Five Areas of Reading Instruction - Essay Example

? Education  Five Areas of Reading Instruction The National Reading Panel Report presents us with a solution to the difficulty of teaching children to read correctly, swiftly and with understanding. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in 2000 summed up a number of decades of scientific study that evidently explains valuable instructions for reading, specifying five analytical areas. These five critical areas are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. These sections were integrated into the Reading First plan and No Child Left Behind Act as fundamental components of helpful directions for reading. Phonemic awareness is the capability to observe, consider and toil with distinct sounds in words that are spoken. Its teaching includes assisting children to distinguish, separate, and use phonemes with respect to the letters. Phonemic awareness can also be considered as the ability to examine and produce the isolated sounds in expressions, separating or segmenting terms into the sounds of their components and recognizing words that are similar or different in listening. According to the (NICHD) it is explained as the skill to “focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken words.” An illustration of phonemic awareness ability is for instance the word cat, which consists of three phonemes or sounds/k/a/t. In order to become skilled at reading a languages that is based on an alphabet, phonemic awareness is essential. As a vital element of comprehending to read and an effective analyst of reading accomplishment, phonemic awareness is a theory that all teachers should recognize and teach skillfully. The sounds that compose up the words that are spoken are known as phonemes. They are not alphabets; in fact they are sounds of speech. For example the alphabet “b” is not a phoneme actually it is an alphabet that has been selected to symbolize the phoneme /b/. Graphemes are used to denote the phonemes in the written speech. They may be in single letters such as (a, e or n) or in group of alphabets that indicates sounds that are distinct like (th, ck or oo) It can be very beneficial to children as it teaches them progressive ways of learning words that are new to them. In order to learn a new word, developing an association among the visual knowledge concerning the word, its meaning, accent, and other facts that are accumulated in the verbal vocabulary of a child is important. This correlation is what facilitates the person who reads to retrieve information stored in the brain when the word is seen as written. Phonemic awareness is very helpful in makings these associations. “There are several levels of phonemic awareness that may be demonstrated through different classroom activities” (Schatschneider, 1991). The three activities that can facilitate learning in this area include, removing the phonemes. Students should be given the task to recognize the word that stays when a phoneme is removed from it. For instance, if we remove /s/ from the word spot, the word that remains is pot. Second activity can be adding the phonemes to a word. The child can add a phoneme and make a new word. For example if we add a /b/ to the word ring we would make a new word bring. The third activity that can assist the students in learning is substituting the phonemes. The child should be assigned the activity to make a new word by substituting one phoneme with another. For example by removing the /b/ from the word bag and substituting it with /r/ makes a new word rag. Moving to the second area phonics, it involves coaching children the connection between distinct sounds (phonemes) and letters and instructing them about the logical and obvious association between words that are written and spoken. The requirement of written language led to the invention of different alphabets. Later on people eventually realized the importance of making spelling coherent with every word as they invented the alphabets to symbolize the sounds of the language they spoke. They wanted those alphabets to represent the same sound every time they wrote it so therefore the rules they established to maintain this uniformity is what we currently identify as phonics rules. These rules can be very helpful for the students in interpreting the new words that they are not familiar with. According to the alphabetic principle there is a methodical, and at times improper, connection amongst the graphemes and phonemes. Effectual phonics guidelines facilitate students to utilize these associations to spell and read words correctly and swiftly. Moreover phonic rules assist the memory that supports the students to memorize and use these instructions for the simplification of corresponding alphabets and sounds. The three instructional activities that can help the children to learn in this area consist of the teacher identifying between the systematic and explicit phonic instructions. Explicit instructions involves the clear explanation that certain letters or combination of letters represent particular sounds such as the sound /b/ is represented by the alphabet b. Comparatively phonic instructions that are systematic use a fixed order of alphabet-sound association instead of coaching the letter-sound associations at random as children come across them in print. Another activity is to apply these phonic rules in reading the related text. The lecture proceeds from distinguishing sound-letter associations to applying those associations to interpret text that is decodable and linked. The teacher keeps this in mind during the lecture so that children recognize that the reason of learning unfamiliar phonic simplification and patterns of spelling so to aid them in reading skillfully. The third area specified by the National Reading Panel Report is Fluency. It is the skill to read a passage rapidly and correctly. Readers which are fluent identify words unconsciously and classify them as they read as it doesn’t require an effort and this form of reading seems expressive and meaningful. Children feel difficulty in understanding what they read because they read little by little and are uncertain. The only way to improve their fluency is to make them read a lot. Children can use the principle of phonics to decode words that are unfamiliar rapidly and utilize their information of the meaning of the alphabets of the words to quickly interpret the ones that are new. “Fluency can also involve grouping words within a sentence into phrases that make what is read easier to comprehend” (Rasinki, 1990). Hence we now come to know that fluency is identifying the words in a passage quickly and appropriately, and then by means of phraseology and pronunciation make it seem like oral verbal communication. Fluency is very important for quick understanding and the notion of recognizing the word in the first attempt makes a clear cut meaning for the person listening. Teaching and practice is necessary for the instinctive word identification and so it can be considered as a range that starts with gradual struggling for a beginner and later continues as a quick natural skill. The activities that can assist the children in learning fluency include reading a story repeatedly again and again. A child is asked to reread a passage over and over again until he reaches certain fluency. In any case share of the perfection in fluency formed by frequent reading may outcome from a change in the child’s importance from recognizing words to comprehend them as he go through the story many times. Through the early readings, it will be necessary for the child to dedicate more time for remembrance of the words and to decode new ones. This hard work at word detection builds intellectual links that facilitates the student to distinguish those words more quickly when seen again. This leads to further effective remembrance to be applied for understanding through later reading of a passage. “Using repeated reading with a taped-recorded version of the story produced significant gains in reading performance. When the training was completed, the students sustained their higher reading levels; however, without further training, they did not continue to improve” (Blum, 1995) this activity can be very helpful for children as well. The teacher can also go around the class and ask the students to whisper-read a story and after she has taken note of the child reading move on to the next one. As the teacher goes around the class, she can correct the mistakes and guide the students on constructing fluency. Vocabulary is the fourth element for effective reading. Vocabulary means words that a person must posses to communicate effectively with other people. Reading, speaking, listening and writing are the four categories of vocabulary. For the recognition of words, vocabulary is an essential part. Young children use the meaning and the accent of the words in their verbal vocabulary to assist them in making out words they encounter in the written form. Moreover it acts as an essential part in comprehending the material a child reads. Therefore it is important for learning to read and additionally for reading to learn as well. “We know that direct teaching of words that are necessary to understanding a given text before asking students to read the text helps them learn the words and understand what they are about to read” (Wixson, 1986). Now, approaches to learn new words may include teaching the child the use of dictionary, and how to apply clues from the context to determine the meaning of new words. Another activity may include reading the story aloud in which the teacher should discuss the meaning of the unfamiliar words and explain the usage of these words so the student can use this vocabulary the next time they write anything. “Repeated readings can help young children’s vocabulary growth” (Senechal, 1997). Another activity may include reformation of the vocabulary. It consists of rewriting a short paragraph or definition to make it simpler from the use of different words but giving the same meaning. Comprehension is the fifth element for successful reading. It is the capability to comprehend what an individual is reading. Furthermore it includes connecting a passage to the information a person has stored in his mind before and creating new knowledge for better understanding. The different feature of comprehension are understanding accurate meaning, figuring out metaphorical or figurative meaning, recognizing and evaluating the value of the passage and responding to it accordingly. The objective is for students to be trained to read and to discover the usefulness of reading which makes it pleasurable, and meaningful. Children are clearly taught strategies for comprehending in separation and during writing, reading and listening passages. These approaches comprise of constructing predictions, forming queries and developing views at the same time as reading, and linking the significance of the passage with previous facts about the context and personal incidents. An activity that proves to be helpful in this area requires the teacher to introduce a passage to the class and explain the basic idea. Afterwards the teacher should read the passage and holds discussion between the students giving them the task to rewrite it in their own words or draw pictures to illustrate what they have understood. Secondly the students can be assigned the task of forming questions that relate to the text they have read or the teacher can give those questions and ask for answers. In this way the teacher would be able to measure the extent to which the students have understood the passage. Instructing students to read understand writing is a difficult job. Satisfying this task needs awareness of the successful five basic components and the enthusiasm to apply them. Instructors who have an absolute comprehension of these areas of helpful reading tips are prepared to educate students to read by means of these activities and resources that have verified to be valuable. The five fundamental areas of efficient reading lessons symbolize elements that should be there to assist students to become skilled at reading. Successful educationalists know how to merge these components in the accurate extent to encounter the exclusive requirements of every student. References Schatschneider, C., Francis, D., Foorman, B., Fletcher, J., & Mehta, P. (1999). The dimensionality of phonological awareness Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(3), 439–449. Rasinski, T. (1990). Investigating measures of reading fluency. Educational Research Quarterly, 14(3), 34–44. Blum, I., Koskinen, P., Tennant, N., Parker, E., Straub, M., & Curry, C. (1995). Journal of Reading Behavior, 27(4), 535–563. Senechal, M. (1997). Journal of Child Language, 24(1), 123–138. . Read More