The Reading Process

Jane Coates

Mrs Jane Coates Background:Jane Coates - an experienced Social Worker and Primary School Teacher based in Leeds, UK, but spends regular periods abroad as a volunteer teacher. Jane has had short periods of teaching in Angola, Africa; Bangladesh; India and Afghanistan. She is particularly committed to teaching in China, and has led teacher teams each July for the past 6 years (in Luzhou, Sichuan; Xingtang, Hebei; and Chuzhou, Jiangsu Province and Guangxi Province.) and this is her 7th Summer English Programme on behalf of the Amity Foundation. Amity is a charity which was one of the first NGOs officially approved by the Chinese Government. Its Summer Programme helps Chinese teachers of English to develop oracy skills (speaking and listening, language and teaching skills).She has been married to Professor Coates for 40 years and they have four adult children and three grandchildren.

What is involved in the reading process?How can Teachers support this process?

The active process of getting meaning from print

comprehension and word recognition/decoding

Word recognition and language comprehension need a different weighting

Teaching of word recognition/phonic knowledge and skills. Then language comprehension processes

Develop a wide range of skills and strategies

What do children need in order to become good readers?

Phonics (grapho-phonic skills) 44 sounds (phonemes) in English and 26 letters Phonics describes the sound/symbol correspondence

Learning the Letter Sounds The sounds are taught in seven

groups Blend: the two sounds, s and t can

each be heard (e.g. mishap) Digraph: (e.g. midship)

Encourage children to say the two sounds as one unit (fl-a-g not f-l-a-g)

What do children need in order to become good readers?

Syllables

Teacher rhythmically clapping syllables

Writing words on cards and cutting cards up into syllables

Colour each syllable a different colour on a word card.

Give children the first syllable to complete the word

Word search

Building syllabic phrase, e.g:

a one the 1 syllablebaby tiny noisy 2 syllableselephant hedgehog aeroplane 3 syllables

What do children need in order to become good readers?

Onset and rime

Within syllables there is a natural distinction between the onset and the rime.

The onset is the opening consonant or consonant cluster. The rime is the vowel sound and any following consonents.

e.g.: s + and = sand

(ONSET) (RIME)

str + ing = string

Nearly 500 primary grade words can be made from the following set of 37 rimes:

-ack -all -ain -ake -ale -ame -an -ill -in -ine -ing -ink -ip -ir-ank -ap –ash -at -ate -aw -ay -ock -oke -op -ore -or -uck -

ug -eat -ell -est -ice -ick -ide -ight -ump -unk

Some suggestions of ways to develop phonological awareness

multi-sensory, systematic, and daily aiming for fluent and fast word recognition The full circle game: t a i s p - sat, sit, sip, tip, tap, sap, sat. Phoneme discrimination - being able to pick out individual sounds Splitting up the sounds within words and putting them together again Words with common sounds and common letter sequences / strings

e.g.: -en den hen men pen ten Syllable work - clapping syllables, segmentation, onset and rime activities Concept of rhyme—poems, jingles-leaving out the last rhyme for children to fill in Discriminating between rhyming and non-rhyming words

What do children need in order to become good readers?

Sight vocabulary - key words and high frequency words Being able to recognize words on sight eliminates the frustrating process of trying to

“break down” non-phonetic words. The first 100 high frequency words make up one half of words in common use. Evidence that teaching words in isolation (e.g. flash cards), is not always effective. Better to have a word card with the high frequency word and sentence providing

context meaningful and memorable to the child

Semantic (relating to meaning)

The key elements here are: Understanding and interpreting texts. Engaging and responding to the text.

Children need to be taught to use their knowledge of book conventions, story structure, patterns of language and presentational devices and to also use their background knowledge and understanding of the content of a book.

What do children need in order to become good readers?

Shared and Guided reading:

Responding to the text - thinking and talking about the book

Reading aloud together is less threatening than individually

Some schools colour code books according to level of difficultyor use a published graded reading scheme

Shared and Guided reading -1

Responding to the text is at the centre of all reading. Children need to personalize knowledge in order to both understand it and retain it. Group reading creates a sharing situation which naturally leads to thinking and talking about the book giving children the best opportunity to personalise their knowledge.

The teacher is able to model reading skills and the response to the text.

The teacher is able to observe and assess the children’s reading strategies.

Reading aloud together in a group is far less threatening to children than reading individually to an adult.

Shared and Guided reading -2

Once children have mastered the basic skills of reading adequately and choose to read silently many teachers are uncertain how to develop their reading further.

Some schools colour code the class library books according to the level of difficulty of the texts; others use a published graded reading scheme; others encourage children to choose books for themselves from the school or class library.

Too many children develop only as “surface” readers. These children read for the story alone and rarely explore subtle aspects of the text such as making inferences and deductions about the plot and characters.

DARTS (Directed Activities Related to Text)

help children to become critical and reflective readers

involve a collaborative approach

talk always precedes any written work

Activities:

Underlining Outlining Listing / ranking Time ordering (flow diagram) Scanning Cloze procedure Sequencing

Prediction (what happens next?) Skimming Chaining. Headlines/Titling Segmenting Labelling Modelling

Ways to improve:

Ways to help ways to improve ways to get

find information reading fluency more

understanding

underlining cloze segmenting

main ideas and details sequencing titling

outlining prediction labelling

note taking skimming modelling mapping

listing/ranking headlines time charts

classifying flow charts, cycles, tables

The Reading Process

Jane Coates