Beginning Reading

A balanced approach to literacy instruction in the first three years of school

Yola Center

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000256321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

Most children learn to read, irrespective of the method of instruction. Yet up to a fifth of children struggle with reading in their first few years at school. Unfortunately, those who struggle in the early years will continue to struggle throughout their school career.Yola Center offers a systematic, research-based guide to teaching reading in the first three years of school. Her aim is to ensure that teachers can work with at-risk or reluctant readers in the regular classroom as effectively as with children for whom reading seems to come naturally.Taking an analytic approach to reading, Beginning Reading shows how children can be moved through the key stages of early reading acquisition. Each chapter includes an overview of relevant research, practical classroom strategies and guidelines for lesson planning. Center adopts a balanced view of reading instruction, stressing the importance of phonological processes at the beginning of literacy instruction, as well as semantic and syntactic ones. This supports at risk children in regular classrooms, who are provided with the maximum opportunity to develop the accurate and fluent word recognition skills that are needed in order to extract meaning from print.'At last! A book that combines an overview of recent research findings and their implications for the teaching of reading with sensible and practical suggestions for classroom teachers.'
Morag Stuart, Professor in the Psychology of Reading, University of London 'This is an excellent book. It comprehensively reviews the research literature and shows how to apply it to the nuts and bolts of teaching reading in the first few years of school. It is a must-read for teachers.'
Professor Tom Nicholson, University of Auckland, New Zealand 'This is the book that we have all been waiting for. It is the only book that I have seen that focuses on a theoretically sound approach to the teaching of reading with a focus on children who experience difficulties in the regular classroom.'
Ruth Fielding-Barnsley, Queensland University of Technology 'It is indeed rare when a reading scientist can explain the intricacies of reading development, reading difficulties, and reading instruction with such clarity and comprehensiveness. Most importantly, Dr Center provides a masterful synthesis of the most current converging scientific evidence available that defines what research-based reading instruction is all about.'
G. Reid Lyon, PhD, National Institutes of Health, USA

Section 1
WHO NEEDS another book on reading instruction?

Introduction

It is a truism that most children learn to read, irrespective of the mode of instruction, and (dare one say it?) sometimes despite the mode of instruction. However, it is also clear that a significant minority of children in regular classes in regular schools will have trouble with the literacy process.

While it is always dangerous to quote figures, and these will fluctuate according to geographical area, various overseas estimates suggest that about 20–25 per cent of the school population will be at-risk of literacy failure (Stedman & Kaestle, 1987). More recently in the United States, Snow et al. (1998, p. 98) have suggested that ‘the educational careers of 25–40 per cent of American children are imperilled because they do not read well enough, quickly enough, or easily enough to ensure comprehension in their content courses in middle and secondary schools’.

The Australian estimate is somewhat more conservative, with between 10 and 20 per cent of primary/elementary school children considered to have persistent and significant problems in learning to read (House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training, 1992; Waring et al., 1996). A recent review of public school education in NSW, Australia, also revealed that while the best readers in this state performed well in comparison with students from other OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) member countries, children in the lowest achievement band compared extremely poorly (Vinson Report, 2001).

During classroom observations and in conversation with many teachers, I have frequently heard them express deep frustration with this group of ‘at-risk’ or ‘reluctant’ readers. The teachers with whom I have been associated, both experienced and novice, have often confided that their pre-service training had not equipped them to assist struggling readers satisfactorily. So much is currently required of a student teacher in a teacher training program that the time devoted to effective literacy instruction for all learners is, of necessity, far too brief.

It is quite apparent that teacher concern with students having literacy difficulties in regular classes exceeds national boundaries. A recent US study of elementary reading instruction practices reported by teachers and administrators (Baumann et al., 2000) indicated that accommodating struggling or underachieving students in regular classrooms was their greatest challenge. The comforting adage issued to teachers (and parents) a generation ago, that children would grow out of their reading problems, proved to be incorrect. As far back as 1988, Connie Juel had found that there was almost a 90 per cent chance that children who were poor readers at the end of first grade would continue to be poor readers throughout the primary/elementary grades (Juel, 1994). She cites the example of a child called Anna, who did not read well in first class. By the fourth grade, Anna was declaring quite unequivocally that ‘she’d rather clean her room than read’.

All those concerned with a child’s education will readily understand the opportunities that will be denied to a child like Anna. It is primarily to teachers of such children in regular classes everywhere that this book is dedicated. While teachers have always had access to many outstanding theoretical books on early literacy, and recourse to many well-researched commercial programs, there has been a dearth of early literacy books with an evidence-based approach to instructional practice. I hope that this text will fill this void by grounding early literacy classroom procedures within the most current research data. I also hope that such a book will prove useful to teacher educators, student teachers, policy makers, parents and others interested in the process of children’s reading acquisition and the practices that are designed to foster it most effectively.

1
Speaking and reading

If you don’t need to teach speaking, why do you need to teach reading/writing?

This chapter highlights the similarities and differences between speaking and reading, in order to explain why some children who have no difficulties with the former may still experience problems with the latter.

All parents, and all elementary/primary teachers who are parents, know that pre-school children acquire oral language without receiving explicit instruction in it. Indeed, parental attempts at such explicit instruction generally have little effect at all on the way young children speak. As a typical concerned grandmother of a grandson aged 17 months, who communicated only in a series of grunts, squeaks and gestures, I wondered about the need for some early language intervention. The day I decided to pluck up courage and suggest to his mother that she consult a speech pathologist, he greeted me with a perfectly constructed, if less than perfectly articulated, three-word sentence. It was my turn to be speechless.

Foorman (1995) also gives an interesting example of the ease with which nearly all children in all societies develop a language, even when the environmental trigger to their language acquisition is only minimal. She writes (p. 378) that children who grow up in societies where their parents speak an ad hoc communication of the marketplace, called a ‘pidgin’, create and transmit their own language, called a ‘creole’. A pidgin has a small vocabulary and a borrowed, inconsistent grammar from the speaker’s native language. Unlike a pidgin, a creole is a language in its own right—with its own grammar, vocabulary and sound system. Children who speak Cajun, a creole language that developed out of the French and English linguistic environments of Louisiana, have acquired a language different from the pidgin spoken by their parents. It appears that children are biologically programmed to construct grammar in spite of the contrived linguistic input surrounding them. However, they are most unlikely to develop literacy in a similarly non-conducive environment.

To immigrants who arrive in their new country at adolescence or later, the dissimilarities between speech and reading/writing are, regretfully, only too obvious. My father, who arrived in Australia in his early thirties, became an extremely proficient reader of English (as good as he was of Polish) because his word recognition skills carried him through once he had acquired a working vocabulary in English. However, unlike his daughter, who arrived at the age of three and adopted the accent of the marketplace, he was never able to become a proficient English speaker, to the extent that he was never able to lose the Eastern European accent of his native land.

I have another interesting example of the ease with which children acquire new vocabulary, culled from my young grandson during regular baby-sitting sessions. He is now very aware of noises in his environment for which he demands continual explanation. When I told him that a particular noise was that of a window creaking, he looked at me intently and repeated ‘window cweaking’. When his mother arrived to pick him up, and the wind and window began their usual orchestration, he remarked to his mother that it was only the window cweaking. Imagine reading the word ‘creaking’ correctly after only one print exposure.

Examples such as these have led Barbara Foorman to comment on the profound discrepancy between the development of language and that of literacy. To say that they merely emerge as part of a common developmental pathway is to rob speech of its biologically driven nature (Foorman, 1995) and to impute to literacy a natural spontaneity that cannot be supported in fact or theory.

The reason for the development of speech, without explicit instruction, in all normally developing infants, is that speech is a product of biological evolution. It stands as the most obvious, and arguably the most important, of our species-typical behaviours. Reading/writing, on the other hand, did not evolve biologically, but rather developed (and then, only in some cultures) as a secondary response to that which evolution had already produced. A consequence of this is that we are biologically destined to speak, but not to read and write (Liberman, 1997, p. 5).

As Liberman (1997) also remarks, language has been around for 200 000 years or more, and articulate speech for perhaps 75000 years (Corballis, 2004), while the idea that it could be rendered alphabetically only occurred about 4000 years ago, suggesting that it is far more difficult to transcribe our thoughts on paper than it is to produce them orally. Furthermore, while all cultures have an oral tradition, only some find it necessary to translate that tradition into print.

To clinch the argument, we know, as teachers, that we will experience an unfortunate number of reluctant readers in our classrooms. However, we are less likely to experience the luxury of even a few reluctant speakers. Speech may have to be learned, but it does not have to be taught. On the other hand, reading and writing, for most people, will not be learned unless it is taught, and for some people, it will not be learned unless it is taught well. It is important for teachers to understand the dissimilarities as well as the similarities that exist between speaking and reading/writing. Without this understanding, they could easily underestimate the difficulties some children will have in acquiring literacy.

The aim of this book, therefore, is to give teachers in inclusive settings access to theory and research-based programs that have a generally preventive effect during the early school years in reducing the literacy problems of many at-risk learners.

What is the real relationship between speaking and reading/writing?

Having established, pragmatically and intuitively, that speaking a language does not necessarily entail reading or writing that language, we still need to know why this divergence exists.

Essentially, reading involves two basic processes (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990). One process is learning how to decipher print and the other is understanding what the print means. Or, as expanded by Torgesen (2000, p. 56), ‘To comprehend written material, children need to be able to identify the words used to convey meaning, and they must be able to construct meaning once they have identified the individual words in print.’

Teaching these two processes in a complementary fashion guarantees a balanced approach to reading instruction. Michael Pressley, when making the case for a balanced perspective on reading instruction, has this to say: ‘Balanced-literacy teachers combine the strengths of whole language and skills instruction, and in doing so, create instruction that is more than the sum of its parts’ (1998, p. 1). The strengths of a whole-language approach, as I see it, are its insistence on a print-rich environment to stimulate a child’s desire for reading. The strengths of a skills approach are its insistence on the explicit instruction of sound–symbol associations, both in isolation and in context to foster a child’s word recognition ability.

It is this latter precept that has aroused the greatest controversy, despite overwhelming evidence that expert readers are extremely proficient at word-level processes (Pressley, 1998, p. 56). The need to include explicit decoding instruction when teaching beginners to read arises because difficulties at the word level often prevent children (particularly those at-risk) from becoming competent and interested readers. This is largely because speaking (and even speaking well) does not automatically translate into being able to decipher print. However, having a good command of a language will certainly enable children to understand the language written down, once they have learnt to decipher the print.

Another of my grandsons is just over four years of age and lives in a non-English-speaking country. From time to time, I send him tapes of books that I read aloud in English. He has no trouble listening to the tapes and understanding the stories on them, provided that they are pitched at a four-year old’s level of comprehension. Furthermore, being bilingual he can readily understand appropriate stories that are read to him in his native tongue. However, if he were given the same books to read by himself, in either language, he would not yet be able to decipher the print and, apart from the pictures, these books would remain meaningless to him.

Another interesting example of the same phenomenon is the apocryphal story of the poet Milton (Gough et al., 1996). As his eyesight faded, he would ask his daughters to read him books in his beloved Latin. Although he could no longer decipher the print (he was blind), he could still enjoy the text because of his mastery of the Latin language. His daughters, not being blind, could decipher the print, but no doubt found the reading process rather tiresome as neither of them could understand Latin.

So just what is the relationship between speaking and reading that prevents the majority of pre-school children from actually reading a story that is totally comprehensible when it is read to them? To answer this question, we should really examine all our options.

• ➼ Is reading easier than speaking?
• ➼ Is reading equivalent to speaking?
• ➼ Is reading harder than speaking?

In view of what I’ve already said, and from what experience as parents and teachers has taught us, the first option sounds a little bizarre. Still, let’s look at the arguments set out by a speech theorist, Alvin Liberman (1997, p. 9), to examine this proposition more closely.

He suggests that on the surface, reading/writing appear to be easier than talking. The medium of reading/writing is print and is much clearer to observe than the speech signal, which is transient, and leaves much to be desired from a physical point of view. Furthermore, if you compare the effectors—fingers for writing, tongue for speaking—the skilfulness of the former far outweighs the clumsiness of the latter. Apart from licking lollipops and stamps, there is a limit to what the tongue can actually do. Finally, if you examine the receptors—the eye for reading, the ear for listening—you would have to agree that as a channel for transmission the eye is more effective than the ear. For example, in how many households does the radio hold sway over the television?

Nothing Liberman has said so far can be effectively denied. However, if the proposition that reading was easier than speaking were true, we would be seeing more children in our schools with speech difficulties than with reading/writing difficulties. We also wouldn’t have to read books to four-year-old children whose reading abilities would exceed the surprisingly sophisticated speech we know that they possess at this age. In such a utopia, caregivers could concentrate on their own interests while pre-schoolers sat in silence, reading to themselves! Unfortunately, it seems patently obvious that reading presents a greater challenge than speaking.

Let’s now examine the second option, that reading/writing and talking are equivalent. We have all heard arguments that reading and speech are similar in acquisition and that, as a consequence, reading/writing need no more explicit instruction than does speaking. This, after all, is the premise on which some whole language theorists base their approach to early reading instruction (for example, G...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication Page
• How to use this book
• Section 1 Who needs another book on reading instruction?
• Section 2 Starting the first school year
• Section 3 The first year at school
• Section 4 The second year at school
• Section 5 The third year at school
• Section 6 Assessment and intervention
• Afterword
• Appendices
• Glossary
• References
• Index