How Do Young Children Learn to Read?

Topic: Developmental Psychology
Words: 2159 Pages: 7

Introduction

Childhood literacy is a crucial skill for children’s cognitive and mental development, as well as their creativity and compassion. Children who have been exposed to a variety of literature have a more extensive vocabulary and acquire focus and active listening comprehension more quickly (Christie, 2012). By code-breaking and being able to know, the young learner is openly and methodically taught words. Then, using the framework, instructional programs, and evaluations, words become texts. Children gain textual meaning, context, and comprehension with the professor’s implicit guidance (Department of Education, Science, and Training, 2005). The significance of a child has spoken language and emergent literacy activities, as well as the role that pronunciation play in increasing a child’s lexicon, fluency, and overall comprehension, will be understood by an excellent teacher.

Oral Language

Oral language and children’s literacy skills, which a child gains through receptive and expressive engagement with their environment, are combined into one aspect that aids a kid in literacy development. Oral language is an essential part of our civilization and accepted practices, both in terms of how one perceives the environment and how one communicates with it and others (Emmitt et al., 2014). Although the spoken language is definitely vital for beginning readers, it is equally critical that it be actively fostered in the school through pedagogical approaches like these. Teachers can teach students how to recognize and correlate actual text with terms they have used in their listening and speaking (Hoff, 2006). Children begin to memorize word structure, which allows them to remember new words and associate them with previously learned communication depending on sounds and even visual similarities.

Children accumulate these phrases as part of their language as they grow older and eventually utilize them to communicate themselves. A child unconsciously learns the grammar and psycholinguistics of the English language and adapts them to their spoken word as their speech grows and as they are exposed to the oral language around them. Oral language is the primary spoken language, and as such, it shares many of the grammatical elements of the writing system.

Phonological Awareness

Children’s phonological awareness grows as they learn more about the English language. Listening comprehension is a broad umbrella that concentrates mainly on connected speech and serves as both a predecessor and a supplement to phonics (Carson & Bayetto, 2018). It includes the growing understanding of language noises, the fact that language is thought up of segmentation, and that words are made up of both groupings of noises and single makes it sound, both of which can be combined to form new words (Chapman, 2003). Many youngsters arrive at school with a basic understanding of phonology gained from their early reading experience (Ehri et al., 2001a). Children who have had minimal interaction with such activities, on the other hand, will profit greatly by spending more time on the tasks listed above.

Additionally, children should be given the opportunities to participate with and modify these sounds by adding, deleting, and substituting phonemes to construct other words, thereby increasing their knowledge of word families. Children must also be trained on how to divide into spoken and how to decode phrases into specific phonemes. Above all, children must be participants in this activity, which means learning must be enjoyable, engaging, and participatory. Moreover, teachers must treat listening comprehension as only one component of a child’s literacy development, carefully designing and arranging their lessons to guide students toward grammatical knowledge.

Phonics

Through the establishment of the alphabet and consonant relationship, phonics training builds on speech perception. Teachers can educate phonics by commencing with the letters and teaching to distinguish and name letters, as well as learning the accompanying letter tone, beginning letters of words, long and short syllable notes, and shifting vowels around (Department for Education and Skills, 2007). Synthetic phonics is a method of reading that involves sounding out words by reading the morphemes and acquiring the sound it represents (Ehri et al., 2001b). Encoding, or cracking the code, is helpful for phrases that can be broken down into separate morphemic elements. Computational phonics analyzes pronunciations or grammatical patterns and, where appropriate, separates the word using decode (Hogan et al., 2005). Because youngsters cannot interpret well enough to ensure that the data until they learn synthesis phonology, the whole word method standalone has the flaw of assuming that youngsters already grasp sounds.

Vocabulary

The most basic definition of vocabulary is “word knowledge,” which comes mainly from unstructured speaking language and shared read activities in reading comprehension. Emergent readers use spoken language to assist them in understanding terms in the literature and during reading ability (Ellis & Rowe, 2020). Throughout, during, and after a presentation, good teachers will chat to the children about the story to encourage them to announce potential words and meanings actively, relate to familiar words, and utilize them in their own sentences—teachers who read aloud model pronunciation and encourage students to create their own phrases using unfamiliar terms. Students engage in overt authored vocabulary acquisition, particularly for abnormally managed to spell words, which is crucial for using the lexicon to support learning (Kilpatrick et al., 2019). When combined with explicit phonological awareness, this provides students with strange sight memorizing vocabulary as well as the ability to decode unfamiliar words to see whether they can link them to their oral vernacular.

Members of the school community address unfairness in the classroom, and research has shown that quality instruction has a significant impact on a child’s vocabulary learning. Classroom training should be rich in language, both oral and written, with a focus on exposing children to high-quality literature and engaging them in word immersion activities and discussions. Fluency is obtained through the development of a child’s vocabulary.

Comprehension

It is fair to conclude that reading and comprehension is the ultimate goal when training youngsters to read. According to studies, comprehension is heavily reliant on a solid foundation of linguistic skills, which is built through children’s use and comprehension of oral language (Emmitt et al., 2014). In order to make sense of literature, students must decode it, understand the terminology used, use the background to infer proper meaning, and comprehend linguistic and pragmatic structures. A pedagogy that combines bottom-up and relational theories will take a methodical approach to teach these distinct qualities of understanding while simultaneously assessing the text’s broader content. Trying to implement teacher-led techniques like primary and question creation can help students dig deeper into the text’s symbolic and deduced significance, while mutual trying to read is a structured sociocultural pupil approach in which students work together just to unwrap the text and start debating their understandings.

Fluency

Accepting the simplified view that the reading process involves the two tasks of decoding and comprehending text, it follows that fluency refers to the ease with which readers are able to complete these tasks simultaneously and accurately. Many authorities and establishments often restrict fluency definitions to a student’s ability to read aloud accurately or appropriately implement punctuation and inflection while doing so (National Reading Panel, 2000). Fluency is defined as the capacity to detect words correctly and spontaneously, which is developed by frequent oral readings and sight word memorizing.

Skilled readers use high-level word knowledge, context, and grammatical knowledge to read fluently and with fair accuracy. Competence is only half of the equation because as young readers gain confidence in their reading abilities, they grow more capable of extracting critical learning from books (Wolf, 2008). Teachers provide clear decoding teaching to beginning readers through group and reading activities with organized comments and scaffolds on a daily basis (Mesmer & Griffith, 2005). Additionally, it is crucial to spend additional time with worse writers to ensure that assurance and proficiency are developed and that those learners love reading as a fun activity, as it is critical that they are not left aside.

Literacy Development Theories

When developing teaching for the growth of reading in children, four main theories must be considered. These are the ideas: The skills-based paradigm, which views the activity as the continuous acquisition of hierarchical discrete skills, is supported by leading expert or bottom-up theory (BUT). The whole-language paradigm, which is a student-centered method that prioritizes projecting the meaning of the text over examining its constituent components, is backed by psychology or top-down theory (TDT). The reader response model, which looks at the circumstances of the learning process and emphasizes the intended human contact between the author and the reader, supports the contractual concept (Rodda & Eleweke, 2000). Critical theory is backed up by the four-resources paradigm, which prioritizes the cultural background of the literature and the reader’s perspective.

While each of these ideas has been the favored conceptual viewpoint of curriculum authors and pedagogues at one time or another, it is crucial to recognize that none of them address a child’s language learning comprehensively in isolation. It is vital to analyze the findings of major, evidence-based research papers in order for instructors to identify the most appropriate mixing of these alternatives for their individual students, especially when appealing to young emerging readers.

Ruby Case

Strengths:
  • Ruby is hesitant and insecure, but she interacts fluently with her classmates and family and participates in small group conversations; she can also repeat events and experiences.
  • Ruby is well-versed in the field of printing.
  • She comprehends ideas such as the book’s front, back, title, and author.
  • Ruby understands where reading begins, the importance of sentence punctuation, and the organization of literary documents into words, phrases, and the intervals in between.
Learning Difficulty:
  • Ruby is a shaky reader who lacks experience; she can sound out many CVC words and knows a few phonemic awareness, but she struggles with a number of words.

Ruby adores books at home and at school and appreciates being read to. Ruby knows how to handle literature and how to handle them properly. Ruby is enthralled by the book and the story ahead of her. Ruby can offer a coherent plot after hearing a brief report and demonstrating comprehension of the storyline, as well as recognize photographs in the presentation that connect to the critical events, characters, and place.

How to Help Ruby Based on the Above Data

Ruby is currently a child who is learning to read correctly, but she does not perceive all sounds accurately. To help Ruby learn to read well, her teacher should consider options for how to do it; a good option is to understand the words in a playful way and then read the text associated with these words. Thus, the terms will be related to something, and then they will be remembered and used in practice. This will help fill in the gaps in the previously studied curriculum. As soon as Ruby begins to cope with all the tasks, the teacher can safely continue teaching.

Children who struggle with phonics are more likely to suffer from reading. Instructors must lead pupils step by step through a specified string of symbols and sounds in explicit phonological awareness training. Kids who learn to decipher words can then use that knowledge to more complex expressions and eventually read fluently (Ellis & Rowe, 2020). Some children, particularly as they get older, may not require much assistance with phonics.

Students’ instructional and autonomous reading abilities can also be determined using literacy diagnostic techniques such as regularly keeping or narrative notes. During a one-on-one or comparatively tiny literacy instruction, teachers can take notes on any reading faults they notice, as well as students’ responses to understanding questions and details about their attitude, tone, and reading rate.

Students who have a prior understanding of a topic or subject matter may find it easier to engage in the reading. For instance, if a youngster has never visited a farm, he or she may not be learned how vital the barn environment is to the storyline of a story set on a farm. Another technique to boost background knowledge is to make stories and articles relevant to everyday life and current events (Ellis & Rowe, 2020). Educators need to understand putting students on either virtual or live field trips or allowing them access to real things in order to establish previous knowledge before literature.

Conclusion

Children’s reading is vital for their neurological and intellectual development, as well as their inventiveness and empathy. Children who are exposed to a diverse range of reading develop a more extensive vocabulary and learn to focus and listen actively more quickly. With the professor’s tacit assistance, the students learn the textual meaning, context, and understanding. The young learner is taught words honestly and deliberately through the script and being able to know. Classroom instruction should be rich in spoken and written language, with an emphasis on exposing students to high-quality reading and immersing them in word saturation activities and conversations.

Ruby Case Reference

Ellis, S., & Rowe, A. (2020). Literacy, social justice, and inclusion: a large‐scale design experiment to narrow the attainment gap linked to poverty. Support for Learning, 35(4), 418-439. Web.

References

Christie, F. (2012). Early childhood: The initial challenges of school learning. Language Learning, 62(1), 33-70.

Chapman, M. L. (2003). Phonemic awareness: Clarifying what we know. Literacy Teaching and Learning, 7, 91-114. Web.

Carson, K., & Bayetto, A. (2018). Teachers’ phonological awareness assessment practices, self-reported knowledge, and actual knowledge: The challenge of assessing what you may know less about. Australian Journal of Teacher Education (Online), 43(6), 67-85.

Department of Education, Science, and Training. (2005). Teaching reading: Report and recommendations. Web.

Department for Education and Skills. (2007). Letters and Sounds: Principles and Practice of High-quality Phonics. Department for Education and Skills.

Emmitt, M., Zbaracki, M., Komesaroff, L., & Pollock, J. (2014). Language and learning: An introduction for teaching. Oxford University Press.

Ellis, S., & Rowe, A. (2020). Literacy, social justice, and inclusion: a large‐scale design experiment to narrow the attainment gap linked to poverty. Support for Learning, 35(4), 418-439.

Ehri, L. C., Nunes, S. R., Willows, D. M., Schuster, B. V., Yaghoub‐Zadeh, Z., & Shanahan, T. (2001a). Phonemic awareness instruction helps children learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel’s meta‐analysis. Reading research quarterly, 36(3), 250-287.

Ehri, L. C., Nunes, S. R., Stahl, S. A., & Willows, D. M. (2001b). Systematic phonics instruction helps students learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel’s meta-analysis. Review of educational research, 71(3), 393-447. Web.

Hogan, T. P., Catts, H. W., & Little, T. D. (2005). The relationship between phonological awareness and reading. Web.

Hoff, E. (2006). How social contexts support and shape language development. Developmental Review, 26(1), 55-88. Web.

Kilpatrick, D. A., Joshi, R. M., & Wagner, R. K. (2019). Reading Development and Difficulties. Springer International Publishing. Web.

Mesmer, H. A. E., & Griffith, P. L. (2005). Everybody is selling it—But just what is explicit, systematic phonics instruction?. The Reading Teacher, 59(4), 366-376.

National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Web.

Rodda, M., & Eleweke, C. J. (2000). Theories of literacy development in limited English proficiency deaf people: A review. Deafness & Education International, 2(2), 101-113.

Wolf, M. (2008). Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

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