Developing reading
When does reading start?
• Formally? Age 4, in school.
• However, words might appear to young
children sooner. E.g. PUSH and PULL on
doors.
• Where may very young children absorb
information from?
Thinking points
• 1. Did your pre school or family experience
shape your attitude to reading and writing
and your confidence at school?
• 2. Technology offers new types of literacy.
What kind of literacy do you need to use
it?
• 3. Should other cultural practices be more
valued within schools?
What do you think baby/toddler
books aim to do? How do they
achieve their aims?
Baby/ toddler books
• Help with speech development by providing pictures for children to
label objects/package/network build.
• Often based around themes or topics using hypernyms to provide
children with relevant hyponyms and allow them to network build.
• Initially designed to be read to children – therefore they contain
complicated grammatical structure that children wouldn’t be able to
read.
• They increase children’s knowledge of immediate environment.
• Provide an enjoyable shared experience.
• Reading scheme books are different – focus on entertainment, but
also to help the formal learning process.
• Children become independent reader around the age of 8.
Now let’s look at some theorists that will
help us discuss how children learn to
read...
B. F. Skinner
• Imitation theory
• Children can be seen learning to read
through clear imitation and repeating of
words
Jerome Bruner- LASS (language
acquisition support system)
Explains how parents use book to interact with babies.
He saw parent child interactions as having 4 phases:
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1. Gaining attention- getting the babies attention on a picture.
2. Query- asking the baby what the object is.
3. Label- telling the baby what the object in the picture is.
4. Feedback- responding to the baby’s utterance.
• He was inspired by Vygotsky, who believed that children learn
by being helped to do it when they are ready- and part of a
‘scaffolding’ process. Both see children as active learners and
believe that the social context of their experiences are of
paramount importance.
Jeanne Chall
An expert on reading development, Jeanne Chall, surmised
that "the learning and uses of literacy are among the most
advanced forms of intelligence, and, compared to other
forms, depend more on instruction and practice" (1983, p.
2). Chall (1983) proposed six developmental stages that
describe how children typically learn to read, as
summarized in table below.
Noam Chomsky
• Nativism: the theory that the ability to acquire language is
genetic and innate
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Theory
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Language has a quality of innateness.
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Big gap between evidence available to child and linguistic
system they ultimately construct
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Language Acquisition Device (LAD: an instinctive mental
ability to develop language)
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Universal Grammar (initial state of LAD) – what child has at
birth
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Children assemble sets of rules as they see language about
them
Jean Piaget
Theory of Cognitive Development
Theory of Cognitive
Development
• One of the most famous theories used to
explain children’s overall cognitive
development.
• It can be used by literacy educators to
understand the learning stages through which
students progress as they mature and their
relationship to literacy achievement.
• Let’s look at this more closely…
Birth – 2 Years of Age
• Sensory exploration of the world: Children
do not have language skills and are
dependent on their senses.
• Activities for Literacy
– Board books with brightly colored pictures
– Books with sound, things to touch, or smell
2 Years – 7 Years of Age
• This stage is categorized with rapid
language development. Children begin to
categorize with words.
• Activities for Literacy
– Story book reading and discussing the story
7 Years – 11 Years of Age
• In this stage of
development, children use
concrete objects to begin
to think about abstract
concepts.
• Books for younger children
will often contain lots of
concrete nouns and mostly
avoid including abstract
nouns.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA76Wa7uUxw
How do the texts do the following…
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Interact with their audience
Suggest values.
Use rhyme and other phonological devices
Depict characters (animal? human?)
Use spoken language features
Proportion of text to pictures
Hypernyms/hyponyms/semantic fields
Structural devices (repetition, repetition of
sentence frames, lexical cohesion –
connectives)
• Vary sentence moods – declarative,
exclamatory, interrogative, imperative
Graphemes and phonemes
• A grapheme: a written symbol, letter or combination of
letters that represent a phoneme or a sound.
Children need to understand that written texts:
1. reflect the relationship between symbols (graphemes)
and sounds (phonemes).
2. have cohesion, with different parts interconnecting
3. are organised in particular ways, chapters, headings etc
4. differ in their organisation according to genre (fiction and
non-fiction)
5. represent their original culture, following its rules and
conventions
How are children taught to read?
Looking into the deep and distant past….
• Can you remember how were you taught
to read?
How are children taught to read?
‘Look and say’ or whole word approach.
• Children learn the shape of words, without
recognising individual phonemes.
• The method is often with flashcards, with
an image to accompany it.
• What are the advantages?
• Disadvantages?
How are children taught to read?
The ‘phonics’ approach.
• Children learn the different sounds made by
different letters and put them together. Emphasis
is on phonological awareness and on hearing,
differentiating sounds in spoken words. The two
main approaches are analytic and synthetic.
• This is currently viewed as being the most
effective… why?
• Any disadvantages?
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e5--3wLUUk
Context – Oliver (7 years old)is reading his school
book to his mother at home
C: the horse needs a new shoe (.) got any jobs mister (.)
asked Vicky I’ll give you a penny to jump
M: not jump
C: pump
M: yeah
C: the pi b-billows
M: not (.) not (.) billows what does that say what does that
part of the word say [mother covers up the end of the
word to leave “bell”]
C: bell [mother takes hand off word] ows
M: yes bellows
What can we say about the context of this?
What theorists can we link it to?
Encouraging and motivating…
• The best case scenario is parents reading
with children externally as well, for obvious
reasons!
• Through positive reinforcement, parents
can aid a child’s development. Skinner
would love this stuff!
Cues
• Cueing is the strategy used to help decode
written texts successfully.
• Graphaphonic- looking at the shapes of words, linking
them to familiar grapheme/words to interpret them.
• Semantic- understanding the meanings of words and
making connections to new ones.
• Visual- looking at images to connect to
words/graphemes.
• Syntactic- applying word knowledge and word classes
to work out if context of word is correct.
• Contextual- searching for own experience to compare
with or social conventions (pragmatics)
• Miscue- learning from errors.
Transcript
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M: Okay you are going to read your book to me today Ollie (2.0) what’s it
called
O: Victorian adventure
M: Yes
O: Biff and chip had been to (.) London (1.0) with Gran (,) they had some
pictures which (.) they put into a scrapbook (.) they wanted to take the book
to school
M: It’s like when we went to London isn’t it
O: Gran came into Biff’s room to look at the children’s scrapbook (.) we had
a great time in London said Biff (1.0) thank you Gran (.) Gran was pleased
(2.o) suddenly the magic key glowed it was time for an adventure (.) the
magic suddenly took the children into the little house but didn’t it take Gran
M: no no what does it say
O: But did it take Gran
M: That’s right good boy (sound of pages turning)
Chall’s stages of reading development
Stage
Age
Key characteristics
0
Pre-reading and
pseudo-reading
Up to
6
Pretend reading, turning pages. Some letter
recognition, especially letters in own name. Often
predicting stories and words.
1
Initial reading and
decoding
6-7
Reading simple texts containing high frequency
lexis. Chall estimated about 600 words
understood.
2
Confirmation and
fluency
7-8
reading more quickly, accurately, paying more
attention to meaning of words. How many written
words understood? 3,000.
3
Reading for
learning
9-14
Reading for knowledge as motivation
4
Multiplicity and
complexity
14-17
Responding critically to what they read and
analysing texts.
5
Construction and
reconstruction
18+
Reading selectively and forming opinions.
Graded ‘Reading schemes’ are used in schools.
familiarity is established and used to aid learning. Can
you remember the scheme at your school? Key
features are:
• Lexical repetition- new lexis introduced often repeated.
Often Proper nouns
• Syntactical repetition of structures- simple sentences
containing one clause.
• Simple verbs- single rather than verb phrases
• One sentence per line- helping children say complete
phrases
• Anaphoric referencing- pronouns refer to characters
already used
• Text-image cohesion- tells the story
Key questions:
1. Can you apply the nature vs nurture debate to
literacy acquisition? Is it innate? Or can be
acquired through imitation?
2. Is there evidence that the methods used to
teach reading support the interactionist
viewpoint?
3. How far do you think cognitive acquisition
theories relate to reading development? Do
children have to understand the concepts first?