READING DEVELOPMENT

The early stages of reading require the learner to form a set of connections between the written forms of language and already acquired spoken forms. The child also has to recognise the extent to which the written word is a different modality from the spoken. Spoken language often takes the form of short exchanges between two or more interlocutors who can provide feedback and clarification. The pre-literate child has to adapt to an entirely new pragmatic environment, and to accept a situation where information can only be checked by reference to the text.

 An important factor is the relationship between the child’s sight vocabulary and its oral vocabulary. Once basic decoding skills have been established, the child goes through a stage where its reading ability catches up on its ability to understand speech. There then comes a cross-over point after which much information gained through reading becomes easier to process than the same information gained through listening; and many new words are acquired first in the visual modality rather than the spoken.

 Two main approaches are employed in the teaching of reading: the analytic phonics method, in which the learner is taught the relationship between letters and sounds, and the holistic whole word (or ‘look and say’) method, where a match is made between complete written and spoken word forms.

 Phonics would appear to tap into the child’s existing knowledge of the spoken language. But pre-literate infants may well not possess phonological awareness, the ability to recognise the words of a language as composed of discrete sounds. In addition, there are obvious problems with phonics in relation to an opaque spelling system such as the English one. These include the lack of a one-to-one relationship between letters and sounds (compare A in ABOUT, HAT, HATE), the use of digraphs (SH- as in SHARP) and the existence of irregular words (YACHT).

The whole word method is said to be more motivating, enabling children to identify words in text at once. However, it does not equip learners to use a sub-lexical route in order to work out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word from its spelling. This skill potentially plays a major part in the expansion of a child’s sight vocabulary once it starts reading independently. In support of the whole word technique, it has been claimed that skilled readers do not decode letters but identify words by their shapes. Evidence has not supported this. A currently influential interactive model of reading suggests that words are processed simultaneously at many different levels (letter feature, letter, letter order, word). This entails a need for phonic as well as whole word skills.

There are a number of other approaches to reading instruction. A compromise between phonics and whole word approaches makes use of analogy: when the word MIGHT is taught, children are reminded of its neighbours, words like LIGHT and RIGHT with a similar rime. There is evidence that rime plays a part in the decoding of words by adult readers; and that it is a strategy employed by child readers as young as six.

 The traditional alphabetic approach requires learners to master the names of the letters. There is no evidence that knowledge of letter names contributes to better early reading, although it may give support to letter shape recognition.

Various regularised alphabets have been devised for the teaching of reading, including some that employ colour coding of letters or diacritical marking. In Britain, the initial teaching alphabet (i.t.a.) enjoyed a vogue in the 1960s and 1970s. Evidence suggested that, after a year of reading, children who learnt with i.t.a. were better at word recognition though not at comprehension; however, this advantage seemed to be lost when they transferred to the standard alphabet.

Finally, a story approach asserts that it is not necessary to train children to read: they should instead be exposed to motivating material which is read aloud to them by an adult until such time as they feel able to read it themselves. The approach is based upon the notion that reading is a guessing game and that skilled adult readers make use of contextual information to relieve themselves of the necessity of decoding words. The theory is not supported by evidence, and the current consensus is that decoding skills have to be taught.

One model of reading development portrays novice readers as proceeding through four phases:

Phase 1: sight vocabulary. The child acquires a small set of words by being taught them by carers or by hearing a spoken word frequently associated with a label or sign. The child can still recognise these words when they are written in different scripts or cases. This direct procedure appears to involve recognising words as sequences of letters rather than as wholes.

Phase 2: discrimination net. The child assumes that every word form it encounters corresponds to a word from its limited reading vocabulary. It therefore makes highly approximate matches. It draws on minimal similarities such as length (TELEVISION read as ‘children’) or the presence of a particular letter (LIKE read as ‘black’ because it contains a k).

Phase 3: phonological recoding. At this stage, the child becomes capable of reading non-words. It begins to match unknown words with words that it knows in spoken form but has not yet learnt in writing. This suggests that sound-spelling rules are being acquired by the child, possibly supported by analogy.

Phase 4: orthographic. Sound-spelling rules do not serve to distinguish homophones such as WHERE and WEAR or to identify unique spellings such as YACHT. The importance of phonological recoding declines between six and ten years old; stronger readers lead the way in adopting orthographic form as the dominant representation.

Some researchers challenge this sequence, asserting that visual access develops first and remains the dominant mode at nine years old, with only the better readers possessing developed phonological encoding skills at that stage.

 An alternative approach measures development in terms of the extent to which the young reader relies upon sentence context to decode a word. A child’s first reading errors often fit the context but bear little formal resemblance to the target word. At a second stage, children become more aware of the importance of accurate decoding and stop reading when they reach words whose form they do not know. At a third stage (after about the first year of reading), the child’s errors come to reflect the influence of both context and form.

Alongside decoding, children have to acquire higher-level reading skills.

Syntax. Speech contains cues to syntactic boundaries in the form of intonation, pausing etc.; these are absent from reading. There is evidence that some young readers with adequate decoding skills read word by word and fail to recognise hierarchical syntactic patterns in text.

Inference. Children appear to be capable of applying inferences to text quite early on. They nevertheless perform better with texts where information is explicit rather than those where it is implicit, and make fewer inferences than adults.

Relevance. Sensitivity to what is important in a text develops gradually with experience of reading. In recall tasks, early readers are more likely to mention important points than peripheral ones; but they have difficulty in identifying main ideas or grouping sentences according to topic.

Text structure. An awareness of logical structure seems to pre-date reading: young children are sensitive to the structure of stories, and disruptions of conventional order make stories difficult for them to follow.

Comprehension monitoring. Younger readers often fail to check their representation of what a text says to ensure that it is consistent. They are less likely to notice internal inconsistencies in a text than problems arising from difficult vocabulary. This may be partly because the effort involved in lower-level processing places relatively heavy demands upon memory.

 See also: Phonological awareness, Reading: decoding, Reading: skilled

Further reading: Goswami and Bryant (1990); Harris and Coltheart (1986: Chap. 4); Oakhill and Beard (1999); Oakhill and Garnham (1988: Chap. 4)

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

قسم التطوير يقيم دورة تدريبية عن إعداد المراسلات والمخاطبات الإدارية

وزارة التعليم العالي تكرم جامعة العميد لحصولها على جائزة المكتبة الأكاديمية المتميزة

جمعية العميد تناقش استعداداتها لانطلاق فعاليات المؤتمر العلمي الرابع لإحياء تراث أمير المؤمنين (عليه السلام)

أكاديمية التطوير الإداري تواصل برنامج الخطة الخمسينية لعدد من ملاكات العتبة العباسية المقدسة

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

الرياضة وحدها لا تكفي.. كيف يؤثر الجلوس الطويل على الصحة؟

دراسة: بدائل السكر ليست آمنة على الكبد

تفاحة قبل النوم.. عادة بسيطة مفيدة أم خطر على الصحة؟

احذر مشاركتها مع الآخرين.. 3 أدوات شائعة قد تنقل أمراض خطيرة

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

الهنغاري لاسلو كراسناهوركاي يفوز بجائزة نوبل للآداب 2025

رسميا.. إعلان الفائز بجائزة نوبل للسلام لعام 2025

باحثون: تشات جي بي تي ونماذج الذكاء الاصطناعي يمكن "تسميمها"

عالمان في الأعصاب يرفعان دعوى قضائية ضد شركة آبل

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

SPEECH PERCEPTION: AUTONOMOUS VS INTERACTIVE

SPEECH MODE2

SPEECH MODE1

SPEECH CODE

SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT (SLI)

SPECIES SPECIFICITY

SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES (also EXCEPTIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES)

SPEAKING RATE

SOCIAL-INTERACTIONISM

SLIPS OF THE TONGUE (SOT)

SLIPS OF THE PEN (AND KEYBOARD)

SLIPS OF THE EAR