Reading Acquistion (CLA)

Revision cards about how children learn to read, with theorists.

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Early Reading Books

  • Baby and toddler books are designed to help children learn to label objects and package/network build.
  • Common use of nouns and adjectives under one hypernym to teach the relevant hyponyms.
  • Link literacy experiences with current stage of speech acquisition.
  • Designed to be read TO the child, not by the child.
  • Early story books include more complex grammatical structures and lexis the child might understand even if they can't use them theirselves yet.
  • Early story books help teach narrative structure and syntax skills.
  • Designed to be a shared experience - interactive and enjoyable for the adult and child.
  • School reading schemes - graded to aid fluency skills and designed to help the formal learning process - but use similar techniques/principles.
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Prior Knowledge

  • Children need to understand various things as they begin to learn to read:
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      • relationship between written symbols (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes)
      • stories haev structure - beginning, middle, end - which is cohesive and continues from one page to the next
      • written texts can be organised with headings, page numbers, etc.
      • texts can differ in organisation according to genre.
      • texts represent the culture they are from - reading direction, narrative styles, well known character tropes.
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Early Book Features

  • Things to looks out for in analysing early reading books:
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      • audience interaction/opportunities for the adult to interact with the child
      • implied values
      • rhyme, rythmn, other phonological devices
      • character depiction (either human or animal)
      • use of spoken language features
      • text-to-picture ratio
      • hypernyms and hyponyms, semantic fields
      • rhetorical devices - repetitions, parallel sentences etc
      • textual cohesion - connectives, lexical repetition, syntactical repetition
      • sentence types - declarative, exclamatory, interrogative, imperative
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Frank Myszor - Oral Qualities of Children's Texts

  • Experts advise to read to children even before they can speak
  • Writers think carefully about the oral abilities of the audience
  • Books written to entertain and educate both about the world and about language
  • Up to this point the child's only experience with language will have been speakign and listening - leading to high usage of :
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      • direct speech
      • face to face interaction
      • narration soundling like speech
      • use of noises
      • interactive text (mimicking relationship between two speakers)
      • repetition
      • reframing of vocab to show new uses and ideas.
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Learning To Read

  • Children need to be able to:
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      • follow a line of text left to right, top to bottom - can be difficult - use of finger to focus on a line of text
      • recognise shapes of letters and words
      • recognise phoneme-grapheme link - including phonics and digraphs (where two letters create a single sound, e.g. ch, th, sh)
      • recognise that graphemes can be used in more than one phoneme
      • match words on a page with words and meanings in their memory
      • recognise clauses, phrases etc and decode grammatical structures
      • rmember the beginning of the sentence in order to understand it as a whole when they finish reading it
      • recognise textual 'signposts' and other cohesion devices
      • check understanding against real-world knowledge.
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Jeanne Chall's Stages of Reading Development

  • Stage 0 - Pre-reading and Pseudo-reading - up to 6yrs - 'pretend' reading, some letter/word recognition, especially their name, predicting single words or next stage of a story.
  • Stage 1 - Initial Reading and Decoding - 6-7 yrs - reading simple texts with high-frequency lexis, starting to learn grapheme-phoneme link, about 600 written words understood
  • Stage 2 - Confirmation and Fluency - 7-8yrs - reading faster, more accurately and fluently, paying more attention to menaings and understanding, about 3,000 written words understood.
  • Stage 3 - Reading for learning - 9-14 yrs - reading for knowledge and information becomes the motivation. (Also can be reading for pleasure)
  • Stage 4 - Multiplicity and Complexity - 14-17 yrs - Responding critically and analysing texts they have read
  • Stage 5 - Construction and Reconstruction - 18+yrs - reading selectively and forming opinions on what has been read.
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Teaching Methods - 'Look and say'/Whole Word Metho

  • Children learn the shape of words
  • Recognise whole words or sentences not individual phonemes
  • Flashcards are used with individual words and pictures
  • Good - for beginners, mirrors the way children learn their own name.
  • Bad - doesn't teach strategies for decoding new words, not all children have good visual memories.
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Teaching Methods - Analytic Phonics

  • Children learn to break down words into phonemes or praphems, looking for phonetic or orthographic (spelling) patterns.
  • Decode words by breaking them down into smaller units - Onset (opening vowel or syllable) and rime (rest of word, always begins with a vowel)
  • Use rhyme and analogy to learn words with similar patterns, e.g. c-a-t, m-a-t, p-a-t
  • Recognise one letter sound at a time, with pictures showing words all beginning with the same letter sound.
  • Learn initial letter sounds first, then middle sounds, then final sounds and coonsonant blends. 
  • Competent readers within 3 years.
  • Can use this method alongside whole word method.
  • Good- learn spelling patterns, learn strategies for unfamiliar words, develop good sight vocabulary for reading and spelling, exposure to reading books
  • Bad - takes time to learn all spelling patterns and combinations, not all children have good rhyming skills, not effective if children can't apply their knowledge to unfamiliar words, or words not accompanied by a picture.
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Teaching Methods - Synthetic Phonics

  • Children learn to remmeber 44 phonemes and the related graphemes (one sound can be spelled in a variety of ways e.g. 'ough' 'ow' and 'oa')
  • Recognise each grapheme, sound out graphemes in a words and blend the sounds together to phonetically pronounce the word
  • Memorise phonemes quickly - five or six sounds a week)
  • Multi-sensory approach - see the symbol, listen to the sound, use an action.
  • Learn in whole-class teaching groups
  • Reading schemes not initially used as the method can be taught in a few months. 
  • Good - quick method of teaching, encourags reading and spelling skills immediately, can apply knowledge to unfamiliar words - blending sounds is taught early on
  • Bad - existing research has not found any disadvantages.
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Reading Cues

  • Graphophonic - looking at the shape of words, linking the shape to familiar graphemes/words to interpret them
  • Semantic - understanding the menaing of the word, making connections between surrounding words to decode the new ones
  • Visual - looking at pictures and visual narrative to interpret unfamiliar words or ideas
  • Syntactic - Aplying knowledge of word order and word classes to see if a word fits the context
  • Contextual - comparing the story to own knowledge/experience, using their understanding of social conventions to predict the word
  • Miscue - making errors when reading, by missing out a word, substituting a similar looking one or guessing a word by using the pictures. (Miscues can come from a variety of causes)
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