Oral language and literacy are so tightly connected that, alongside familiarity with books, strengthening one positively affects the other.
The age that children begin to read can depend on a variety of factors , from cognitive development to socioeconomic differences. Students from low socioeconomic status SES homes in particular often enter schools with lower vocabulary ranges and pre-reading skills. This is not because of any neurological differences but because low SES students often have fewer resources available to them.
Wealthier families, for example, may have more time to read to their children or take them to library events. The more exposure low SES children and students with abilities have to books and pre-literacy activities, the better families and educators can lessen or prevent reading disorders. Now that you understand how and when reading develops, learning which foundational reading skills a PreK student is ready to learn can help you create the best curriculum for your child. The definition of pre-reading skills are any abilities that help children learn to read once they reach kindergarten.
One important distinction in the list above is the difference between phonological awareness vs phonemic awareness. The definition of phonological awareness is broad and can encompass anything from identifying letters, sounds, syllables, and words within a sentence. Phonemic awareness is more specific and refers to the ability to identify and manipulate sounds. Ideally, children should exhibit both of these connected pre-reading skills by the time they enter kindergarten.
Each of these pre-reading skills are building blocks that make learning to read simpler for young students. Children who learn alphabetical recognition at a young age, for example, often pick up vocabulary words and learn to spell correctly at an earlier age. Nell Duke. The most important factor that determines if students learn these skills by kindergarten is whether parents encourage it.
While students may learn some pre-reading skills on their own, others develop best with parent or teacher instruction. The benefits of reading aloud and teaching pre-reading skills begin at birth. Even in infancy, reading to your baby can help them develop a positive association toward reading. Plus, reading aloud to your student can improve brain development during these critical early years. Plus, these benefits extend far beyond academic achievement. Those who had been taught to focus on whole words had more activity on the right side of the brain, which has been characteristically associated with adults and children who struggle with reading.
Moreover, those who had learned letter sounds were better able to identify unfamiliar words. Early readers benefit from systematic phonics instruction. Among students in grades K-1, phonics instruction led to improvements in decoding ability and reading comprehension across the board, according to the National Reading Panel Children at risk of developing future reading problems, children with disabilities, and children from all socio-economic backgrounds all benefited.
Later research reviews have confirmed that systematic phonics instruction is effective for students with disabilities, and shown that it also works for English-language learners Most studies of phonics instruction test its immediate effectiveness—after the intervention, are children better readers? Among students in older grades, the results are less clear.
A recent meta-analysis of the long-term effects of reading interventions 18 looked at phonics and phonemic awareness training, mostly in studies with children in grades K Both phonics and phonemic awareness interventions improved reading comprehension at an immediate post-test. But while the benefits of phonemic awareness interventions persisted in a follow-up test, the benefits of phonics interventions faded much more over time.
The average length of all interventions included in the study was about 40 hours, and the follow-up assessments were conducted about a year after the interventions were complete, on average. Depending on the estimate 19 , anywhere from 1 percent to 7 percent of children figure out how to decode words on their own, without explicit instruction.
They may spot the patterns in books read to them or print they see in their environment, and then they apply these patterns. It may seem like these children are reading words as whole units, or using guessing strategies to figure out what comes next in the story.
Of course, phonics instruction—like all teaching—can and should be differentiated to meet the needs of individual students where they are. For example, a child may see an illustration of an apple falling from a tree, and correctly guess that the sentence below the picture describes an apple falling from a tree.
Many early reading classrooms teach students strategies to identify a word by guessing with the help of context cues. Cueing systems were designed by analyzing errors 24 rather than practices of proficient readers, and have not shown benefits in controlled experiments Moreover, cognitive and neuroscience studies have found that guessing is a much less efficient way to identify a new word, and a mark of beginning or struggling readers, not proficient readers.
Skilled readers instead sound out new words to decode them. Balanced literacy programs often include both phonics and cueing, but studies suggest cueing instruction can make it more difficult for children to develop phonics skills because it takes their attention away from the letter sounds.
There is a general path that most children follow as they become skilled decoders. Research can tell us how children usually progress along this path, and which skills specifically predict better reading performance. Before starting kindergarten, children generally develop some early phonological awareness—an understanding of the sounds that make up spoken language.
They can rhyme, break down multi-syllable words, and recognize alliteration A next step in the process is understanding that graphemes—combinations of one or more letters—represent phonemes, the smallest units of spoken language. There are other early skills that relate to later reading and writing ability as well 29 , regardless of IQ or socio-economic status. Among these are writing letters, remembering spoken information for a short time, rapidly naming sequences of random letters, numbers, or pictures, and other phonological skills—like the ability to segment words into phonemes.
To decode words, students need to be taught to blend together the phonemes that graphemes represent on the page. Though there are some 15, syllables in English 30 , after a child has learned the 44 most common sound and letter combinations 31 , they will begin to sound out words as they read. In one method, students learn the sounds of the letters first and then blend these phonemes together to sound out words. The other method, analytic phonics, takes an inverted approach: Students identify—or analyze—the phonemes within words, and then use that knowledge to read other words.
A few studies have found synthetic phonics to be more effective than analytic phonics. Most notably, a seven-year longitudinal study from Scotland found that synthetic phonics taught in 1st grade gave students an advantage in reading and spelling over analytic phonics Other more recent research is still inconclusive Yes, but not alone; spelling and semantic rules go hand-in-hand with teaching letter sounds.
This shows that young readers use systems of understanding of both printed shapes and sounds when they see any written word. Understanding phonics gives students the foundation to read these irregular words. Even very young children can benefit from instruction designed to develop phonological awareness. The National Early Literacy Panel Report 38 , a meta-analysis of early literacy studies, found that teaching preschoolers and kindergartners how to distinguish the sounds in words, whether orally or in relationship to print, improved their reading and writing ability.
The children in these studies were generally between the ages of 3 and 5. But it is mixed, and students very quickly progress enough to get more benefit from texts that provide more complex and irregular words—and often texts that students find more interesting. The National Reading Panel report found that programs focusing on phonemic awareness, the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the smallest units of speech sounds, that lasted less than 20 hours total had the greatest effect on reading skills.
Across the studies that the researchers looked at, individual sessions lasted 25 minutes on average. But the authors of the NRP are quick to point out that these patterns are descriptive, not prescriptive. She sees the word and recognizes it immediately. Through reading the word again and again over time, her brain has linked this particular sequence to this word, through a process called orthographic mapping Phonics is essential to a research-based reading program.
There are five essential components of reading 43 : phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The National Reading Panel addressed all five of these components. The researchers found that having students read out loud with guidance and feedback improved reading fluency.
Vocabulary instruction, both explicit and implicit, led to better reading comprehension—and it was most effective when students had multiple opportunities to see and use new words in context. They also found that teaching comprehension strategies can also lead to gains in reading achievement, though most of these studies were done with students older than 2nd grade.
Children are introduced to a range of interactive activities that reinforce letter sounds and symbols, building phonemic awareness and phonics skills, as well as vocabulary and comprehension. Middle vowel sounds can be tricky for some children, which is why this activity can be so helpful. Prepare letter magnets on the fridge and pull the vowels to one side a, e, i, o, u. Say a CVC word consonant-vowel-consonant , for example 'cat', and ask your child to spell it using the magnets.
Learning to read should be an enjoyable process in order to keep kids motivated to improve. Sometimes a child might be full of excitement and eagerness to learn at the beginning, but once they hit a wall can feel overwhelmed and give up easily. As a parent, it can feel impossible to pick up again and know where to fill in any gaps that may be causing frustration.
Children are regularly rewarded for completing activities and reaching new levels, which keeps them motivated to stay on track. Parents can also view instant progress reports to see how a child's skills are improving. A lot of people don't realize just how many skills can be picked up through the simple act of reading to a child. Not only are you showing them how to sound out words, you're also building key comprehension skills, growing their vocabulary, and letting them hear what a fluent reader sounds like.
Most of all, regular reading helps your child to develop a love of reading, which is the best way to set them up for reading success. Strengthen your child's comprehension skills by asking questions while reading. For younger children, encourage them to engage with the pictures e. What color is the cat? Woodworth, who now works in accounting, 1 says she's still not a very good reader and tears up when she talks about it.
Reading "influences every aspect of your life," she said. She's determined to make sure her own kids get off to a better start than she did. That's why she was so alarmed to see how her oldest child, Claire, was being taught to read in school.
A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. The class was reading a book together and the teacher was telling the children to practice the strategies that good readers use. The teacher said, "If you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here," Woodworth recalled.
And the word was bear, and she said, 'Look at the first letter. It's a "b. Woodworth was stunned. She went to the teacher and expressed her concerns. The teacher told her she was teaching reading the way the curriculum told her to.
Woodworth had stumbled on to American education's own little secret about reading: Elementary schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers — and educators may not even know it.
For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by — memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know — are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school.
This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process. A shocking number of kids in the United States can't read very well. A third of all fourth-graders can't read at a basic level, and most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.
When kids struggle to learn how to read, it can lead to a downward spiral in which behavior, vocabulary, knowledge and other cognitive skills are eventually affected by slow reading development.
The fact that a disproven theory about how reading works is still driving the way many children are taught to read is part of the problem. School districts spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on curriculum materials that include this theory. Teachers are taught the theory in their teacher preparation programs and on the job.
As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read. The theory is known as "three cueing. The theory was first proposed in , when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City. In the paper, 5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words.
Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:. Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools. One idea is that reading is a visual memory process. The teaching method associated with this idea is known as "whole word. The books rely on word repetition, and pictures to support the meaning of the text.
The idea is that if you see words enough, you eventually store them in your memory as visual images. The other idea is that reading requires knowledge of the relationships between sounds and letters. Children learn to read by sounding out words. This approach is known as phonics. It goes way back, popularized in the s with the McGuffey readers.
These two ideas — whole word and phonics — had been taking turns as the favored way to teach reading until Goodman came along with what came to be known among educators as the "three-cueing system. In the cueing theory of how reading works, when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, the teacher encourages her to think of a word that makes sense and asks: Does it look right?
Does it sound right? If a word checks out on the basis of those questions, the child is getting it. She's on the path to skilled reading. Teachers may not know the term "three cueing," but they're probably familiar with "MSV. MSV is a cueing idea that can be traced back to the late Marie Clay, a developmental psychologist from New Zealand who first laid out her theories about reading in a dissertation in the s.
Clay developed her cueing theory independently of Goodman, but they met several times and had similar ideas about the reading process. Their theories were based on observational research. They would listen to children read, note the kinds of errors they made, and use that information to identify a child's reading difficulties.
For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence. Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words.
The goal was to comprehend text. These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools. Goodman's three-cueing idea formed the theoretical basis of an approach known as "whole language" that by the late s had taken hold throughout America.
It was implemented across New Zealand in the s and went on to become one of the world's most widely used reading intervention programs. But while cueing was taking hold in schools, scientists were busy studying the cognitive processes involved in reading words. And they came to different conclusions about how people read. It was the early s, and Keith Stanovich was working on his doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan.
He thought the reading field was ready for an infusion of knowledge from the "cognitive revolution" that was underway in psychology. Stanovich had a background in experimental science and an interest in learning and cognition due in part to the influence of his wife, Paula, who was a special education teacher. Stanovich wanted to understand how people read words. So, in , Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab.
They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context.
The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader.
This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research. Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory: Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters.
That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example. Experiments that force people to use context to predict words show that even skilled readers can correctly guess only a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to identify words are poor readers.
Weak word recognition skills are the most common and debilitating source of reading problems. The results of these studies are not controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings have been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works. It's not hard to find examples of the cueing system. A quick search on Google, Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers turns up plenty of lesson plans, teaching guides and classroom posters.
One popular poster has cute cartoon characters to remind children they have lots of strategies to use when they're stuck on a word, including looking at the picture Eagle Eye , getting their lips ready to try the first sound Lips the Fish , or just skipping the word altogether Skippy Frog.
There are videos online where you can see cueing in action. In one video posted on The Teaching Channel, 17 a kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, instructs her students to use "picture power" to identify the words on the page.
The goal of the lesson, according to the teacher, is for the students to "use the picture and a first sound to determine an unknown word in their book. The class reads a book together called "In the Garden. It's what's known as a predictable book; the sentences are all the same except for the last word. The children have been taught to memorize the words "look," "at," and "the. The lesson plan tells the teacher to cover up the word with a sticky note.
In the video, the wiggly kindergarteners sitting cross-legged on the floor come to a page with a picture of a butterfly. The teacher tells the kids that she's guessing the word is going to be butterfly. She uncovers the word to check on the accuracy of her guess. This lesson comes from "Units of Study for Teaching Reading," more commonly known as "reader's workshop.
But the children were not taught to decode words in this lesson. They were taught to guess words using pictures and patterns — hallmarks of the three-cueing system. Fountas and Pinnell have written several books about teaching reading, including a best-seller about a widely used instructional approach called "Guided Reading.
But many of the words in those books — butterfly, caterpillar — are words that beginning readers haven't been taught to decode yet. One purpose of the books is to teach children that when they get to a word they don't know, they can use context to figure it out. When put into practice in the classroom, these approaches can cause problems for children when they are learning to read.
Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.
Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess.
One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut! Goldberg had been hired by the Oakland schools in to help struggling readers by teaching a Fountas and Pinnell program called "Leveled Literacy Intervention" that uses leveled books and the cueing approach.
Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words.
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