Learning+to+Read

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There are many ways to teach a child to read. When a child is very young it is important for them to be exposed to many different types of text. Text types range from books to newspapers and magazines, read-along books with tapes, music and sing along songs, nursary rhymes, telivision, movies, radio, It includes conversation and drawing. Children begin learning to read and write at a very early stage taking in their surroundings, they learn to assimilate what people are saying can be matched to the shapes people use to write. There has been much debate over the years about the best way to teach students to read, more recently Snow, Burns and Griffin (1998, p199), identified three main approaches to teaching at the begining of literacy. These approaches are; Implicit phonics or whole language approaches. Here teachers give priority to children's construction of meaning, and phonics is taught in the context of meaningful reading and writing. Here the teacher is a facilitator. Embedded phonics involves the teacher using word families where a word containing the target spelling pattern is presented then the students are encouraged to build up the families. e.g. dog, fog, log, clog. frog. Direct code instruction is where students are taught letter-sound correspondences and spelling conventions and they are praciticed. Sounding out of words is encouraged. Whilst in the classroom teachers have what is called The Early Years LIteracy Block in order to teach reading and writing. This block should contain one hour or reading and one hour of writing. Teachers need to use a balanced approach to teaching reading in order for children to have success and develop their skills. Teachers use many different types of reading, some offering a lot of support to less support as students move form being Emergent readers to Early readers and so on. Some of these approaches include; Modeled Reading - Teacher selects a teaxt and reads it aloud to the class, MODELING skilled reading - fluency, puncuation, phrasing & intonation the teacher even models enjoyment. Shared Reading - is a whole class instructional approach. Here the teacher reads the text but involves the students in reading where appropriate or responding to prompts about the text before and whilst reading. Guided Reading - here a teacher works with a small group of children reading the same text. These students are often grouped with other students who need to work on the same things within their reading. Guided reading often has a single purpose eg. self correction, or one to one matching. Reciprocal Teaching - (generally done with older students) Is a varient of guided reading with less teacher involvement and hight student independance. Text is selected by the teacher and every student has a copy. Comprehension is fostered and monitored as the teacher supports students in leading a conversation/disscussion about said text. There are 4 strategies involved; Predicting, Clarifying, Question generating, and Summarising. Other approaches include the Bottom-up or Part-Whole approach, where the reader moves from sounding out individual words to knowing their meanings to understanding sentances, then text and so on until they understand whole text. This was popular in the 1970's and 80's. Then there was the Top-Down or Whole-Part approachm here the reader brings ther experience and knowledge to the text and assigns meaning to the print decoding it for meaning. Then there is the balanced approach where both reader and text contribute to the comprehension of the text. Within the Litracy block it is important that students not only work as a group to assist one another in their learning, but also allowing them time to work individually and gain individual feedback about their progress and how to improve. It is also crutial for students to come together at the conclusion of any lesson to share what they have learnt and/or been practicing. This is often refred to as the whole-part-whole approach.

(This information is taken from calss notes Deakin, Bachelor of Education Primary, ECL210 and Hill, 2006)

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