Embedded Files
Reading is a Complex Act
Reading requires the development and use of several skills(mental processes)at the same time: Phonemic awareness, word knowledge, fluency, comprehension and motivation. If there are weaknesses in one area, the whole process is impacted. For example, it is common for students to have difficulties with decoding, and this can impact fluency, which in turn, can decrease motivation to read. This lack of motivation causes a vicious cycle as students do not want to read. This lack of reading negatively impacts the development of new schema and vocabulary which makes comprehension more difficult when reading takes place in class. We need readers to be good at all skills AND motivated to read. Here is a good website that show the 5 main areas of instruction to help readers.
Reading and the Role of Schema: The role of schema is very important when reading. Incoming information interacts with schema as the student creates meaning. They say that no two people read the same book. This is true because no two people are the same schema. When people with vastly different schema and life experiences read a book, they often have different interpretations. Schema also helps students fill in the blanks. This means that when students do not understand a word or a phrase, she might be able to still make meaning because they can fill in the gaps with their background knowledge. Remember the class activity we did? We read a variety of texts form the view point of people with different schema.
The Basic Reading Models
Top-down: This model of reading states that reading is a process that involves the higher-order thinking skills of the reader. Higher-order thinking skills means that the reader has background experiences (schema) and she brings this to the text to strategically and holistically make meaning from a text. In top-down the focus is on the creation of meaning, and we use our judgment to help create meaning by filling in blanks with our judgement. An important feature of this reading model is that not all words need to be known and not all words need to be decoded accurately for comprehension. People from this point of view, state that students will learn to decode by reading for meaning and experience. Students do not need systematic and full instructions on how to decode the language. Kenneth Goodman is a big name for this type of reading.
Bottom-up: This view of reading states that reading starts with the decoding of the text and then once the text is decoded the reader THEN creates meaning. The meaning is in the text and we decode to get the meaning. This view believes in systematic, comprehensive teaching of the sounds of the language so students can accurately decode the words in the language. This means in the earlier years there is a heavy focus on phonics activities that help students have a strong phonemic awareness.
Interactive Views: This view states that both processes are used by readers. They use both top-down and bottom up processes. For example, the students will use top-down processes but when they have difficulty they can use bottom up process to look closely at text to help solve the problem. In short both processes are necessary for good reading.
Categories of Developing Readers
Emergent Reader: This reader can work with print, but at the beginning stages. For example, they can read words like bat, cat, hot, hit. They need books that have language and vocabulary that is repetitive with lots of pictures. They also need large print with only small amounts of text on the page. Most of all they need lots of guidance from the teacher to help them. Motivation is real important. Here is an example of an emergent reader text
Early Reader: This reader can decode reasonably well and are beginning to use strategies for figuring a word in context and are starting to use schema and background knowledge to help make meaning of a text. This means that they rely less on pictures and teacher support. However, they still need to pay close attention to the cueing system (structural, graphophonic, semantic cues) In short, this means they they are concentrating a lot to make meaning and are paying careful attention to all the parts of the text. Reading is not fully 'automatized'.
Transitional Reader: This type of reader is reading at a good pace. This means that the reading has developed to an automatic skill' for most of the text in the book. They have strategies to figure out most Towords but will need support for more challenging vocabulary. They can deal with more complex sentences.
Fluent Reader: This type of readers can deal with complex vocabulary and sentence structure, and they can maintain comprehension over a long stretch of text. This type of reader see a text as a way to change how one thinks and may use the ideas in her life.
The Wonderful World of Phonological Awareness: The Gateway to Decoding
This slideshow will help you with the basic terms of teaching phonics.
Teaching the Alphabet:
Teaching the alphabet using an example word plus physical movement is a best practice.
Teaching Phonemes: This is a great playlist of teaching
Phonemes.
Teaching Phonics: The Six Steps
Good video about teaching sounds
The 3 stages of a (Guided) Reading Lesson:
-Pre-reading
We prepare our students to read the text. This includes The activation of schema, discussion of important vocabulary words, setting a purpose for reading and creating enthusiasm and interest in the top and making predictions based on the schema, title, pictures, and key words. Finally, make sure that the students understand the genre, for example, fable, biography, or a tall tale.
-While-reading:
In this stage we help and support our readers during the process of building and understanding of the text. This can include activities such as paraphrasing, answering questions, and drawing pictures just to name a few. The goal of the while-reading stage is to support the students and help them monitor their own comprehension. One of the most important ways to help them monitor comprehension is to have students check their predictions made in the pre-reading stage and then make new predictions based on what they are reading.
-Post-reading
In this stage, we help our readers process the text in a deeper way through activities that help them think about or apply the themes and concepts in the text. We want them to connect the text to their life in some way and see the relevance of the text to their life. Students can write poems, act out scenes, write summaries, reflection journals just to name a few. What is important to remember that the post-reading stage is help deepen and extend their understanding of the text, hopefully helping them 'experience' the text. Books change us, and the post-reading stage is a chance for students to find that out through thinking and doing activities relevant to the text. Here are several videos that should be very helpful.
Questioning Protocols: Text-to Self, Text-to-World, Text-to-Text
Google Sites
Report abuse