Specific Literacy Experiences: The Reading

ActEvery day, in the classroom, children

engage in reading like self-reading, storytelling and phonies, sight word, letter-sound relations. Therefore, the teacher must plan specific activities to help children use their knowledge and their developing abilities so that they can get and make meaning from printed literacy materials. These activities must promote children’s expression of their creative ideas and critical thoughts.

Story Reading / Story TellingThe use of story reading not only for

the story itself, but as a means of generating other activities aids transfer. (Campbell, 1998) Story reading provides various encounters with language from which children can build their data pool. Children can memorize familiar stories that can join in adult reading or shared reading. Gradually, children can link the events of the story to picture cues and can mark beginning reading of story texts. Hopefully, in the final stage, they can read unfamiliar text independently.

Story reading is an immersion to literacy. Through a story, children learn about language – new words, new syntactic

words, meanings and ways of organizing discourse (Dombay, 1988). Similarly, reading aloud enriches vocabulary and sense of story. Story reading or reading aloud allows children to make comments about the characters, objects, book cover, to join in with parts of the text like rhymes and repetitions, to predict events and ending, and to relate the text to their lives. Story reading promotes interactive reading, like interaction with the teacher, as he/she encourages the children to comment and to question and interact with the text directly or indirectly.

Wells (1987) identified the importance of the story telling in providing kids access to narratives. Story telling is an important feature of literacy development and is a central component of the literacy children encounter subsequently in the more formal setting (Campbell, 1998). Story telling helps children to deduce meaning of and from narrative texts.

Story reading and story telling develops among children shared reading and retelling. Children themselves develop as story tellers as they tell their own stories and respond to the subsequent telling and retelling. These become possible when children are exposed to and provided with Big Books as early in their beginning reading since through Big Books (Holdaway, 1979) all children can follow reading and can learn from it.

Table 10 Transferred LearningInput Process > Transfer Output

Story Reading or Story Telling

Reading aloud, attentive and appreciative listening, social

interaction

Vocabulary knowledge, picture analysis, prediction,

comprehension, interactive reading, shared reading, retelling

VocabularyStructural analysis, context

clues, determining synonyms or antonyms

Use in meaningful context (written or oral), comprehension

Independent reading

Silent reading, think aloud

Creative version of the story, imaginative illustrations of

characters, memorized unfamiliar or favorite story, retelling,

reading fluency, creative writing

Reported by:

Sheena E. Bernal3rd Year / BEEd-SpEdMSC 8 MW 3:00-4:30PM