Teaching Beginning Readers and Writers



Teaching Beginning Readers and Writers

RE 5100 Midterm Exam

Carol Holt

1. The language experience approach is an effective way to engage students in the reading/writing process. The language-experience approach begins with a shared experience, and then the class dictates sentences for the teacher to write about their event. The shared experience can be simply a tour of the school, a nature walk or steps in making a craft. The discussion of the kids’ ideas in the shared experience is crucial to dictating sentences. The teacher writes the students’ sentences as they recall their experience. The teacher says each word as she writes it on poster paper. The idea is to start kindergarten with two sentences. Later on, the teacher could write 3 lines, increase to 4 lines, and so on as the school year progresses. An important aspect of this approach is that students see their spoken words turn into written words as the teacher writes each word for everyone to see. In this way, students can begin to learn Concept of Word as the teacher points to the beginning of each word while simultaneously reading the words (teacher points to the beginning of 1 syllable words, slides finger under multisyllabic words). Hearing the story read aloud can help students get a feel for the rhythm of written language. After the teacher reads the story to the class, the class reads it with the teacher. Rereading the story over and over helps students memorize the text. Students begin to gain the ability to match the spoken words with the written words by remembering the order of the spoken words and the placement of each written word. Being able to track words with 1 to 1 correspondence while rereading the story helps students learn sight words. Another method for learning words in the language-experience approach is to point to beginning letters. Beginning letter sounds help students point to each word which, in turn, promotes Concept of Word. As children begin the reading process, the first thing they learn in word recognition is the beginning consonant. Later, the child begins to learn the final consonant in a word, and eventually the vowel in CVC words. By pointing to beginning letters, students can identify the letter and the sound it makes, and then guess what word it could be based on the initial consonant. With the teacher modeling reading while pointing to each word, students not only begin to learn that spoken words match printed words, but also that words are composed of letters that represent specific sounds. When a student misreads a word, the teacher can point to the beginning letter to assist the student with the unknown word. The teacher may prompt the student by asking, “What’s the 1st letter in this word?” (M) “What sound does M make?” /m/ “What do you think that word could be?” It may be necessary to have the student read the sentence again, so they can use contextual clues to help figure out the tricky word. This approach can be used by covering all but the beginning letter of a word in the text, and asking students what word could be there, what word has the same beginning sound, and what word makes sense. Another way to reread the story is to have students echo read. This involves the teacher reading 1 sentence at a time, and then the students echo read the same sentence. Individual children can finger-point read part of the story as well as identify words and letters/letter sounds in the text. By the 3rd day, the teacher can check for 1 to 1 correspondence when students track and read on their individual copy of the story. These early writing experiences will help some students to pick up on the rhythm of written language, others may be able to identify beginning consonants and the sounds they represent, while other students may actually learn to read the words written in the story.

2. The history of beginning reading instruction includes a huge debate between the code-emphasis approach (part-to-whole) versus the Whole Language approach (whole-to-part). In the late 1980’s, advocates for the Whole Language movement felt that reading should be taught in a holistic way as opposed to a phonics approach to reading. Teaching phonics required teaching bits or parts of words, and focused on breaking the alphabetic code. However, teaching 26 abstract symbols was not considered to be a meaningful, holistic way to teach reading. The Whole Language approach taught reading as a whole, exposing children to literature by reading stories. With this approach, beginning reading instruction focused on meaning while children were immersed in a literature-rich environment. The Whole Language movement lasted approximately a decade.

The reason for the demise of Whole Language in the late 1990s was due to the fact that President George W. Bush endorsed a program called Reading First which, unlike Whole Language, was skill-based. The federal government got involved in education and evaluated the research on teaching children to read. The research revealed that reading scores had dropped during the Whole Language movement. The U.S. government decided that children should be taught phonics beginning in kindergarten. States who agreed with this policy and implemented phonics programs in their kindergarten curriculum were paid federal money. This was the driving force behind the movement to teach phonemic awareness and the alphabet in a systematic way.

Before this movement towards a phonics-based curriculum, teachers were not required to teach 5-year-olds to read, but instead were supposed to work on developing oral language and social skills. Interestingly, kids today are not only learning social skills, but are also introduced to the alphabet in current preschool settings. So with the rise of Reading First, this major change in the methods of teaching reading now required students to begin reading in kindergarten. School districts were now expecting students to be able to identify letters and letter sounds, plus be able to read at a level 3 or 4 by the end of kindergarten. It’s interesting to think about such a huge shift in the thinking of how to teach beginning readers, when components of both approaches seem necessary for children to become successful readers.

2b. The problem with whole group instruction is using 1 leveled book for all students. Before and after the Whole Language era there was small group instruction. Regie Routman thought students should have guided reading in small groups to work on reading strategies in a supportive setting. Routman combined what she thought was the best of both phonics-based and literature-based instruction. Routman encouraged word attack skills to include context clues (Does it make sense?), structural clues (Does it sound right?), and picture clues. Asking a child if the miscue sounded right and/or makes sense is a good strategy to use to help her think about what was read and encourage her to look more closely at the text. Reminding students to look at illustrations is a good strategy for figuring out unknown words and to help with comprehension. Students can gain a lot of information from looking at the pictures in a book.

It is a plus that Routman included using a phonetic strategy of looking at initial and final sounds in a word. Although she encouraged reading beginning and ending sounds, Routman advised students to skip the vowels. Disregarding the vowel sound leaves far too many word possibilities. For instance, a word beginning with the letter P and ending with T could be several different words (ex: pat, pet, pit, pot, put). Using this same strategy, identifying words with multiple letters would be even more difficult (ex: pant, paint, pint, point, pout, punt, past, post, pelt, part, port, etc.). I believe it is important for beginning readers to learn vowels, the sounds they represent, and should not be disregarded when learning to read.

3a. According to a study by Whitehurst, a researcher for the Department of Education, children need to acquire two forms of knowledge during the kindergarten year if they are to be successful in reading in first grade and in fourth grade. These two forms of knowledge are print-related knowledge and language-based/world knowledge.

The best predictor of early success in first grade reading is print-related knowledge (within the word). This includes knowledge of the alphabet, attending to the sounds in a spoken word known as phoneme awareness, and letter/sound knowledge (b = /b/) to be learned in kindergarten.

World knowledge (outside the word) that was learned in kindergarten was the best predictor of success with fourth grade students. Fourth graders need background knowledge to be able to make connections and meaning vocabulary to be successful in comprehending fourth grade material.

Students must have both areas in order to thrive in education. Whitehurst revealed another reason to focus on alphabet and phoneme awareness as well as reading lots of literature to children that is rich in vocabulary. Teachers should read stories to students about different themes, in different content areas, fiction, nonfiction, and must engage in discussions about the stories with their students.

3b. Alphabet knowledge is the ability to name and write the 26 letters of the alphabet.

Letter-sound knowledge is the ability to match letters with the sounds they represent (b = /b/).

Phoneme awareness is the ability to attend to individual sounds in a spoken word (cat = /c/, /a/, /t/).

3c. When learning to read, natural language in carefully leveled books helps the reader predict what they may read next in the story. Predictable books that are on the correct reading level and contain repetition of sight words help beginning readers learn to “read beyond the word” or anticipate upcoming words in the text. Teachers want their students to attend to the text, think about what they are reading, and make sense out of the words they read.

Text in a language-experience story also facilitates reading beyond the word. Once students are familiar with the story and have it memorized, they can easily predict what word comes next.

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