Analysis Of Two Approaches In Reading Instruction

Mary Diemer
EDU 555
November 20, 2014
Two Approaches in Reading Instruction
Early-childhood teachers everywhere are faced with the challenges of teaching their students how to read. Students enter their classrooms with a variety of different ability levels and backgrounds. Some students can read before they ever step foot into their kindergarten classrooms. Some students do not know how to hold a book and open it properly. Other students cannot speak the language of their teachers and classmates.
Reading is a complicated process. According to Stanislas Dehaene (2009), an entire series of mental and cerebral operations must occur before a word can be decoded. As you read, you are constructing meaning by making sense of the text. Like spoken

A phoneme is the basic unit of sound. Different phonemes signal different meanings. (Reed, 2007) Educators define phonemic awareness as the mindfulness that words are made of individual sounds. Reading instruction begins like language acquisition. Phonemic awareness is easily fostered in early childhood classrooms. Teachers and students can chant nursery rhymes, manipulate magnetic letters and clap syllables. Children can learn to recognize words with the same phonemes through rhyme and alliteration. They learn to blend sounds together to make a word by listening to a variety of texts read loud. Students can learn how to break a word into its different sounds by singing and chanting written words. (Bertrand and Stice, 2002) Phonemic awareness is especially important in ELLs. ELL students heard a different set of phonemes as babies. The sounds of the English language may be drastically different than the sounds of their native tongue. Phonemic awareness must be explicitly taught among ELL students in order to foster reading. All children that develop phonemic awareness make connections between the sounds they hear and the symbols they

It makes sense to use a phonics approach when teaching reading. The instruction would benefit the students in mastering the written and oral language. I understand the merits of the whole-language reading approach. Students learn how to read while developing deeper comprehension. However, our ELL students need specific strategies for word recognition. Teachers should be encouraged to use rhymes, alliterative stories and songs to meet the needs of the English Language Learners in their classrooms. Through decoding strategies- developed from phonemic awareness- ELLs can learn to become confident, independent readers, as they tackle the challenges of becoming proficient speakers and readers of the English language.
Word Count: 1579
References
Bertand, Nancy P. & Stice, Carole F. (2002). Good Teaching. Portsmouth: Heinemann
Dehaene, Stanislas. (2009). Reading in the Brain. New York: Viking
Reed, Stephen K. (2007) Comprehension and Memory for Text. (7th Ed.), Cognition (pp. 271-298). Belmont: Thomson: Wadsworth
Robeck, Mildred, C. & Wilson, John A.R. (1973). Psychology of Reading Foundations of Instruction. New York: