consonant singlet or di-trigraph (compound semaphores: fake, gym, duty; compound phonograms: fall, sigh, cold). These grains also folded into a transparent singularity generalization as shown in the box below.
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How could the elegant transparency of English hide in plain sight for a millennium?Language historians infer that Old English held a high letter-sound transparency. This consisted of the three primary decoding grains. In 1066, the Normans Invaded England and inserted more complex compounds into Middle English. In particular, these Norman compounds—heavily seasoned from Latin and Greek origins—became so intertwined with the singlets, di-trigraphs, and simple compounds as to blur the transparency of Modern English. The separation and study of the three decoding grains reintroduced to English to an elegant transparency. In brief, the research teased out the letter-sound redundancy of the three grains within a body of 16,928 words. These included a shallow transparency within 84,896 of 87,240 elements—the singlets and letter combinations to their sounds within the word corpus—for 97 percent transparency. In other words, the discovery of this redundancy of the three grains brought decoding text-to-speech transparency for students in much the same manner that it does for computers—both discoveries leveraged the Markov chains to break the code.
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How can teachers assist their students as they pack their letterboxes with words and pattern elements that showcase the elegant code?As attached, the three grains of English transparency mesh into just six exemplar wordlists. The first set includes four monosyllabic model wordlists for primary-level decoding; the second set contains two multisyllabic exemplary lists that leads to the entry level of adult decoding. With proper teacher guidance, students will begin to pack whole words and these model word elements into their brains’ “letterboxes” (visual word form area). These model letter-sound patterns, in particular, ease the next crucial step of applying the exemplars to decoding text-to-speech with automaticity.
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How can teachers help teach their students apply the elegant grains to connected text with decoding automaticity?We attached suggested book titles and leveled passages. Use these and similar resources to assist students as they practice automaticity. This practice begins with a list of decodable readers and spirals to leveled books and passages at the beginning adult decoding level—the curtain call for most decoding programs. Much like vocalists who practice musical scales and then apply the scales to singing from musical scores, students pack decoding scales—words, and particularly words with model letter patterns—into their brains’ letterboxes. Once packed, the words ease learning to decode with automaticity in connected text. The attachments also provide guidance for applying repeated reading to promote students’ automaticity as needed.
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Science often builds upon elegant models, does a reading model exist that showcases this new science of decoding?As with other transparent languages, the shallow transparency of English moves the decoding aspect of reading models away from a product emphasis to a spiraling focus. Deeper, a research team led by Bettina Muller found that “Children who learn to read a consistent language, such as German, Dutch, or Finnish, usually develop from a non-reader to an accurate decoder within the first school year.” To model this shift to a shallow transparency, we included attachments to our website that introduce DAC’s Spiraling Model of Reading with its helix of reading variables—Decoding (D), Automaticity (A), and Comprehension (C). Simplified, these variables melt into the algorithm R = D🡪A🡪C; this we further reduced to the mnemonic DAC reads. We also define each variable within The Elegant Code (pp. 148-152).
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Where can I learn more about the elegant transparency of English?The accompanying resources emphasize the elegant transparency of English and how, after a thousand years, this discovery reelevated Modern English to its original shallow transparency that Old English likely showcased.
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How can I learn more about applying DAC’s Spiraling Reading Model?You may begin to learn about DAC’s Spiraling Reading Model through reading the book, The Elegant Code. Order this book by clicking on the following link: The Elegant Code.
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How do we schedule an Elegant Code presentation?Use the following email for your inquiries and to schedule a presentation, which we will tailor-make to meet the requests and needs of your team: TheElegantCode@gmail.com
The DAC Reading Model
According to a team led by Bettina Muller, “children who learn to read a consistent language (such as German, Dutch, or Finnish) usually develop from a non-reader to an accurate decoder within the first school year.” Similarly, neuroscientist Daniel Willingham, who specializing in reading, noted, “Finnish, Spanish, and Italian, for example, are very consistent, with a near one-to-one mapping between letters and speech sounds and very few exception words. Kids learn to decode quite quickly in those countries. In a matter of months, almost all children can read aloud one- or two-syllable words with few errors.” In short, the decoding prominence shifts between deep verses shallow languages. Thus, the surprising emergence of the decoding elegance within the English code led us to create the reading model as shown within the accompanying image. As transparent languages typify, this model emphasizes the flow from Decoding through Automaticity to Comprehension—easily remembered with the following mnemonic: The DAC Reading Model. We weave our DAC model throughout our book, The Elegant Code, with a capstone summary on pages 148-150.
