Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (1998) / Chapter Skim
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2. The Process of Learning to Read
2. The Process of Learning to Read
Pages 41-84
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From page 41... ...
We then describe skilled reading as it is engaged in by adults and continue by describing how children develop to become readers. READING AND LITERACY In focusing in this report on preventing reading difficulties among young children in the United States, we take a limited view of reading, putting aside many issues and concerns that would belong to a full consideration of literacy in various societies inside and outside the United States.
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From page 42... ...
, the alphabetic principle (Ferreiro and Teberosky, 1982) , the alphabetic stage (Frith, 1985)
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From page 43... ...
. The capacity to learn to read and write is related to children's agerelated developmental timetables, although there is no clear agreement on the precise chronological or mental age nor on a particular developmental level that children must reach before they are "ready" to learn to read and write.
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From page 44... ...
. In each situation they encounter, their understanding is both increased and constrained by their existing models of written language.
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From page 45... ...
THE PROCESS OF LEARNING TO READ 45 sual word recognition can flourish only when children displace the belief that print is like pictures with the insight that written words are comprised of letters that, in turn, map to speech sounds. Even as children begin to learn about spellings, they must also develop more sophisticated understandings of the forces beyond pictures and individual words that direct text meaning.
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From page 46... ...
Metalinguistic insights about some language domains typically emerge in the preschool years, however, as discussed later in this section. Practically from birth, infants are able to distinguish all the sounds of any human language, and within a short time their perceptual abilities become tuned to their native language, even though their productive repertoire remains limited to nonspeech sounds and babbling for much of the first year of life (e.g., Werker and Lalonde, 1988)
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From page 47... ...
may be contingent on vocabulary size rather than age or general developmental level. The potential immaturity of some children's phonological encoding/representation systems at the time formal reading instruction begins may impede their achieving a level of phonemic awareness for spoken words related to fluent decoding of written words.
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From page 48... ...
. Some time after they are able to comprehend simple sentences, children begin to combine words so as to express some structural and/or syntactic relationship between them.
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From page 49... ...
. Much of the work in the field of pragmatics describes how children learn the rules for using language in specific situations, such as book reading (Ninio and Bruner, 1978; Snow and Ninio, 1986; Snow and Goldfield, 1983)
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From page 50... ...
. Another aspect of metalinguistic development is the child's ability to attend to and analyze the internal phonological structure of spoken words.
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From page 51... ...
. The assessment of phonemic awareness typically involves tasks that require the student to isolate or segment one or more of the phonemes of a spoken word, to blend or combine a sequence of separate phonemes into a word, or to manipulate the phonemes within a word (e.g., adding, subtracting, or rearranging phonemes of one word to make a different word)
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From page 52... ...
Speech discrimination, including phonemic discrimination, is distin guished from phonemic awareness because the ability to detect or dis criminate even slight differences between two spoken words does not necessarily indicate an awareness of the nature of that difference. More over, the study of the phonetics indicates that, both within and between speakers, there are many variations in the acoustic and articulatory prop erties of speech, including phonemes, that are not functionally significant to meaning.
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From page 53... ...
is closely intertwined with growth in basic language proficiency during the preschool years. True phonemic awareness extends beyond an appreciation of rhyme or alliteration, as it corresponds to the insight that every word can be conceived of as a sequence of phonemes.
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From page 54... ...
. Phonological and phonemic awareness should not be confused with speech perception, per se.
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From page 55... ...
To the extent that children lack such phonemic awareness, they are unable to internalize usefully their phonics lessons. The resulting symptoms include difficulties in sounding and blending new words, in retaining words from one encounter to the next, and in learning to spell.
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From page 56... ...
. In other words, on one hand, some basic appreciation of the phonological structure of spoken words appears to be necessary for the child to discover the alphabetic principle that print represents the sounds of the language.
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From page 57... ...
After a few such correct decodings, these words can be recognized quite automatically. In thinking about the process of learning to read and about how best to frame early reading instruction, it is important to bear in mind these powerful reciprocal influences of reading skill and phonological awareness on each other.
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From page 58... ...
"Good night noises everywhere," she whispers, and then pronounces, "The end," proudly snapping the book shut. Parents assist in their children's literacy development with sensitivity to culturally specific social routines in book reading1 (Snow and Goldfield, 1982; Snow and Ninio, 1986; Teale and Sulzby, 1986; 1987; Kaderavek and Sulzby, 1998a, 1998b; Sulzby and Kaderavek, 1996)
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From page 59... ...
Children who are frequently read to will then "read" their favorite books by themselves by engaging in oral language-like and written language-like routines (Sulzby and Teale, 1987, 1991)
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From page 60... ...
. The same set of cognitive skills distinguishes skilled from unskilled readers at the adult level as at the middle grade level (Bell and Perfetti, 1994; Bruck, 1990; Daneman and Carpenter, 1980; Haenggi and Perfetti, 1992; Jackson and McClelland, 1979; Palmer et al., 1985; Cunningham et al., 1990)
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From page 61... ...
Three- to Four-Year-Old Accomplishments · Knows that alphabet letters are a special category of visual graphics that can be individually named. · Recognizes local environmental print.
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From page 62... ...
and can be traded off to some extent against weak word recognition skills (Adams et al., 1996; Recht and Leslie, 1988)
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From page 63... ...
. An alternate explanation is that less skilled readers have difficulties with the component processes of representing a text (i.e., word identification and basic comprehension)
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From page 64... ...
Syntactic and inferential processes as well as background and word knowledge play a role in both. The correlations between listening comprehension and reading comprehension are high for adult populations (Gernsbacher et al., 1990; Sticht and James, 1984)
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From page 65... ...
By "word identification," we mean that the reader can pronounce a word, not whether he or she knows what it means. For a skilled reader, the identification of a printed word begins with a visual process that operates on the visual forms of letters that make up a word.
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From page 66... ...
phonology is automatically activated during the identification process and (b) phonological word forms are retrieved along with meanings.2 In addition to supporting word identification, phonological processing during reading supports comprehension and memory for recently read text (Slowiaczek and Clifton, 1980; Perfetti and McCutchen, 1982)
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From page 67... ...
of reading printed word forms. These two types of knowledge may derive from related kinds of learning, however, since theories of word identification include both singleprocess and dual-process accounts of how a reader can come to know both individual word forms and general procedures for converting letter strings into phonological forms.
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From page 68... ...
. The transition to real reading involves changes not only in the composition of skills but also in concepts about the nature of literacy (Chall, 1983)
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From page 69... ...
Children appear to move across various forms of writing even up to grade 1, using scribble, nonphonetic letter strings, and drawing as forms of writing from which they subsequently read.
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From page 70... ...
Learning to Identify Words in Print Beginning Some research has demonstrated that 5-year-old children associate features of print with spoken word names without any indication that they are using the orthography of the word (Gough, 1993;
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From page 71... ...
Moving to productive reading requires more than this attempt to memorize on the basis of nonproductive associations between parts of printed words and their spoken equivalents. Becoming Productive Addressing the early stages of learning to read, researchers argue that children move from a prereading stage, marked by "reading" environmental print (logos, for example, such as MacDonald's or Pepsi)
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From page 72... ...
These early connections between print and speech forms can drive a rapid transition to real reading. Indeed, the combination of these print-sound connections along with phonological sensitivity are critical factors in reading acquisition (Bradley and Bryant, 1983; Ehri and Sweet, 1991; Juel et al., 1986; Share, 1995; Tunmer et al., 1988)
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From page 73... ...
The research on word identification has explored whether words are identified based on their morphological structure, that is, whether some kind of morphological decomposition process accompanies
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From page 74... ...
How morphology is actually used in skilled word identification is probably less important for learning to read than the awareness of morphology that a child can use to support learning words. Along with syntax (the structure of sentences)
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From page 75... ...
. In reading, automaticity entails "practice" at word identification, such as frequent retrievals of word forms and meanings from print.
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From page 76... ...
compared children matched for chronological age and for reading accuracy but who differed significantly in reading comprehension on a standardized norm-referenced test that measures the two aspects of reading separately. The skilled comprehenders (at or slightly above the level expected for their chronological age in comprehension)
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From page 77... ...
In fact, as Cain (1996) notes, "because early reading instruction emphasizes word recognition rather than comprehension, the less skilled comprehenders' difficulties generally go unnoticed by their classroom teachers." It may well be that relieving the bottleneck from
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From page 78... ...
Previously "unimportant" reading difficulties may appear for the first time in fourth grade when the children are dealing more frequently, deeply, and widely with nonfiction materials in a variety of school subjects and when these are represented in assessment instruments. It may be that there had been less call for certain knowledge and abilities until fourth grade and a failure to thrive in those areas might not be noticed until then.
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From page 79... ...
The achievement of real reading requires knowledge of the phonological structures of language and how the written units connect with the spoken units. Phonological sensitivity at the subword level is important in this achievement.
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From page 80... ...
· Independently writes many uppercase and lowercase letters. · Uses phonemic awareness and letter knowledge to spell independently (invented or creative spelling)
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From page 81... ...
· Shows evidence of expanding language repertory, including increasing appropriate use of standard more formal language registers. · Creates own written texts for others to read.
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From page 82... ...
· Shows sensitivity to using formal language patterns in place of oral language patterns at appropriate spots in own writing (e.g., decontextualizing sentences, conventions for quoted speech, literary language forms, proper verb forms)
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From page 83... ...
· Correctly spells previously studied words and spelling patterns in own writing. · Begins to incorporate literacy words and language patterns in own writing (e.g., elaborates descriptions, uses figurative wording)
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From page 84... ...
84 PREVENTING READING DIFFICULTIES IN YOUNG CHILDREN lary, and some comprehension strategies. In each case, "some" indicates that exhaustive knowledge of these aspects is not needed to get the child reading conventionally; rather, each child seems to need varying amounts of knowledge to get started, but then he or she needs to build up the kind of inclusive and automatic knowledge that will let the fact that reading is being done fade into the background while the reasons for reading are fulfilled.
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