Reading is a complex task which incorporates several elements for teachers to effectively teach students to read. Reading is the process of constructing meaning from text and using the student’s prior knowledge and experience to make sense of the context. A balanced approach to reading is the most effective way to teach students to read as it gives student’s the correct learning opportunities to become engaged and passionate readers.
A balanced approach to reading involves the effective use of both phonics and whole language. The elements of the two are combined into a program aimed at educating students to be proficient and lifelong readers. The use of phonics and whole language stems from the strategies ‘Bottom-Up’ approach and ‘Top-Down’
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When students understand, which letters blend together to make a word, they can practice blending the sounds together. The advantage of this approach will assist students to know that the reading and writing process requires blending together and pulling apart the sounds of the language (Konza, 2014). Students can practice these blending skills by reading short decodable books and this will be beneficial for students to build confidence, fluency, and automaticity with their new skill (Konza, …show more content…
A fun way to encourage phonics learning is through nursery rhymes, songs, poetry with repetitive language and non-fiction books. Students should be encouraged to practice this skill with independent reading.
Fluent readers can recognise words and at the same time comprehend the meaning. They do not need to work on decoding the text so they can focus on the meaning of the text. This is the point that “Learning to Read” becomes “Reading to Learn” (Konza, 2010). Once the student has developed an understanding of phonemic awareness, knowledge of the alphabet and understands the context, they can fluency read a story providing it contains simple language structures (Konza, 2016). Fluency will continue to develop as the students vocabulary expands.
Fluent readers can focus their main attention on what the text means rather than having to concentrate on decoding the words. They can recognise words and understand them at the same time, however, less fluent readers will focus on figuring out the words rather than understanding the meaning of the text. Fluent readers can recognise words automatically and group words quickly to obtain meaning from what they have read. A student who has not developed fluency will read word by word and as they read aloud, this will be slow and choppy (Learning Point Associates,
Practicing Systematic Synthetic Phonics helps to develop early reading in a number of different ways; Ehri (1988) suggested that there were four main ways in which a reader might recognise an unknown w...
Overall, teachers need to take into account all six critical areas of reading when teaching. No matter the subject or time constraints, teachers need to incorporate all areas into the curriculum. Reading is a complex process. If a student does not know to read, a student will never to be able to achieve their best. When using all six areas teachers are using a balanced literacy approach and create greater success for students to succeed in reading and writing.
The history of the use of phonics dates back to the 1700’s. Backs then, children were taught to read through their memorization of the twenty-six-letter alphabet. Since many books hadn’t been written, their primary textbook was the Bible. Although there is no accounts for when whole language originated some believe that it was around the same time as phonics. The whole language reading method was widespread for thirty years, from around 1940 to 1970. From around 1970 to 1990, phonics was popular. Whole Language gained the most recent foothold around 1990. (Stahl 1996) Several times they have gone back and forth. The debate over whole language and phonics has gone on for years. Which way is best in teaching children how to read? The education world has been debating this issue for years and there still are no exact answers. In more recent year’s instruction specialist have argued that some sort of middle ground should be reached because it would give children the benefits of both. (Cromwell 1997) Some form of middle ground needs to be obtained if children’s needs are going to be met.
What is the problem you are addressing? Students have to learn the names and sounds of the letters in order move on into more advance connections that will lead them into success in reading and writing. Traditional teaching methods in our schools allow students to make the connections between letter prints and phonemes using mostly visual and auditory learning styles. This early reading task is not easy for beginners (Ehri, Deffner & Lee, 1984, p. 880). In order to ease the difficulties young scholars might encounter while learning sound to letter graphic representation, multi sensory teaching methods that have been tested such as the Orton-Gillingham. The use of multi sensory teaching methods from trained teachers have been able to prove student improvement in decoding ability, and application of decoding skills ( Trepanier, 2009). QSI has a vast population of non native kindergarten students, who though can hear and produce the sounds of the letter taught, they might benefit from incorporating kinaesthetic letter patterns into phonic instruction. This intervention would be the stepping stone for the production of CVC words/ pseudo words. In my 10 year experience teaching kindergarten students overseas I have experience the benefits of using visual aids for students to manipulate sounds with the propose of reading words or and writing them. This action research is an attempt to identify if this specific kinaesthetic intervention to learn letter/phoneme relationship will help students make the required connections to enhance their phonemic awareness.
Balanced Literacy is an approach for teaching literacy that is widely used in classrooms across the country. It involves several methods of teaching and learning reading and writing, whole class instruction directed by the teacher with independent work in reading, writing, and oral language. By integrating a variety of approaches, a balance is achieved in which students learning to understand text (from a whole language approach) as well as how to read text (from a phonics approach). Effective phonics instruction focuses children's attention on noticing the letter/sound patterns in initial consonants and consonant clusters and in rimes.
As indicated by Ziegler and Goswami (2005), reading is the process of understanding and making sense of speech or written down thoughts. The initial goal of reading is to gain access to the meaning of sentences. To achieve reading student must learn the letters used by their society for representing speech or thoughts as series of visual symbols and they also found that the critical characteristic to develop reading depends on phonological consciousness. Ziegler and Goswami (2005) focused on the psycholinguistic grain size theory, reading acquisition and...
"Learning to read is like learning to drive a car. You take lessons and learn the mechanics and the rules of the road. After a few weeks you have
The FLaRE (Florida Literacy and Reading Excellence) Center has published a professional paper entitled “Phonemic Awareness” of which I will be presenting a critical review. Phonemic awareness is one of the five essential components of reading identified by the National reading Panel (Learning Point Associates, 2004). Phonemic awareness can be defined as a person’s understanding that each word we speak is comprised of individual sounds called phonemes and that these sounds can be blended to form different words (Learning Point Associates, 2004). The article was intended to give a synopsis of phonemic awareness and the vital role it plays in a literacy program. I found the article to be very clear and concise presenting valuable tactics that can be applied in the classroom.
My previous conceptions and beliefs about reading have been challenged by looking at a different group of learners. Now, I have a more solid theoretical understanding understanding of the importance of reflective reading practices, in which the reader realize that reading is a complex process that is not determined for the fluency and “correctness” of matching the printed word with its expected and “appropriate” sound. I am also more aware of the importance of continuous support for struggling readers in post-secondary
...nd a sizable vocabulary that contains the words they’re attempting to read. Vocabularies are built with the help of strong phonics skill, which in turn build upon good phonological skills and oral language capabilities.
As an educator, it is essential that goals include teaching students to be the best possible students that they can. With this, teachers need to pick and choose from differing literacy programs to suit the needs of all students. Providing a combination of approaches is the best from of teaching literacy. Providing students with the benefits from a basal reader and using children’s books is the best way to teach literacy in a classroom. According to Pressley, a balanced literacy program is one that integrates effective skills instruction and a high awareness of holistic reading and writing. By integrating skills instruction and a holistic approach, the students will be provided with the skills and background knowledge that they will need to learn to read. A balanced literacy program in the classroom should involve explicit ...
Reading and writing is a key part of everyone’s life. There has been some encouraging levels of reading development in primary school assessments. According to the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy report (2015), 95.5% of students achieve at or above the national minimum standard of reading. It is important to know effective ways to teach reading so children can become active problem solvers to enable them to read for meaning or for fun. Over the years, there has been a big amount of research into the most effective ways to teach reading skills to students. There are some systematically taught key skills and strategies that help achieve these levels of reading. Some of these skills include phonological awareness, phonemic awareness,
In these days, the world would become more and more cultural. Since phonics is important step for readers, teachers should focus more on it. This is a way to lead them to success on reading. Teachers are able to know how to improve students’ literacy skill; they should dedicate time to each reading and writing. They cannot focus on only one thing. Every part should be balanced for balanced literacy. They should equally practice for each section. It is very important step to be balanced. They have to incorporate reading, writing, listening, and speaking into activities. They should know how to make students to be active to learn new things. They get easily get bored by doing same activity again and again. It also affects for the adults too. It is important to try new and creative activities to improve their skills. Once they incorporate them into activities, they must make students to be actively involved into the lessons to improve their skills. Teacher’s role is important to the students because their skills can be enhanced or dropped depend on teachers’ role. It is hard job for them, but they should lead the students. There are some complexes for balanced literacy, but teachers are able to handle these problems. There are many things to make even. Students do not learn everything at the same time even we do not learn at the same time. Different kinds and different parts
Reading is an essential skill that needs to be addressed when dealing with students with disabilities. Reading is a skill that will be used for a student’s entire life. Therefore, it needs to be an important skill that is learned and used proficiently in order for a student to succeed in the real world. There are many techniques that educators can use to help improve a student’s reading comprehension. One of these skills that needs to be directly and explicitly taught is learning how to read fluently for comprehension. “To comprehend texts, the reader must be a fluent decoder and not a laborious, word-by-word reader” (Kameenui, 252). Comprehension can be difficult for students with learning disabilities because they tend to be the students that are reading below grade level. One strategy is to incorporate the student’s background knowledge into a lesson. This may require a bit of work, but it will help the students relate with the information being pres...
Good reading skills are very important in learning languages. Reading improves spelling because as students learn to sound out letters and words, spelling comes easier. It helps to expand the vocabulary, since the best way to acquire a large vocabulary is to read. Students learn new words as they read and put them in their mind for later use. . They also unconsciously absorb the information about things like how to structure the sentences, how words are used in different contexts, and it gives a better understanding of the word usage and definitions than the cold facts of a dictionary. It improves a person’s vocabulary and knowledge without the person even knowing it. Even if students do not understand every word, they will hear new sounds, words and phrases which they can then try out, copying what they have heard. They can comprehend ideas, follow arguments and detect implications. Reading texts also provide good models for English writing. Krashen (2004) found that reading is extremely important in learning English, since it is the only way to “become a good reader, develop a good writing style, an adequate vocabulary, advanced grammar” and the only way to “become a good speller”.