How Children Learn To Read

How Children Learn to Read

Between the ages of four and nine, your child will have to master some 100 phonics rules, learn to recognize 3,000 words with just a glance, and develop a comfortable reading speed approaching 100 words a minute. He must learn to combine words on the page with a half-dozen squiggles called punctuation into something – a voice or image in his mind that gives back meaning. (Paul Kropp, 1996)

Why do we read? Why do we need to read? Reading plays an avid part in our daily lives. Whether we read the stop sign so we know to stop our car, read a map to navigate around a city, or to just read for pleasure, reading is important. Reading is the start of someones future and creates the foundation for the rest of their life. Reading takes place as soon as a baby is born. From day one, babies are listening and monitoring their surroundings and even though it doesn't seem like an infant that young can understand anything that is going on, they really do. They are putting together the sounds and babbling they hear and see and through a process, will be able to acquire the five components of effective reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Each language in the world uses a different assortment of phonemes – the distinctive sounds used to form words. When adults hear another language, they may not notice the differences in phonemes not used in their own language. Babies are born with the ability to distinguish these differences. Their babbles include many more sounds than those used in their home language. At about 6 to 10 months, babies begin to ignore the phonemes not used in their home language. They babble only the sounds made by the people who talk with them most often (Collins & Koralek, 2013 ).

During their first year, babies hear speech as a series of distinct, but meaningless words. By age 1, most children begin linking words to meaning. They understand the names used to label familiar objects, body parts, animals, and people. From this point on, children develop language skills rapidly. At about 18 months, children add new words to their vocabulary at a rate of one every 2 hours. By age 2, most children know approximately 2,000 words and combine two words to form simple sentences such as: "Go out." "All gone." Between 24 to 30 months, children speak in longer sentences. And from 30 to 36 months, children begin following the rules for expressing tense and use words such as some, would, and who. During these developmental stages, children are learning not only their reading and writing skills, but also listening and speaking skills (Collins & Koralek, 2013).

Once children have developed basic language skills now the task is to reinforce these skills in a classroom setting. The first component in reading instruction that is important is phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the basic understanding that spoken words are composed of different sounds (Ruddell, 2005). The skill sequence for the development of phonemic awareness is first students identify a word unit (cat, kitten), next they identify a syllable unit (kit+ten=kitten), third students identify the rhyme (kit-ten, mit-ten), last the identification of the phoneme is recgonized (blend: kitten= /kit/ /ten/) (Ruddell, 2005). To reinforce this sequence, phonemic awareness can be developed in a number of ways, such as focusing on rhyming words. Reading Dr. Seuss books or Mother Goose rhymes are often relatable to most younger children. These readings incorporate rhyme and using riddles that focus on sound units that will help reinforce the concept of phonemic awareness.

As children go through the primary grades, they gain phonics and other word identification skills that help them decipher print. Phonics is crucial during these stages of development because children need to learn how to spell and read high frequency words such as was, have, and they. In order to do this they need to know how to identify a word based on letter-sound and letter pattern-sound pattern relationships, which is also known as phonics (Vacca, 2012). Knowing these beginning stages of phonics will help children move through the stages of invented spelling then eventually towards conventional spelling.

As children develop the concept of phonics, they move towards fluency and how this can affect their reading. In order for a student to read fluently they must be able to recognize at sight—both quickly and accurately-- most of the words in any given passage. This will allow for more text to be covered, which is a significant factor in developing fluency. Fluent readers are also more drawn to the text and contribute to reading growth and comprehension. To help build fluency, repeated reading, simultaneous reading and paired reading are known to build confidence stimulate the wanting to read in students (Ruddell, 2005). In most elementary classrooms, at least two hours a day are devoted to reading and other language arts areas. During the rest of the day science, math, and social studies are taught. Even though we don't think of it often, learning these content-area subject provide perfect opportunities to help children build fluency skills. In order to read and write in these areas, they must know specialized vocabulary; which is another key component in learning how to read.

Vocabulary knowledge and comprehension develop rapidlytogether. Vocabulary knowledge has long been regarded as critical to children's comprehension development (Cunningham, 2004). Researchers have suggested that in order to address the tasks of teaching vocabulary, children should be enrolled in a program of rich instruction that is geared towards children's independent vocabulary-learning abilities. Direct instruction to help develop vocabulary meaning is a great step to take and help enrich the context meaning. Direct teaching of selected words that not only are essential to comprehending the text but to go beyond the text and understand them in a different context. Present word-learning strategies to children so they become independent and read outside of the classroom setting. Showing them how to use the text to develop meaning will be crucial to identify unknown words. Last, use a wide variety of reading materials in your classroom. Having an extensive variety of reading materials will open students up to many different levels of reading and multiple word selections. Once all of these steps are taken into account, the student will be able to comprehend the material they read. Comprehending includes not only being able to read something but to understand the deep meaning of the context.

Reading is the most important skill any child needs. Beyond their classroom years, adults still read on a constant basis. While most children have been surrounded by language from birth and can be fluent speakers by age three without conscious effort, a lot of children are not this fortunate. A select few have not been surrounded by language and their reading development is going to happen at a slower rate. As an educator we need to understand that all children learn differently and differentiating our instruction to meet the needs of all learners is vital. All students need to comprehend the five components of reading and it is our job as educators to get them to this educational level.

References:

Cunningham, Patricia Marr., James W. Cunningham, Sharon A. Moore, and David W. Moore. Reading and Writing in Elementary Classrooms: Research Based K-4 Instruction. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2004. Print.

Johns, Jerry L., Laurie Elish-Piper, and Beth Johns. Basic Reading Inventory: Pre-primer through Grade Twelve and Early Literacy Assessments. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Pub., 2012. Print.

Koralek, Derry, and Ray Collins (2013). "Reading Rockets." Reading Rockets. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2014. <http://www.readingrockets.org/article/386>.

Lyon, Reid (2012). "Reading Rockets." Reading Rockets. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Feb. 2014. <http://www.readingrockets.org/article/356>.

Ruddell, Robert B. Teaching Children to Read and Write: Becoming an Effective Literacy Teacher. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2005. Print.

Vacca, Jo Anne L., Richard T. Vacca, Mary K. Gove, Linda C. Burkey, Lisa A. Lenhart, and Christine A. McKeon. Reading and Learning to Read. Boston: Pearson, 2012. Print.