Meeting Difficulties in Literacy Development

Research, Policy and Practice

Gavin Reid, Janet Soler, Janice Wearmouth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134407644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Addressing the sensitive issue of difficulties in literacy development this practical book outlines what is meant by 'literacy' and the barriers to literacy development such as social class, ethnicity, culture and gender. It emphasises practical strategies and programmes to help reduce these barriers at school, family and community levels. Throughout, the highly qualified team of authors relate cognitive, psychological, and socio-cultural perspectives to current curriculum policies, controversies and ethical considerations.

This book enables practitioners to reflect critically upon the choices available to them in assessing and supporting students who experience difficulties in literacy development. Topics covered include a thorough consideration of dyslexia, bilingualism, the conceptualising of literacy, equity issues, and suggestions for assessment and planning for pupils.

This is essential reading for students on initial teacher training courses and teachers on CPD courses in the area of special needs, literacy and dyslexia. It is also a companion course guide for the Open University's new Difficulties in Literacy Development course.

Chapter 1

Models of, and debates over, the reading process

Introduction: models of reading

Learning to read is the initial stage of becoming literate. The skills involved in reading can be quite complex, and different views exist on how children read and the relative importance of each of these skills and processes in reading. An understanding of different models of reading is essential in order for the teacher to make decisions about appropriate strategies for facilitating success in learning to read. Reading programmes and interventions are underpinned by different models of reading, and it is crucial to know what these are before deciding which programme or intervention to implement to address difficulties students may have with literacy.

Bottom-up (phonics) and top-down (whole-book/whole-language) approaches

As Reid (1998) notes, there are two principal models of the reading process:

1. The ‘bottom-up’, data-driven model, which suggests fluent readers look first at the stimulus—that is, the component features of the letters in the words—before they move on to consider the meaning of the print.
2. The ‘top-down’, concept-driven model, which assumes that fluent readers first anticipate the meaning of text before checking the available syntactic and graphic cues.

These contrasting theoretical perspectives on the act of reading each lead to a different approach to the teaching of reading to students who experience difficulty. From the bottom-up perspective, the reconstruction of the author’s meaning is achieved through the process of decoding the abstract and complicated alphabetic code. Reading is a series of small steps to be learned one by one. In order to learn how to do this, children must first learn the letters of the alphabet and establish the principle of sound-symbol identification and then apply this in order to decode words. The teaching of bottom-up skills emphasises the mastery of phonics and word recognition. M.J.Adams notes that the bottom-up approach was the earliest method of teaching reading (1994, p. 21). There was little need to be concerned about reading comprehension since the Bible constituted most reading matter for children and the text was predetermined.

In a major US report commissioned by the Center for the Study of Reading in Champaign, Illinois, to review all aspects of phonics and early reading instruction, Adams argues that research indicates that readers of English thoroughly process the individual letters of words easily and quickly because they are well acquainted with the sequences of letters they are likely to see (ibid., p. 108). What separates good from poor readers is their ability visually to recognise frequent spelling patterns and to make visual-sound correspondences automatically.

Adams concludes that phonics has a crucial place in competent reading. Beginning readers should first learn to recognise individual letters quickly in order to optimise their ability to recognise whole words. They also need to pay attention to the sequence of letters in a word, not simply the whole word. The implication of this view is to highlight the significance of ‘synthetic’ phonics, writing and spelling of whole words, ‘exercise with frequent blends and digraphs, practice with word families’ and attention to every letter of the word, in left-to-right order. Adams also advocates exercises on frequent digraphs, letter blends and word families.

In contrast, Goodman (1976) advocated a top-down approach to reading and his approach became known as the ‘psycholinguistic guessing game’. The implication of this, according to Goodman, is that good readers will have less need to rely on graphic cues and therefore do not have to process every characteristic of the word and letter. The top-down, whole-book/whole-language approach implies that children learn to read through reading, being read to and being immersed in a literacy-rich environment.

The second perspective views reading as the active construction of meaning. This perspective is influenced by psycholinguistics, with its emphasis on how we make sense of our world through the use of language. Goodman likens the way in which the human mind makes sense of print to the way in which it makes sense of any other aspect of the world (1996, pp. 110–11). The strategies that the mind uses for making sense of print are called psycholinguistic because thought and language continuously interact in this process. Beginning with written text, the mind constructs meaning drawing on cues ‘from the various language levels’ (ibid.). He calls the process a ‘psycholinguistic guessing game’ (Goodman 1967) because the reader has a hypothesis of what a text might be about, and then tests this hypothesis and confirms or rejects it as s/he reads through the text.

Goodman describes four cycles between the visual input supplied by the eyes to the brain and the meaning constructed by the brain: visual, perceptual, syntactic and semantic. Those learners in the early stages of literacy development should be encouraged to decide for themselves whether they have read text correctly by continually monitoring for meaning in order to develop useful strategies for self-correction. Only miscues that cause a loss of meaning need correction.

A number of other researchers, for example Adams’s colleagues Strickland and Cullinan (1994), follow a similar top-down model of reading and criticise the use of terms such as ‘pre-readers’, ‘reading readiness’ and ‘prerequisite skills’ as implying that children acquire literacy skills suddenly and as a result of formal instruction in phonics. They prefer the term ‘emergent literacy’ because they feel that children’s literacy emerges out of their interaction with language and their experience of the world of print around them. Studies showing a strong relationship between linguistic awareness and literacy development do not provide conclusive proof that competence in phonics should be acquired before children are taught to read, because competence in phonics develops as a result of access to stories and print rather than the other way round. Strickland and Cullinan feel that the emphasis should be on literacy-rich environments for early literacy acquisition rather than direct instruction in phonics. Instruction in reading should include phonics but should begin from an emphasis on meaning.

According to Harrison (1994), current views of the reading process turn Goodman’s model on its head. They stress that, when it comes to word recognition, it is the good reader who has less need to rely on context as s/he can recognise the word because s/he has mastered the elements of reading. The poor reader cannot recognise the word and therefore needs context to aid recognition. Harrison suggests this takes up valuable processing capacity, which reduces the potential for comprehension. Fluent readers are therefore more efficient than poor readers, but they do not use less visual information.

The interactive approach

Despite her advocacy of the importance of phonics in initial reading instruction, it should be noted that Adams also acknowledges the importance of semantic cues in reading and other ‘critical sources of information’:

In the reading situation, as in any effective communication situation, the message or text provides but one of the critical sources of information. The rest must come from the readers’ own prior knowledge. Further, in the reading situation as in any other learning situation, the learnability of a pattern depends critically on the prior knowledge and higher-order relationships that it evokes. In both fluent reading and its acquisition, the reader’s knowledge must be aroused interactively and in parallel. Neither understanding nor learning can proceed hierarchically from the bottom up. Phonological awareness, letter recognition facility, familiarity with spelling patterns, spelling-sound relations, and individual words must be developed in concert with real reading and real writing and with deliberate reflection on the forms, functions and meanings of texts.

(M.J.Adams 1994, p. 422)

Stanovich (1988) also suggests that both top-down and bottom-up methods have limitations because readers draw on both processes when reading. He suggests that readers use information simultaneously from different levels and do not necessarily begin at the graphic (bottom up) or the context (top down) level. During the development of reading skills some readers may rely more heavily on some levels than others. Additionally, Stanovich argues that the readers’ weaknesses are compensated for by her/his strengths. He called this process the ‘interactive compensatory model’ because the various processes interact and also because the reader can compensate for weaknesses in one area by relying on strengths in the other aspects. Therefore the argument is that poor readers rely on context to compensate for their difficulties in processing the individual sounds of words. Stanovich (1986) argues that those children who are not proficient in the sub-skills of reading will not have the opportunity to acquire these skills because they do not have easy access to reading, the so-called ‘Matthew effect’.

Basically there are three processes interacting when children read. These are:

1. Sound—the sound pattern of the letters or word. This is called the phonic aspect of the reading process.
2. Sight—the visual characteristics of the word are focused on or a word is read as an entity. The ‘whole-Word’ method of teaching reading was designed to reinforce this process.
3. Meaning—context, both semantic (meaning) and syntactic (grammar) aspects of text.

The interaction between the three of them constitutes ‘reading’. This model of the reading system highlights the reciprocal relationship between content, meaning, orthography (print) and phonology (speech). Processing at the level of orthography includes sequencing the letters in a word, whilst at the phonological level it encompasses matching those letters to the letter sound. Processing of meaning relates to the reader’s knowledge of meaning at word level, and processing of context provides a framework for understanding the text.

A number of factors are involved in the process of reading: linguistic, auditory and visual. It is important to have some idea of how these factors contribute to the difficulties some children have with reading.

Linguistic factors

Reading is expressed in language form and this can present a difficulty for some children because:

• the flow of oral language does not always make the break between words clear;
• they may have difficulty breaking the words into constituent sounds and sequencing these sounds;
• they may have problems retaining the sounds in memory;
• they may have difficulty in articulating sounds;
• they may have difficulty in recognising the sounds in written form.

Visual factors

Children when reading must:

• recognise the visual cues of letters and words;
• be familiar with left—right orientation;
• recognise word patterns;
• recognise letter and word shapes.

Difficulty in any of these areas may inhibit reading acquisition.

Auditory factors

These include:

• recognition of letter sounds;
• recognition of sounds and letter groups or patterns;
• sequencing of sounds;
• corresponding sounds to visual stimuli;
• discriminating sounds from other sounds;
• discriminating sounds within words.

(Adapted from Reid 1998)

Once again, difficulty in any of these areas may inhibit reading acquisition.

Connectionist models of reading

The dual-route model

Coltheart (1978) developed a somewhat different model of the reading process, the so-called ‘dual-route model’. Basically he suggests that children have at their disposal two routes to the written word (lexicon). These are:

• a direct route in which they use a visual strategy to read whole words which are already familiar to them; and
• a phonological route which is used to break words down into their component sounds and is used with unfamiliar words.

Reappraisal of the dual-route model

There has, however, been a reappraisal of the dual-route model which suggests that children read through the use of ‘parallel distributed processing’ (PDP). This is sometimes referred to as the connectionist model of reading and offers a different framework for understanding the reading process. This model suggests that, rather than through different routes, children learn to read through the interaction of each of the processing elements in reading.

According to Snowling, a critical feature of the connectionist model is that it is possible to associate the input patterns (written words) with the output patterns (spoken words), and children can eventually generalise from this association to read words they have not been explicitly taught to read (2000, p. 61). However, Snowling argues that training in phonology is important and that children who come to the reading task with ‘well specified phonological representations are well placed to establish links between the letters of printed words and the sounds of spoken words’. One of the difficulties with models such as the connectionist model is that they may explain the processes involved in reading but they do not inform about the conscious reading strategies readers may adopt. This is particularly important in English because there are a great number of irregular words which may not conform to logical processes, and these words are those which are most challenging for dyslexic children. Additionally, the connectionist model implies that the connections which are regularly used will be stronger, so reading practice will help to develop the connections. The phonological representations hypothesis suggests that children with dyslexia approach the task of learning to read with poorly specified phonological representations. As a result they have difficulty in establishing the connections between the letter strings of printed words and the phonemic sequences of spoken words, and difficulty in generalising this knowledge when they meet new words. This would imply that dyslexic children would need to gain practice at using connections, particularly with irregular words. This, however, can be particularly challenging for dyslexic children and underlines the need for an early systematic structured programme to develop phonological representations.

Developmental model of reading

Another approach to understanding the process of acquiring literacy is through the developmental model of learning to read. From a developmental perspective, learning to read consists of the acquisition of different kinds of skills at different points in the learner’s development. In order to chart a child’s development in reading acquisition it is important to be able to identify the sub-skills involved in the reading process itself.

Ehri (1999) suggests that there are three essential interrelated ingredients in the knowledge base for teachers in order to inform them in making decisions on reading instruction. These are: knowledge about the reading process; knowledge about teaching methods and how these facilitate the reading process; and knowledge about observational procedures to identify the processes readers are facilitating and the processes they have difficulty with. As Snowling suggests, children read in different ways so it is important to gather data on the reading skills and the reading processes of individual children and to map these onto their reading development. Although Ehri stresses the importance of the word-learning process, she also suggests that this knowledge can be used by teachers to create relevant instructional activities to help children store sight words in memory. Ehri therefore hypothesises that explanations about beginning reading processes can help teachers gain insights that can prove useful in their classrooms.

There is a very strong similarity between Ehri’s and Stanovich’s description of the reading process and the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ models. Ehri refers to four developmental phases which occur in the development of sight-word reading. Each phase reflects the type of connection that links the written forms of words to pronunciation and meaning that is stored in memory.

Ehri stresses the fundamental importance of children gaining mastery over phonics. However, despite her discussion of the interactive model of reading she does not highlight the place of learning to read through reading—that is, the top-down approach. This leads us to reflect on the applicability of the interactive model, as Ehri discusses it, to the practice of teaching reading when her discussion of implications for reading instruction omits key aspects of the interactive reading process and emphasises phonics alone.

The ‘Great Debate’ over reading

Differing models for conceptualising literacy have resulted in conflicting views and diverse positions over how to teach reading which have often been energetically attacked and rigorously defended. Many adults involved in the field of education will have encountered such ‘great debates’ and ‘literacy wars’ over the teaching of reading during their lifetime. These educators would be able to give a personal account of their professional encounters with the issues thrown up by such conflicts and the way in which they resolved these in their practice.

The debates over the best way to teach a young child to read and how to overcome barriers to developing reading skills have stretched over the entire period during which we have had compulsory schooling. Carson’s personal account of her grandmother’s and her own experiences of teaching reading from the 1880s to the present (Carson 2002, pp. 117–32) highlights the impact of these debates and the tensions they create for individual teachers in classroom settings. Carson argues that her experiences as a teacher and a university teacher responsible for educating future teachers from the 1950s to the present have led her to believe that the ‘Reading Wars’ over phonics and whole language are essentially the same issues debated again and again, as they resurface in new forms and are rephrased as new ideas.

In her account of these personal experiences of teaching reading Carson notes the lack of an integrated approach between the ‘sight-word’ method and writing which existed in the 1950s during her own teacher training. She also writes about the lack of connection between how to conduct reading instruction in reading-methods classes and approaches to literacy experienced in language arts in her pre-service training. In her initial years of teaching in the 1950s and 1960s she was aware of the dominance of ‘whole-group instruction’ and ‘round-robin reading’. She was also aware of the resulting difficulties in assessing each child’s individual knowledge and use of individual instruction. Her training contrasted with her own experiences of learning literacy through an exploration of the potential of printed text for literate traditions. Carson also experienced this tension in her initial years of teaching as she sought to combine the teaching of skills and grammar with an interest in the meanings, narratives and purposes embodied in literacy.

During the 1960s and 1970s Carson explored phonics-based methods of teaching and increasingly sought to integrate these into developing a literature-rich creative exploration of literature and stories. By the 1980s she had further developed her integrated approach and explored the use of whole-language, oral-language approaches whilst maintaining an interest in phonics and word-identification strategies. In reviewing her experiences, Carson feels that the concerns expressed over reading tend to push educators to the extremes of each position.

Her own experiences of balancing and resolving the tensions implicit between whole-language and phonics approaches and ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ models of reading has led her to believe that there is a need for an intermediate position between these two theoretical stances, one more in line with the ‘interactive’ view which has been developed in New Zealand’s ‘Balanced Reading Programmes’. Moreover, she argu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography