Recently Written Academic Article

Preliminary Experience Assignment: How Children Are Taught to Read Kevin Hill July 2012.

Personal Reflection.

What do you remember about learning to read yourself?

Reading was never homework, it was a reward. Weekly visits to the library with parents as well as daily reading time at home were supported with reading materials connected to my interests. Book clubs and 'Find Out More' as well as the 'Beano' and 'Spot the Dog' are my fondest memories of childhood reading.

Pre-reading skills.

What pre reading skills do young learners need to enable them to become readers? How do places like The Early Learning Centre design materials to develop pre reading skills?

It is a commonly held belief that a child's reading ability on entering school determines their academic reading success in later school life. Therefore, preparing young children to become curious about language and have confidence engaging with letters and sounds is of paramount importance; yet children arrive in schools with extremely mixed reading abilities. In order to give children the ability to manipulate and take pleasure from playing with the sounds of language, kindergarten educators and parents employ a range of pre-reading strategies which foster growth. Picture card recognition as well as speaking books with musical accompaniment are useful in exposing young learners to frequent sound patterns, 'Jolly Phonics', 'Reading Rockets' and 'Reading A-Z' programs are further mobile tools which can be used as an introduction for the beginning reader.

The role of phonics in the teaching of reading.

Phonics - What is phonics? What is the difference between synthetic and analytical phonics? What are the phonemes in English? How do teachers develop young learners' phonological awareness and phonic knowledge?

Phonics is the micro level of language study - it deals with the sub-lexical teaching of language recognition: graphemes, phonemes and blends of the language. Synthetic phonics refers to an approach to the teaching of reading in which phonemes [sounds] associated with particular graphemes [letters] are pronounced in isolation and blended together (synthesized) (Brooks, 2003). Synthetic phonics teaches individual letter sounds in all positions of the word and allows students to gain confidence in creating sound blends, segments and whole word pronunciation. The method emphasises the discerning recognition of phonemes in all positions of words and the method is frequently employed in language classrooms due to its renown speed, often giving students between eight and ten sounds over two weeks and allowing accelerated entry into reading. Commonly, synthetic phonics is taught through letter shape reproduction activities and sound games which allow students to become familiar with the forty four phonemes it covers. Furthermore, because letter names are not initially taught children are able to learn that, for example, /ce/ /s/ /ss/ can all be pronounced the same way and consequently its students are often noted to be better spellers (Yopp, 1992) . Synthetic phonics has many supporters: The Rose Report asserted its support for the teaching of 'systematic synthetic phonics' and in my observations the majority of phonics teachers employ its systems in their classrooms.

Analytic phonics is a whole word approach to the teaching of phonics whereby individual phonemes associated with particular letters are not examined in isolation. Children identify (analyze) the common phoneme in a set of words in which each word contains the phoneme under study (Brooks, 2003). The system places the alphabet and its sounds at the centre of its methodology and emphasises initial sounds, onsets and rhymes and word families. Initial sight vocabulary is often learned through texts which use repetition and predictable sentence patterns as well as picture cue activities. Critics are quick to point out the inherent flaws with this system: in contrast to synthetic phonics, this system of teaching requires a much higher level of prior student knowledge as students are often required to notice sound patterns in sets of words and to 'discover' the relationships between letters, words and their pronunciation (Anthony, 2003) . Due to this essentially guessing nature, critics note that this system is not suitable for lower level readers, those with dyslexia and other reading difficulties that may lack confidence or ability to handle this learning scenario, especially when it comes to learning longer words.

What are the phonemes of English?

English contains twenty vowel phonemes and a further twenty four consonant phonemes all of which can be seen on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). By means of comparison, Mandarin Chinese has 56 phonemes in total. Research suggests that phonological awareness does in fact transfer from one language to another and involving families of second language learners in the explicit teaching processes is therefore beneficial (Durgunoglu and Oney, 2000). Almost unbelievably to the interested language student, the African language of Xu has one hundred and forty phonemes!

Teachers employ a variety of techniques to develop young learners phonological awareness and phonic knowledge; offered as games to the children, language awareness is acquired through the use of; spoken rhymes, the use of flashcards, matching games with word pairs, sound adding and deletion games, sound sequencing, rhythm and rhyming, clapping words, and most fondly, nonsense games where unexpected words and sounds are added to chains. The results of these activities have been well documented in detail elsewhere; needless to say they remain the most prevalent methods for raising awareness of sounds and spelling awareness in young learners. In short the teacher must extend children's play with sounds, watch for spontaneous teachable moments and deliberately establish a phonologically rich environment.

The role of whole language approaches to the teaching of reading.

What is the whole language approach to teaching? What is meant by 'sight vocabulary' or whole word recognition? How do readers make meaning from text using contextual clues?

The whole language approach to reading, referred to by its detractors as 'the crime of the century', is a literacy philosophy stressing the need for reading comprehension strategy instruction with a lexical study of whole word forms. The whole language approach in practical terms strives to enrich children's literary experiences. It emphasizes the wholeness of textual learning by centering itself on literature and textual decoding (Coles, 2000). Proponents of this technique argue that language should not be reduced to single sounds (phonetics); instead words should be studied in relation to each other in a given context, particularly in interesting works of literature of cultural diversity. Whole language as its name suggests stems from a literary rich environment which emphasizes texts meanings over the sounds of letters; consequently it is often seen to be suitable for older aged learners who are new to English, as learning is embedded within high interest reading materials.

While this descri ption may seem attractive it is imperative to be clear about the history of English at this point and the specific reasons why this approach is criticized so strongly; approximately 5000 years ago all languages were ideographic, using pictures to represent their intended meaning without phonetic content. Jumping quickly forwards - 3000 years ago, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Greeks and others began the phonetic alphabet systems in which letters are used to represent sounds. The benefits of this were, once the alphabet was learned, new words could be deduced more readily and consequently the photographic style became less prevalent in some societies. Critics highlight that the whole word recognition idea reinstates the pictorial essence of our language as students are made to remember words as pictures not as components of a larger system of language, furthermore; in dealing with a language comprising hundreds of thousands of words like English the idea of memorizing words in this way seems too big a challenge. Largely for this reason, many educators are vehemently outspoken against the whole word approach to reading.

But what about the supporters of the whole word approach? At the heart of the philosophy lies the idea of incidental learning - namely the concept that vocabulary is learnt through real life experiences with the words and yet it is this very essence which has given the approach a great deal of criticism. The whole language approach to learning is opposed to the techniques of phonics, which necessarily uses more direct instruction techniques - 'drilling' - than the student and group led reading approaches, such as 'Drop Everything and Read', of whole language approaches. Currently, critics remark that this system has been based on a small amount of scientific research and that the importance it places on learning reading through the act of writing as well as its tolerance of spelling mistakes and grammar deviations to encourage motivation, means that it is unsuitable for students with reading difficulties such as dyslexia or students from a non native English speaking background (Coles, 2000). The approach comes under further criticism because it has been directly linked to the high and low literacy household variable referred to by Keith Stanovich as the 'Matthew Effect' (Stanovich, 1980), in which students with a proficient reading and writing ability continue to improve whilst students encountering difficulties continue to suffer. In my observations of teachers of a second language, the methods of the whole language approach were reserved for higher level students who had previously had explicit phonic teaching and phonics reserved for new students with less confidence in dealing with whole words and texts, a decision which on the surface appeared to work but may not have been suitable as a long term strategy due to its very divisiveness. It seems that no resolution of the debate is forthcoming and most diplomatic teachers in approaching the teaching of language combine a system of whole language and phonic teaching strategies depending on the needs of their students. Largely though, reading teachers show an aversion to the principles of whole language teaching due its demerits listed above.

What is meant by sight vocabulary or sight words?

Sight vocabulary or whole sight words are the words that a reader recognizes instantly when reading. The use of sight words, most commonly the infamous Dolch sight word system, which prescribes two hundred and twenty high frequency words to be memorized, has been strongly supported for its effectiveness in dealing with confusing and non decodable English words: words that do not readily lend themselves to the rules of phonetic analysis. More importantly and evident to any teacher of young children is that early readers have a limited amount of attention available while reading (Samuels, 2004; Stanovich, 1980). Consequently, the ability to recognise words, which would otherwise be very time consuming (to use a phonetic system) to explain, is highly productive in maintaining student interest and supporting the learning of reading. Researchers have noted that students who are taught sight word vocabulary explicitly in the classroom have improved comprehension as a function of vocabulary instruction due to their ability to use more cognitive processing skills in comprehending what has been read instead of decoding the words (Tallal, 2012). It is important to note that educators who use sight words do not necessarily fully support the ideas of whole word language practices, but use the sight words as a means of supporting reading of the 'rule breaking' or 'entry words' of English.

How do readers make meaning from text using contextual clues?

Contextual clues refer to the attributes of a text which may help the reader deduce the meaning of a new word or phrase. The majority of us will reach for the dictionary when we encounter a new word but if there is none to hand we will have to use the clues available to us. Chomsky and Goodman (1965) have identified a 'cueing system' in which they identify; graph phonemic - the shape of letters and sounds, semantic - word prediction, syntactic- part of speech based on grammar and pragmatic-function of the text systems, which are used in accordance with each other as the primary means of identifying the meaning of new words. The explicit teachings of reading comprehension strategies such as inference, summarizing and predicting are cornerstones of most English classes and have been proven to raise test scores significantly for students (Goudvis, Harvey, 2009). Therefore and most importantly, fluency in using contextual clues is integral to reading success because if words can be quickly deciphered children will be able to spend more cognitive capacity understanding what is read, not simply recognizing what is read, leading to greater textual comprehension and academic success.

Critical reflection.

What have you discovered about current controversies regarding the teaching of reading? What is your own perspective on the debates? Afterthoughts.

Today most educators and academics lean towards the systematic teaching of phonics, currently supported by our government, yet, a diehard group of educators maintain that there are benefits in the whole language approach to reading. So who is right? The holistic emphasis of the whole language approach means that it is contrasted with the skill based areas, especially phonics, but this fails to take into account the needs of the individual. Doesn't it seem more apt for teacher to judge the needs of their students and act accordingly rather than subscribing to any one school of thought, notably the seeming online popularity of discrediting the whole language approach? Educators would do well to remember that being able to sound out a word, a mark of the phonetic approach, does not mean that the word can be understood. By the same token educators must be aware of the pitfalls for some students in adapting whole language approaches, such as student led reading groups, which for some students may prove ineffective. The implications of this are that teachers need to employ a range of teaching strategies which allow readers to learn not only the recognition of sounds, patterns and words but to have the confidence to deal with unfamiliar ones effectively. In my observations phonics is currently taught by many teachers in a mini lesson format much in the same way as 'grammar bytes' are taught at higher levels. My observations of language learners stressed the significance of a teachers understanding of each students individual BICS and CALP abilities (Cummins, 2000), and the need to tailor the demands of reading activities accordingly.

Bibliography.

Allington, R.L. (2002). Big brother and the national reading curriculum: How ideology trumped evidence. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Allyn & Bacon (1984). Educational Objectives of Bloom's Taxonomy. MA. Pearson.

Anthony, J.L. 2003. Phonological Sensitivity. Reading Research Quarterly 38 (4): 470-87.

Brooks, Greg. 2003. Sound Sense: The Phonics Element of the National Literacy Strategy - A Report to the Department for Education and Skills, University of Sheffield.

Cisero, C.A., J.M. Royer. 1995. The Development and Cross Language Transfer of Phonological Awareness. In Contemporary Educational Psychology 20 (3): 275-303.

Chomsky, N. (1965).Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Coles, G. (2000). Misreading reading: The bad science that hurts children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Cummins, J. (2000) Language, Power and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the Crossfire. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Daniels, H. (2002). Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups. Second edition. Portland, Marine: Teahouse.

Durgunoglu, A. Y., & Öney, B. (2000). A cross-linguistic comparison of phonological awareness and word recognition. Reading & Writing, 11, 281-299.

Goodman, K. (1965).A linguistic study of cues and miscues in reading. Elementary English, 42 (6), 639-643.

Goudvis, A. & Harvey, S. (2005). The Comprehension Toolkit - Language and Lessons for Active Literacy. Firsthand Publications.

Harrison, C. 1998. Interchange (38) School of Education, Nottingham University. Harvey, S. & Harvey, D. (2009). Comprehension and Collaboration - Inquiry Circles in Action. Heinemann.

Samuels, S.J. (2004). Toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading, revisited. In R.B.Ruddell & N.J.Unrau, Theoretical models and processes of reading (5th ed., pp.1127-1148). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Stahl, S.A., B.A. Murray. 1994. Defining phonological awareness and its relationship to early reading. Journal of Educational Psychology 86 (2) 221-34.

Stanovich, K.E. (1980). Toward an interactive-compensatory model of individual differences in the development of reading fluency. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-40.

Tallal, P. (2012). http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/tallal.htm#TeachingReading

Torgesen, J.K., P.G. Mathes. 1998. What every teacher should know about phonological awareness. Tallahassee: Florida Department of Education.

Treiman, R., A, Zukowski. 1991. Levels of phonological awareness. In 'Phonological Processes in Literacy, eds. S. Brady and D. Shankweiler, 67-83. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Yopp, H.K. 1992. Developing phonemic awareness in young children. The reading teacher 45 (9): 696-703.