Reading skills acquisition
Encyclopedia
Learning to read is the process of acquiring the skill
s necessary for reading
; that is, the ability to acquire meaning from print. Learning to read is paradoxical in some ways. For an adult who is a fairly good reader, reading seems like a simple, effortless and automatic skill but the process builds on cognitive, linguistic, and social skills developed in the years before reading typically begins .
. Children make some use of all the material that they are presented with, including every perception
, concept
and word
that they come in contact with . The amount of time that a child spends together with his parents or other important caregivers while listening to them read is a good predictor of the level of reading that he will attain later in life . As a child sits with her parent, looking at pictures and listening to stories, she will slowly learn that all the different lines on each page make different symbols and then that together these symbols refer to words . Taking time to read to children is the most important precursor to a child’s development
of reading . Preschool-aged children with limited exposure to books and reading in their home, including limited experience of being read to, are at risk of reading difficulties . For example, these children tend to have less exposure to literary phrases, such as "Once upon a time" , and have smaller vocabularies , both factors that affect the ability to read by limiting comprehension of text.
Thus, the ideal process of what is called emergent or early literacy begins in the relationship between hearing written language
and feeling loved. The positive feeling that arises from spending time with books in a loving context provides a strong foundation and intrinsic motivation
for the long and cognitively challenging process of learning to read . However, reading to children and ensuring exposure to many books is not enough to prepare them for reading . Another critical skill is the ability to name letters or characters.
, happens when a young child sits and listens to someone read to them. A major insight from this stage of reading is that reading just never happens to anyone. Emerging reading takes many years of language experience, along with the increase of both conceptual and social development. Showing that this process starts early in a child's life is the fact that children typically produce their first few words before their first birthday. This emerging pre-reader stage usually lasts for the first five years of a child's life .
that actually took our ancestors thousands of years to discover, but now a child has to figure this process out in only a few short years. Most children know that the words on a page in a book
mean something, but do not readily understand how the letters code the meaning. They know that these words are made of the sounds of their particular language
, and that letters convey these sounds. Novice readers learn to hear and manipulate the smaller sounds into syllables and words. If a child is able to master this skill, called phonological awareness
, it is one of the best predictors of a child's success in learning to read. One way that you can teach children to become more aware of sounds within words is through such things as nursery rhymes that enhance the child's ability to hear and divide the structure of words. Another way to teach a child to read is through little "games" in which the sounds in word are either clapped, written or danced to a beat. A novice reader will also memorize the most common letter patterns in their own language and most of the frequent words that will not necessarily follow the phonological rules such as in English the words "have" and "who". It is in this stage that children will develop a vocabulary of words that is between 2,500 to 5,000 words. The child's vocabulary continues to grow as they enter elementary school, since they will continue to learn new words at a rate of about seven words per day. This shows that at this stage in reading the best piece of advice is to just practice, practice, practice or read, read more, and read again.
s and in its place the sounds of a smoother, more confident reader. In this phase of learning to read, the reader adds at least 3,000 words to what they can decode. This means for example in the English language, that readers need to now learn the variations of the vowel-based rhyme
s and vowel
pairs. It is essential that during this stage if a reader is going to become a fluent reader that they acquire a sufficient repertoire of the letter-patterns and vowel-pairs that help to make up words that go beyond the basic level. The faster a child can see that the word "together" is "to-get-her", the faster the reader will become a more fluent reader.
As children move forward with their reading skills, they learn a great deal about what is really inside a word
; the stem, roots, prefixes and suffixes that make up morphemes of the language
. By this stage, the children already know about the common bound morphemes such as "s" and "ed" because these are attached to many words. Decoding readers become exposed to many types of morphemes such as prefixes and suffixes and it is when they learn to read these as "sight chunks" that their reading and their understanding will speed up dramatically . Being able to read at a fluent level is not only about how fast a child can read, but it is matter of being able to to utilize all the special knowledge that they have about a word, its letters, letter patterns, meanings, grammatical functions, roots, and endings fast enough that they have time to think and comprehend what they are seeing . The point of becoming a fluent reader is to really read and understand what had just been read. Decoding readers are young and are just beginning to understand and learn how to use their expanding knowledge of language and their growing powers of inference to figure out what they are really reading .
It is also in the decoding phase that the child will learn to go beyond what is not said in writing in the story to get the underlining meaning of what the story is really about . In the decoding stage a child also learns that if they do not understand a sentence or paragraph, that they may need to re-read it a second or third time to fully understand it. Knowing when a text needs to be re-read is a very important skill and can improve comprehension greatly .
understands everything that he or she is reading . As the content of what they are able to read becomes more demanding, good readers will develop knowledge of figurative language and irony
which helps them to discover new meanings in the text. This will assist them to understand the meaning of what they are reading beyond what is written on the page. While learning to read, one of the most powerful moments is when fluent comprehending readers learn to enter into the lives of imagined heroes and heroines . Examples of books where these imagined heroes and heroines could be found in include Harry Potter
, Lord of the Rings, Huckleberry Finn
. The comprehension process grows while reading books like these, where children learn how to connect prior knowledge, predict good or bad consequences, draw inferences from every danger-filled corner, monitor gaps in their understanding, and interpret how each new clue, revelation, or added piece of knowledge changes what they know . In learning these new skills, they learn to unpeel the layers of meaning in a word
, a phrase
or a thought
.
There are two ways in which increasing fluency can be supported. They include explicit instruction in comprehension by a child's teacher and the child's own desire to read . Engaging in conversation about what they are reading allows the beginning reader to ask critical questions, facilitating a better understanding of the central meaning.
At the end of this stage, before the reader becomes an expert reader, many processes are starting to become automatic. This increasing automaticity frees up cognitive resources so that the reader can reflect on meaning. With the decoding process almost automatic by this point, the brain learns to integrate more metaphorical, inferential, analogical, background and experiential knowledge
with every newly won millisecond. This stage in learning to read often will last until early adulthood .
's thinking had left them . An example of this is reading the Bible
. Throughout a person's life when they read the Bible
, they will have a new understanding of what it is saying. This is the case for any book that an expert reader reads. They can have one way of understanding it when they read it when they are twenty-five, and when they go and reread it again at the age of forty, they will bring new and different life experiences to the book and therefore will have a different understanding to what the author is trying to say then they had before. That is what the expert reader stage is about is that knowing that life experiences will affect the way that you view what you read, whether that is because you have more intellectual knowledge or if because you have experienced great loss, knowing that these all affect the way that a person views the text in front of them is crucial for this stage.
and Whole Language
within which there are subtypes Synthetic Phonics
and Sight word
respectively. Each method is employed at differing rates depending on the country and the specific school division. Some educators are beginning to use the two methods in conjunction to maximize the benefits of both methods.
Phonics
is a teaching method that stresses character-sound correspondences, specific rules and their use in reading and spelling. This helps beginning readers understand how characters are linked to sounds (phonemes), patterns of letter-sound correspondences and spelling in English, and how to apply this knowledge when they read to sound out words. Phonics teachers present the spellings for different sounds in a specific order, introducing the simplest (or most useful) patterns early on; these patterns are then practiced. A disadvantage to phonics is that in some languages like English, there is a complex letter-sound correspondence and this causes confusion for beginning readers.
Traditional phonics instruction has marked benefits. Early reading often involves significant expansion of a child's mental lexicon, which includes all the words the child has been exposed to and their meanings. By focusing on the principle of linking specific sounds and characters, the child has the ability to recognize new words and derive meaning from them. Being able to adapt what they know about language to new words they experience is crucial to expanding their mental lexicon; this allows for productive reading that is the ability to read new words. It also produces higher achievement for beginning readers and the difference is the greatest for those at risk of failing to learn to read. While some children are able to infer these rules on their own, most need explicit instructions on phonics rules. Overall, children who are directly taught phonics are better at reading, spelling and comprehension.
Traditional phonics instruction can also have the unintended consequence of promoting dysfluency. The difficulty lies in the coarticulated
nature of speech; speech sounds are overlapping, while print is discrete and sequential. This can be appreciated if one shapes the mouth in position to begin to produce the word cat compared to the word cot. The initial hard c is colored by the subsequent vowel even before speech begins, i.e., the smiling position as one prepares to say cat, and the more limp position as one prepares to say cot. As early readers work from left to right, beginning with the onset consonant, they typically do not yet know the vowel with which it must be coarticulated. The vowel sound itself cannot be known until the remaining rime (the portion of the syllable beginning with the vowel and extending to its end: e.g. ight in right) is fully encountered. For these reasons, teaching reading through orientation to rime first and then adding the onset (ought-bought) can be helpful in promoting fluency through supporting the phonological problems of coarticulation. Emphasis on the rime also supports the development of an intuitive, and therefore more fluent, awareness of orthographic patterns.
Synthetic Phonics
is a method that is endorsed by the governments of The United Kingdom , Australia and Scotland . It also has considerable support in the U.S.A and Canada . In Synthetic Phonics, the student first learns to say the sounds (phonemes) that are associated with the character(graphemes) in isolation first before the sounds are "synthesized" or blended together to make a word. (e.g. /a/, /k/, /t/.) Then, when reading a word, he learns to say each sound in the word (e.g. /k/ - /a/ - /t/); and to "blend" these sounds into a pronunciation of the word (e.g. "cat").
Synthetic phonics does not teach whole words as shapes; and does not involve guessing at words from context, picture and initial letter clues.
There are other types of phonics, such as Analytical phonics
, that differ in their approach based on how a "chunk" within the word is defined (i.e. individual phonemes, syllables, or non-blended units).
Whole Language
is widely used in the U.S.A. and Canada. It is a reading and learning method that trains students to focus on words, sentences and paragraphs as a whole rather than letters. This method aims to make reading fun and keep children motivated, which is beneficial because learning to read depends heavily on what the student does and not the teacher. While the child is typically very engaged in this method, many children struggle to infer the specific rules of the language on their own, which causes the child's comprehension and spelling to suffer in the end.
One subtype is Sight word
, which is sometimes called the "look-say" method. A sight vocabulary of 50-100 words is first memorized and subsequent words are learned as wholes, often by seeing them used repeatedly in the context of a story. It tells children to find meaning by guessing, by recognizing whole words they have memorized, by looking at the pictures, and by creating a context based on surrounding words. It encourages students to "construct their own meaning" (with guidance from peers and facilitator of consensus process). It relies heavily on the child's experience with language as a whole.
The following are some features of the whole language philosophy:
Which style use in teaching reading has divided educators for years. It is now known that using the two approaches together is more powerful than either program alone. The technical skills learned through phonics is important for many children when it comes to learning to read, spell, and general language comprehension but the engagement of children with language in the whole-language style is also important to keep the children motivated and excited to learn.
(NRP) in 2000, the skills required for proficient reading are phonemic awareness
, fluency
, vocabulary
, and text comprehension
. More generally, proficient reading does not necessarily require phonemic awareness
, as in Latin Alphabets, but an awareness of the individual parts of speech, which may also include the whole word (as in Chinese characters) or syllables (as in Japanese) as well as others depending on the writing system being employed. Other important skills are: rapid automatized naming
(RAN), a general understanding of the Orthography
of the language, and practice.
is defined as brain-based type of learning disability that specifically impairs a person's ability to read . These individuals typically read at levels significantly lower than expected despite having normal intelligence . Although the disorder varies from person to person, common characteristics among people with dyslexia are difficulty with spelling, phonological processing (the manipulation of sounds), and/or rapid visual-verbal responding . In adults, dyslexia usually occurs after a brain injury
or in the context of dementia
. It can also be inherited in some families, and recent studies have identified a number of genes that may predispose an individual to developing dyslexia."
Skill
A skill is the learned capacity to carry out pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills...
s necessary for reading
Reading (process)
Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas...
; that is, the ability to acquire meaning from print. Learning to read is paradoxical in some ways. For an adult who is a fairly good reader, reading seems like a simple, effortless and automatic skill but the process builds on cognitive, linguistic, and social skills developed in the years before reading typically begins .
Writing systems
Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that one must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to comprehend the text. Once established, writing systems on the whole change more slowly than their spoken counterparts, and often preserve features and expressions which are no longer current in the spoken language. The great benefit of writing systems is their ability to maintain a persistent record of information expressed in a language, which can be retrieved independently of the initial act of formulation. An understanding of the writing system being employed in a text, and therefore understanding the spoken language associated with it, is critical to being able to read a text.Acquiring language
A child's ability to learn to read begins early. This is also known as reading readinessReading readiness
Reading readiness has been defined as the point at which a person is ready to learn to read and the time during which a person transitions from being a non-reader into a reader. Other terms for reading readiness include early literacy and emergent reading....
. Children make some use of all the material that they are presented with, including every perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
, concept
Concept
The word concept is used in ordinary language as well as in almost all academic disciplines. Particularly in philosophy, psychology and cognitive sciences the term is much used and much discussed. WordNet defines concept: "conception, construct ". However, the meaning of the term concept is much...
and word
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
that they come in contact with . The amount of time that a child spends together with his parents or other important caregivers while listening to them read is a good predictor of the level of reading that he will attain later in life . As a child sits with her parent, looking at pictures and listening to stories, she will slowly learn that all the different lines on each page make different symbols and then that together these symbols refer to words . Taking time to read to children is the most important precursor to a child’s development
Development
-Land use:*Green development, a concept that includes consideration of community-wide or regional environmental implications*Land development, altering the landscape in any number of ways...
of reading . Preschool-aged children with limited exposure to books and reading in their home, including limited experience of being read to, are at risk of reading difficulties . For example, these children tend to have less exposure to literary phrases, such as "Once upon a time" , and have smaller vocabularies , both factors that affect the ability to read by limiting comprehension of text.
Thus, the ideal process of what is called emergent or early literacy begins in the relationship between hearing written language
Written language
A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will instinctively learn or create spoken or gestural languages....
and feeling loved. The positive feeling that arises from spending time with books in a loving context provides a strong foundation and intrinsic motivation
Motivation
Motivation is the driving force by which humans achieve their goals. Motivation is said to be intrinsic or extrinsic. The term is generally used for humans but it can also be used to describe the causes for animal behavior as well. This article refers to human motivation...
for the long and cognitively challenging process of learning to read . However, reading to children and ensuring exposure to many books is not enough to prepare them for reading . Another critical skill is the ability to name letters or characters.
Reading Development
There are five stages of reading development. They are the emerging pre-reader, novice reader, decoding reader, fluent comprehending reader, and the expert reader. It is normal that children will move through these different stages at different rates.Emerging pre-reader
The emerging pre-reader stage, also known as reading readinessReading readiness
Reading readiness has been defined as the point at which a person is ready to learn to read and the time during which a person transitions from being a non-reader into a reader. Other terms for reading readiness include early literacy and emergent reading....
, happens when a young child sits and listens to someone read to them. A major insight from this stage of reading is that reading just never happens to anyone. Emerging reading takes many years of language experience, along with the increase of both conceptual and social development. Showing that this process starts early in a child's life is the fact that children typically produce their first few words before their first birthday. This emerging pre-reader stage usually lasts for the first five years of a child's life .
Novice Reader
The next step in the learning to read process is the novice reading stage also known as selective association . This begins with the child learning to decode print and understanding the meaning of what has been decoded. To do this, the child must first figure out the Alphabetic principleAlphabetic principle
According to the alphabetic principle, letters and combinations of letters are the symbols used to represent the speech sounds of a language based on systematic and predictable relationships between written letters, symbols, and spoken words...
that actually took our ancestors thousands of years to discover, but now a child has to figure this process out in only a few short years. Most children know that the words on a page in a book
Book
A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
mean something, but do not readily understand how the letters code the meaning. They know that these words are made of the sounds of their particular language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
, and that letters convey these sounds. Novice readers learn to hear and manipulate the smaller sounds into syllables and words. If a child is able to master this skill, called phonological awareness
Phonological awareness
Phonological awareness refers to an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of spoken words. Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability and has, therefore, been the focus of much research.- Overview :Phonological...
, it is one of the best predictors of a child's success in learning to read. One way that you can teach children to become more aware of sounds within words is through such things as nursery rhymes that enhance the child's ability to hear and divide the structure of words. Another way to teach a child to read is through little "games" in which the sounds in word are either clapped, written or danced to a beat. A novice reader will also memorize the most common letter patterns in their own language and most of the frequent words that will not necessarily follow the phonological rules such as in English the words "have" and "who". It is in this stage that children will develop a vocabulary of words that is between 2,500 to 5,000 words. The child's vocabulary continues to grow as they enter elementary school, since they will continue to learn new words at a rate of about seven words per day. This shows that at this stage in reading the best piece of advice is to just practice, practice, practice or read, read more, and read again.
Decoding Reader
The transition from the novice reader stage to the decoding stage is marked by the absence of painful pronunciationPronunciation
Pronunciation refers to the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect....
s and in its place the sounds of a smoother, more confident reader. In this phase of learning to read, the reader adds at least 3,000 words to what they can decode. This means for example in the English language, that readers need to now learn the variations of the vowel-based rhyme
Rhyme
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...
s and vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
pairs. It is essential that during this stage if a reader is going to become a fluent reader that they acquire a sufficient repertoire of the letter-patterns and vowel-pairs that help to make up words that go beyond the basic level. The faster a child can see that the word "together" is "to-get-her", the faster the reader will become a more fluent reader.
As children move forward with their reading skills, they learn a great deal about what is really inside a word
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
; the stem, roots, prefixes and suffixes that make up morphemes of the language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
. By this stage, the children already know about the common bound morphemes such as "s" and "ed" because these are attached to many words. Decoding readers become exposed to many types of morphemes such as prefixes and suffixes and it is when they learn to read these as "sight chunks" that their reading and their understanding will speed up dramatically . Being able to read at a fluent level is not only about how fast a child can read, but it is matter of being able to to utilize all the special knowledge that they have about a word, its letters, letter patterns, meanings, grammatical functions, roots, and endings fast enough that they have time to think and comprehend what they are seeing . The point of becoming a fluent reader is to really read and understand what had just been read. Decoding readers are young and are just beginning to understand and learn how to use their expanding knowledge of language and their growing powers of inference to figure out what they are really reading .
It is also in the decoding phase that the child will learn to go beyond what is not said in writing in the story to get the underlining meaning of what the story is really about . In the decoding stage a child also learns that if they do not understand a sentence or paragraph, that they may need to re-read it a second or third time to fully understand it. Knowing when a text needs to be re-read is a very important skill and can improve comprehension greatly .
Fluent, Comprehending Reader
The next stage in reading development is the fluent, comprehending reader stage, in which children shift from learning to read, to reading to learn. In this stage the reader builds up a substantial background of knowledge of spelling . It is during this time in a reader's development that teachers and parents can be tricked by fluent-sounding reading into thinking that a childChild
Biologically, a child is generally a human between the stages of birth and puberty. Some vernacular definitions of a child include the fetus, as being an unborn child. The legal definition of "child" generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority...
understands everything that he or she is reading . As the content of what they are able to read becomes more demanding, good readers will develop knowledge of figurative language and irony
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
which helps them to discover new meanings in the text. This will assist them to understand the meaning of what they are reading beyond what is written on the page. While learning to read, one of the most powerful moments is when fluent comprehending readers learn to enter into the lives of imagined heroes and heroines . Examples of books where these imagined heroes and heroines could be found in include Harry Potter
Harry Potter
Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by the British author J. K. Rowling. The books chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter and his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry...
, Lord of the Rings, Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry Finn
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic Mark Twain novel.Huckleberry Finn may also refer to:*Huckleberry Finn , a fictional character in the Adventures of Tom Sawyer...
. The comprehension process grows while reading books like these, where children learn how to connect prior knowledge, predict good or bad consequences, draw inferences from every danger-filled corner, monitor gaps in their understanding, and interpret how each new clue, revelation, or added piece of knowledge changes what they know . In learning these new skills, they learn to unpeel the layers of meaning in a word
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
, a phrase
Phrase
In everyday speech, a phrase may refer to any group of words. In linguistics, a phrase is a group of words which form a constituent and so function as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence. A phrase is lower on the grammatical hierarchy than a clause....
or a thought
Thought
"Thought" generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination...
.
There are two ways in which increasing fluency can be supported. They include explicit instruction in comprehension by a child's teacher and the child's own desire to read . Engaging in conversation about what they are reading allows the beginning reader to ask critical questions, facilitating a better understanding of the central meaning.
At the end of this stage, before the reader becomes an expert reader, many processes are starting to become automatic. This increasing automaticity frees up cognitive resources so that the reader can reflect on meaning. With the decoding process almost automatic by this point, the brain learns to integrate more metaphorical, inferential, analogical, background and experiential knowledge
Experiential knowledge
Experiential knowledge is knowledge gained through experience as opposed to a priori knowledge. In the philosophy of mind, the phrase often refers to knowledge that can only be acquired through experience, such as, for example, the knowledge of what it is like to see colours, which could not be...
with every newly won millisecond. This stage in learning to read often will last until early adulthood .
Expert Reader
The final stage in learning to read, is the expert stage. When a reader is at this stage of reading, it will usually only take them one half second to read almost any word . The degree to which expert reading will change over the course of an adults life depends on what a person reads and how much they read . As a person matures, they bring to the text not all the cognitive experiences described in the time line for words, but also the impact of the life experiences . It is through a persons' interpretative response to what they have read, that it has a depth that will often take them in a new direction from where the authorAuthor
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
's thinking had left them . An example of this is reading the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
. Throughout a person's life when they read the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
, they will have a new understanding of what it is saying. This is the case for any book that an expert reader reads. They can have one way of understanding it when they read it when they are twenty-five, and when they go and reread it again at the age of forty, they will bring new and different life experiences to the book and therefore will have a different understanding to what the author is trying to say then they had before. That is what the expert reader stage is about is that knowing that life experiences will affect the way that you view what you read, whether that is because you have more intellectual knowledge or if because you have experienced great loss, knowing that these all affect the way that a person views the text in front of them is crucial for this stage.
Methods of teaching reading
Educators have argued for years about which method is best to teach reading to children. There are two major methods PhonicsPhonics
Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations...
and Whole Language
Whole language
Whole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from whole language...
within which there are subtypes Synthetic Phonics
Synthetic phonics
Synthetic phonics is a method of teaching reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words...
and Sight word
Sight word
A sight word is any word that is known by a reader automatically. Sight words are the basis behind the whole-word approach to reading education. Some have suggested that sight words and the whole-word approach to reading are a significant teaching technique considering 65% of the population...
respectively. Each method is employed at differing rates depending on the country and the specific school division. Some educators are beginning to use the two methods in conjunction to maximize the benefits of both methods.
Phonics
Phonics
Phonics refers to a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics involves teaching how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations...
is a teaching method that stresses character-sound correspondences, specific rules and their use in reading and spelling. This helps beginning readers understand how characters are linked to sounds (phonemes), patterns of letter-sound correspondences and spelling in English, and how to apply this knowledge when they read to sound out words. Phonics teachers present the spellings for different sounds in a specific order, introducing the simplest (or most useful) patterns early on; these patterns are then practiced. A disadvantage to phonics is that in some languages like English, there is a complex letter-sound correspondence and this causes confusion for beginning readers.
Traditional phonics instruction has marked benefits. Early reading often involves significant expansion of a child's mental lexicon, which includes all the words the child has been exposed to and their meanings. By focusing on the principle of linking specific sounds and characters, the child has the ability to recognize new words and derive meaning from them. Being able to adapt what they know about language to new words they experience is crucial to expanding their mental lexicon; this allows for productive reading that is the ability to read new words. It also produces higher achievement for beginning readers and the difference is the greatest for those at risk of failing to learn to read. While some children are able to infer these rules on their own, most need explicit instructions on phonics rules. Overall, children who are directly taught phonics are better at reading, spelling and comprehension.
Traditional phonics instruction can also have the unintended consequence of promoting dysfluency. The difficulty lies in the coarticulated
Coarticulation
Coarticulation in its general sense refers to a situation in which a conceptually isolated speech sound is influenced by, and becomes more like, a preceding or following speech sound...
nature of speech; speech sounds are overlapping, while print is discrete and sequential. This can be appreciated if one shapes the mouth in position to begin to produce the word cat compared to the word cot. The initial hard c is colored by the subsequent vowel even before speech begins, i.e., the smiling position as one prepares to say cat, and the more limp position as one prepares to say cot. As early readers work from left to right, beginning with the onset consonant, they typically do not yet know the vowel with which it must be coarticulated. The vowel sound itself cannot be known until the remaining rime (the portion of the syllable beginning with the vowel and extending to its end: e.g. ight in right) is fully encountered. For these reasons, teaching reading through orientation to rime first and then adding the onset (ought-bought) can be helpful in promoting fluency through supporting the phonological problems of coarticulation. Emphasis on the rime also supports the development of an intuitive, and therefore more fluent, awareness of orthographic patterns.
Synthetic Phonics
Synthetic phonics
Synthetic phonics is a method of teaching reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words...
is a method that is endorsed by the governments of The United Kingdom , Australia and Scotland . It also has considerable support in the U.S.A and Canada . In Synthetic Phonics, the student first learns to say the sounds (phonemes) that are associated with the character(graphemes) in isolation first before the sounds are "synthesized" or blended together to make a word. (e.g. /a/, /k/, /t/.) Then, when reading a word, he learns to say each sound in the word (e.g. /k/ - /a/ - /t/); and to "blend" these sounds into a pronunciation of the word (e.g. "cat").
Synthetic phonics does not teach whole words as shapes; and does not involve guessing at words from context, picture and initial letter clues.
There are other types of phonics, such as Analytical phonics
Analytical phonics
Analytical Phonics refers to an approach to the teaching of reading in which the phonemes associated with particular graphemes are not pronounced in isolation. Children identify the common phoneme in a set of words in which each word contains the phoneme under study. For example, teacher and...
, that differ in their approach based on how a "chunk" within the word is defined (i.e. individual phonemes, syllables, or non-blended units).
Whole Language
Whole language
Whole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction. It is often contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. However, from whole language...
is widely used in the U.S.A. and Canada. It is a reading and learning method that trains students to focus on words, sentences and paragraphs as a whole rather than letters. This method aims to make reading fun and keep children motivated, which is beneficial because learning to read depends heavily on what the student does and not the teacher. While the child is typically very engaged in this method, many children struggle to infer the specific rules of the language on their own, which causes the child's comprehension and spelling to suffer in the end.
One subtype is Sight word
Sight word
A sight word is any word that is known by a reader automatically. Sight words are the basis behind the whole-word approach to reading education. Some have suggested that sight words and the whole-word approach to reading are a significant teaching technique considering 65% of the population...
, which is sometimes called the "look-say" method. A sight vocabulary of 50-100 words is first memorized and subsequent words are learned as wholes, often by seeing them used repeatedly in the context of a story. It tells children to find meaning by guessing, by recognizing whole words they have memorized, by looking at the pictures, and by creating a context based on surrounding words. It encourages students to "construct their own meaning" (with guidance from peers and facilitator of consensus process). It relies heavily on the child's experience with language as a whole.
The following are some features of the whole language philosophy:
- Children are expected to learn to read and write as they learned to talk, that is gradually, without a great deal of direct instruction.
- Learning is emphasized more than teaching; it is assumed that the children will learn to read and write, and the teacher facilitates that growth.
- Children read and write every day in a variety of situations.
- Reading, writing, and oral language are not considered separate components of the curriculum or merely ends in themselves; rather they permeate everything the children are doing.
- There is no division between first learning to read and later reading to learn. (adapted from Weaver, C. 1990)
Which style use in teaching reading has divided educators for years. It is now known that using the two approaches together is more powerful than either program alone. The technical skills learned through phonics is important for many children when it comes to learning to read, spell, and general language comprehension but the engagement of children with language in the whole-language style is also important to keep the children motivated and excited to learn.
Skills required for proficient reading
According to the report by the US National Reading PanelNational Reading Panel
The National Reading Panel was a United States government body. Formed in 1997 at the request of Congress, it was a national panel with the stated aim of assessing the effectiveness of different approaches used to teach children to read....
(NRP) in 2000, the skills required for proficient reading are phonemic awareness
Phonemic awareness
Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning...
, fluency
Fluency
Fluency is the property of a person or of a system that delivers information quickly and with expertise.-Speech:...
, vocabulary
Vocabulary
A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
, and text comprehension
Reading comprehension
Reading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a text. This understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are written and how they trigger knowledge outside the text. ....
. More generally, proficient reading does not necessarily require phonemic awareness
Phonemic awareness
Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning...
, as in Latin Alphabets, but an awareness of the individual parts of speech, which may also include the whole word (as in Chinese characters) or syllables (as in Japanese) as well as others depending on the writing system being employed. Other important skills are: rapid automatized naming
Rapid automatized naming
Rapid automatized naming is a task that measures how quickly individuals can name aloud objects, pictures, colors, orsymbols...
(RAN), a general understanding of the Orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
of the language, and practice.
- Speech Awareness: The awareness of individual parts of speech as they apply to individual written characters is crucial for understanding reading (as defined by translating written characters into spoken language). Phonological awarenessPhonological awarenessPhonological awareness refers to an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of spoken words. Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability and has, therefore, been the focus of much research.- Overview :Phonological...
, which includes the manipulation of rhymes, syllableSyllableA syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
s, and onsets and rimesSyllable rimeIn the study of phonology in linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda. It is the part of the syllable used in poetic rhyme, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech.The rime is usually the...
, is most prevalent in Alphabetic systems. The important part of speech depends on the Writing systemWriting systemA writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
employed.
- FluencyFluencyFluency is the property of a person or of a system that delivers information quickly and with expertise.-Speech:...
: The ability to read orally with speed, accuracy, and vocal expression. The ability to read fluently is one of several critical factors necessary for reading comprehension. If a reader is not fluent, it may be difficult to remember what has been read and to relate the ideas expressed in the text to his or her background knowledge. This accuracy and automaticity of reading serves as a bridge between decoding and comprehension.
- VocabularyVocabularyA person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
: A critical aspect of reading comprehension is vocabulary development. When a reader encounters an unfamiliar word in print and decodes it to derive its spoken pronunciation, the reader understands the word if it is in the reader's spoken vocabulary. Otherwise, the reader must derive the meaning of the word using another strategy, such as context. If the development of the child's vocabulary is impeded by things such as ear infections, that inhibit the child from hearing new words consistently, then the development of reading will also be impaired.
- Reading comprehensionReading comprehensionReading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a text. This understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are written and how they trigger knowledge outside the text. ....
: The NRP describes comprehension as a complex cognitive process in which a reader intentionally and interactively engages with the text. Reading comprehension is heavily dependent on skilled word recognition and decoding, oral reading fluency, a well-developed vocabulary and active engagement with the text.
- Rapid automatized namingRapid automatized namingRapid automatized naming is a task that measures how quickly individuals can name aloud objects, pictures, colors, orsymbols...
: The ability to say quickly the names of letters, objects and colors predicts an individual's ability to read. This might be linked to the importance of quick retrieval of phonological representations from long-term memoryLong-term memoryLong-term memory is memory in which associations among items are stored, as part of the theory of a dual-store memory model. According to the theory, long term memory differs structurally and functionally from working memory or short-term memory, which ostensibly stores items for only around 20–30...
in reading and the importance of object-naming circuits in the left cerebral hemisphereCerebral hemisphereA cerebral hemisphere is one of the two regions of the eutherian brain that are delineated by the median plane, . The brain can thus be described as being divided into left and right cerebral hemispheres. Each of these hemispheres has an outer layer of grey matter called the cerebral cortex that is...
that are recruited to underpin a child's word-recognition abilities.
- OrthographyOrthographyThe orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
: means to write correctly. Orthographic Development proceeds in increasing complexity as a child learns to read. Some of the first things to be learnt are the orthographic conventions such as the direction of reading and that there are differing typefaces and capitalization for each symbol. In general, this means that to read proficiently, the reader has to understand elements of the written language including hyphenation, capitalizationCapitalizationCapitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...
, word breaksWordIn language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
, emphasisEmphasis (typography)In typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasize them.- Methods and use :...
, and punctuationPunctuationPunctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences...
. Orthography thus describes or defines the set of symbols used in a language, and the rules about how to write these symbols.
- Practice: repeated exposure to print improves many aspects of learning to read and most importantly the knowledge of individual words. It increases the speed at which high frequency words are recognized which allows for increased FluencyFluencyFluency is the property of a person or of a system that delivers information quickly and with expertise.-Speech:...
in reading. It also supports orthographic development, Reading comprehensionReading comprehensionReading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a text. This understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are written and how they trigger knowledge outside the text. ....
and VocabularyVocabularyA person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
development.
Reading difficulties
DyslexiaDyslexia
Dyslexia is a very broad term defining a learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in being able to read, and which can manifest itself as a difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, or rapid...
is defined as brain-based type of learning disability that specifically impairs a person's ability to read . These individuals typically read at levels significantly lower than expected despite having normal intelligence . Although the disorder varies from person to person, common characteristics among people with dyslexia are difficulty with spelling, phonological processing (the manipulation of sounds), and/or rapid visual-verbal responding . In adults, dyslexia usually occurs after a brain injury
Brain injury
A brain injury is any injury occurring in the brain of a living organism. Brain injuries can be classified along several dimensions. Primary and secondary brain injury are ways to classify the injury processes that occur in brain injury, while focal and diffuse brain injury are ways to classify...
or in the context of dementia
Dementia
Dementia is a serious loss of cognitive ability in a previously unimpaired person, beyond what might be expected from normal aging...
. It can also be inherited in some families, and recent studies have identified a number of genes that may predispose an individual to developing dyslexia."
See Also
- Reading (process)Reading (process)Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas...
- LanguageLanguageLanguage may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
- VocabularyVocabularyA person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
- ComprehensionComprehensionComprehension has the following meanings:* In general usage, and more specifically in reference to education and psychology, it has roughly the same meaning as understanding.*Reading comprehension measures the understanding of a passage of text...
- SpellingSpellingSpelling is the writing of one or more words with letters and diacritics. In addition, the term often, but not always, means an accepted standard spelling or the process of naming the letters...
- Reading disabilityReading disabilityA reading disability is a condition in which a sufferer displays difficulty reading resulting primarily from neurological factors. Developmental Dyslexia, Alexia , and Hyperlexia.-Definition:...