*READING

=__**READING**__=

If we take a minute to think of just a few activities that involve some form of reading, than we quickly gain an insight, into how important and beneficial the everyday skill of reading is to our lives. When driving the car, when cooking, when putting together kit furniture, (the list goes on) reading is a fundamental skill in which to successfully complete one of these tasks reading is a great advantage.

Once it is clear how much reading can affect our lives, it is also clear how important it is to teach reading from an early age. The underlying tools to reading, when grasped at a young age, can make the world of difference in the future years to come.

When looking at the teaching of reading, it is important to start with the basics of letter sound and blends, progressing onto words, then entire sentences. For all these stages, an important influence to a students journey with learning to read, is modelling. Modelling, not only by teachers but also by parents, friends and family. Even in infant stages of a child life, they are taught different aspects of the reading process, by all people in the child’s surroundings.

**-FROM AN EARLY AGE**
Snuggling up in bed with a favourite picture storybook, spending quality time with a parent, are memories that will last a lifetime. It is also a time when a child’s love for books and reading starts.

A child will ask over and over to hear their favourite storybook read to them, often coming to know it off-by-heart. As a young child starts to read a story book in ‘play’, it is in most cases “the story may make no sense to someone listening, but toddlers will put expression in their voices and faces, they pause, add emphasis to exciting words and phrases and will finish with a flourish, just as any adult reader does.” (Hill, 2006, p 145)

“Children naturally develop language through their interactions with others, but books involve children with words and sounds that are not part of everyday conversations” (Hill, 2006, p 145) No matter what form of children’s text may come in, from prose, nursery rhymes and poems, they all add to the process and allow a child to see why and how language is used.



**-THE DEVELOPMENT OF READING**
A child’s early attempts at reading often begin with their most loved and treasured picture book. “Children in the early-emergent phase start to tell the story by looking at the pictures and slowly they begin to pay attention to the print.” (Hill, 2006, p 146) There will also be a difference in the way they tell the story, starting out by sounding like storytelling then evolving to sound like reading. With most children having some sort of reading experiences to equip them, and in some cases reading abilities, it is at school where they are taught the skills of reading which will advance them into the stages of early, transitional and extended reading. Classroom readers will be used as assistance in progressing the students from one stage to another. A vast number of teachers will organise readers in levels based on difficulty, complexity of concepts, length of text, level of syntax and vocabulary etc. It is with great perseverance, full attention and most of all practice that a student will move up this reading ladder. In Emergent reading a child will base most of their concentration on each individual word and its letters. There is a great deal of referencing to illustrations, which give depth to the text they read. This simple story lined text containing short simple sentences, will mainly consist of high frequency words, such as the, I, am, have, like, that etc. “The ‘early’ reading phase builds, and extends onto the emergent phase by slowly increasing the complexity of concepts and texts, syntax and vocabulary.” (Hill, 2006, p 154) The same basic skills are used in ‘early’ reading as in the ‘emergent’ phase, but they are increased in length and difficulty. Children then with persistence will progress into ‘transitional’ reading. Where “children are moving towards becoming more fluent and they have a wider repertoire of problem- solving strategies.” (Hill, 2006, p. 156) A ‘transitional’ text becomes longer and more complex. When a child gets to the ‘extending’ phase of reading a student is able to read complex books, where vocabulary and new concepts can be grasped in fluent reading. “At this level, the children may choose to read silently but will revert to reading aloud if the text becomes difficult.” (Hill, 2006, p 157)



**-TEACHING READING, A TEACHERS ROLE**
A teacher’s goal, is to guide each of their students to understand and decode this amazing puzzle, that we call, our written language. A teacher’s objective is to make reading detectives out of their students, but before they do they need to equip the children with the strategies to make sense of what they read. In order for students to break this code they need to be taught the basic skills of ‘letter knowledge’ -letters and their sounds. They need to learn to become ‘meaning makers’, where they take the vital information out of what is read. They need to develop into ‘text uses’, where they “identify the form or genre of a book to determine how they will read it.” (Hill, 2006, p175) and to add to this list, they also need to become ‘text critics’, to learn to “evaluate the author’s purpose and their decisions about how the information is presented.” (Hill, 2006, p 176) A teacher is a childs aid to motivate assist and encourage them in using these skills in their everyday reading.

During one-on-one reading, a teacher is likely to prompt a reader, instead of straight-out, revealing the answer. This again relates to the decoding of what a child is reading. Asking questions such as, ‘Does that sound right?’ ‘Can you see what’s happening in the picture?’ and ‘Would you say bought or brought?’ guide a student to take a closer look into what they are reading. By enforcing prompting in the classroom, a teacher will in most cases find students gradually correcting themselves.

When a teacher enforces all these reading strategise, they are in actual fact handing over the reading magnifying glass to all of their apprentice reading detectives.



**-PHONICS**
Phonics is an approach that focuses on a letter and the sound it makes. It involves an acceptance of “the idea that spoken language is made up of sounds and these sounds can be mapped to written letters.” (Hill, 2006, p 208) A child needs to discover “the relationship between sound and symbols in our language.” (Cairney, 1983, p 31)

“The English alphabetic code is an amazing set of 26 letters that represent approximately 44 sound or phonemes.” (Hill, 2006, p 208) This goes to show how complex our English language is, it also shows how detailed the teaching of it must be to gain students understanding of our written language.

A student must first learn each of the 26 letters belonging to our alphabet, out of these they must also be able to recognise the 5 vowels, (which when said aloud, have no contact points within the mouth) and the remaining 21 consonants. A student will then go onto the learning of onset and rime, onset is the first syllable of the word and rime is what follows. For example, take the word back b- is the onset and –ack is the rime. It is at this stage that a student starts to become aware of the many different sounds a letter can make. A student will progress onto the learning of letter blends. “When two or more letters are combined they are known as blends or letter clusters.” (Hill, 2006, p. 216) Blends found at the start of a word such as, ‘bl’ in black, are initial consonant blends. A blend positioned at the end of a word in a final consonant blend, as in ‘lf’ in self. Some of the most common blends found in the English language are ‘sp’ ‘fr’ ‘bl’ ‘sm’ ‘cr’ ‘ dr’ and ‘tr’, just to mention a few.

As a child progresses with their personal reading, with habit, they will be able to add these learning methods together to create a basic understanding of the written language.

[|ONSET & RIME]

[|BLENDS]

**-COMPREHENSION**
When a passage or writing is read, it can be argued that comprehension is the second most important factor, after being able to successfully read the passage itself. Comprehension “is the act of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning form the text” (Hill, 2006, p 190) There is no real benefit of being able to read a passage of writing with ease and fluency but unable to extract any understanding sense and importance from the piece. Students need to be able “to build on new meanings by integrating new ideas with old information. In doing this, they are constructing meanings.” (Hill, 2006, p 190)

Especially in the early years of literacy education it is not uncommon to find an extract of writing followed by a corresponding diagram. The diagram adds depth to the passage of text and is a ‘clue donor’ for the child. It is important for a student to be able to link the two together and equally take understanding from both text and illustration. When a child is given a piece of writing to read, it is so easy to focus on the decoding of individual words, while this is important, “sometimes all their effort goes onto decoding, and the meaning or comprehension may be lost. Both decoding and comprehension are necessary in reading.” (Hill, 2006, p 191) If the decoding of words has become a natural ability, “the less conscious effort is required for it, and the more conscious capacity is left over for comprehension of the word, including in relation to contextual clues.” (Pressley P. 548)

Gaskin indicates, five ‘road blocks’ which in order to successfully complete a comprehension task, need to be cleared. “These road blocks to comprehension concern active involvement, attention, persistence, reflectivity and flexibility.” (Hill, 2006, p. 192) All of these elements involve a child to take charge of their brain, and if students can discipline themselves to clear these ‘road blocks’ they will see drastic improvement in their comprehension ability.