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
baby
elephant
one
tiny
hedgehog
the
noisy
aeroplane
1 syllable
2 syllables
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
+
(ONSET)
str +
and
=
sand
(RIME)
ing
=
string
 Nearly 500 primary grade words can be made from the following set of
37 rimes:
-ack -all -ain -ake -ale -ame -an
-ank -ap –ash -at -ate -aw -ay
-eat -ell -est -ice -ick -ide -ight
-ill -in -ine -ing -ink -ip -ir
-ock -oke -op -ore -or -uck -ug
-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 difficulty
or 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
find information
ways to improve
reading fluency
underlining
main ideas and details
outlining
note taking
listing/ranking
classifying
cloze
sequencing
prediction
skimming
headlines
ways to get
more
understanding
segmenting
titling
labelling
modelling mapping
time charts
flow charts, cycles,
tables
The Reading Process
Jane Coates