PARENT TALK
Research findings in education and ways to help your child - Volume 99-4
What is the role of skills in learning to read?
The Role of Skills in Reading
by Carl Smith, Ph.D.
No one denies that skills and strategies are used by readers while they figure out the meaning of a selection. Many skills are used in the complex mental maneuvers used to read a story or article. The issue is not whether there are skills; the issue is the number of useful skills that we should actually teach.
In tutoring, therefore, we should probably limit our instruction to the major skills that show up on national and state standardized tests? After all, the number of skills on those tests is not terribly large and represents the major skills necessary. By limiting our focus to a couple of skills each week, we give children a better chance to succeed, and we can concentrate on strategies that lead children to think for themselves while reading.
A Skills Plan
Assuming that reading instruction always starts with building meaning, work on no more than three skills per reading selection. You might focus on decoding skills for children who struggle with word recognition (without ignoring comprehension, of course). Then you can highlight comprehension skills as your children become more and more fluent. This plan enables parents and children to have a sense of order in their long-range scope of reading, and it encourages them to spend most of their time on comprehension skills and on understanding how articles and chapters are organized.
How To Teach Skills
Recent studies of learning and effective teaching, give us strong indicators of how to teach skills:
1. Motivate and give a clear focus to instruction.
2. Apply the skills immediately.
3. Practice sufficiently to achieve fluency.
4. Test and reteach the skill as needed.
We need to teach systematically and therefore follow a consistent lesson plan in order to help children know that there is order to the knowledge that they are expected to learn.
Skills Plan
Objective
Clearly stated at the beginning of each lesson.
Developing
Explain and develop the instruction for each skill through modeling, demonstration, and discussion. Check for understanding through the use of activities and questions.
Applying
Parent-directed activities and questions provide guided practice.
Checking Understanding
Provide questions for checking mastery.
Reteaching
Reteach and use Alternative Learning Activities for each skill.
Independent Practice
Independent worksheets or skills practice should be given to practice each skill.
Enrichment
Encourage children to read from other books and ask them to be aware of their use of recently learned skills.
Organizing Instruction
Emphasize those skills that serve learners best at their stage of development. In the early stages, for example, boys and girls are struggling with decoding problems, so parents need to emphasize decoding/phonics. Thereafter, the emphasis should shift to comprehension skills. Naturally, comprehension skills and strategies will be incorporated in all the years of instruction. Word skills will continue to receive some attention throughout reading instruction.
Content reading skills are needed as the children become more and more involved in the complexities of their subject-matter textbooks. That's when they learn to apply cause and effect relationships, conditions and effects, conclusions drawn from organized data, and so on. Those same subject-matter books require specialized reading skills such as reading maps, charts, tables and the organization of subheads.
Across the school years, children learn to build meaning from stories and from various expository types. They do this gradually through learning specific skills and through their interpretations, their predictions, and their sharing of ideas with parents and friends.
Pacing Guide
The following is a suggested guide for pacing a lesson.
Recommended
DAY 1: Introduce concepts and teach one key skill.
DAY 2: Read story and apply key skill while reading. Monitor application.
DAY 3: Discuss story and its personal applications. Review thought processes and application of key skill.
DAY 4: Teach two more skills and apply them through examples of the story that was just read.
DAY 5: Work on extension, enrichment, reteaching activities as needed.
Not Recommended
DAY 1: Introduce concepts and 2-3 skills from approximately eight to be taught.
DAY 2: Teach three more skills.
DAY 3: Teach two to three more skills.
DAY 4: Read and discuss story but do not relate story to skills. (There were too many to keep track of.)
DAY 5 Provide extension and enrichment or continue work on the skills if they have not all been completed.
Recommendations
Based on the previous comments, the following recommendations would apply to teaching skills in any story or reading selection:
1. Teach one key skill as you introduce concepts in a story.
2. Clearly apply the key skill in the reading. Thus motivation for reading is not lost and immediate reinforcement/application moves the learner towards mastery of the skill.
3. After the story is discussed, teach another skill, and demonstrate its application with passages from the story.
4. Then engage in enrichment or reteaching activities as needed.
This routine does not prevent the parent from working on other skills that clearly need attention. Most stories permit the application of numerous skills, especially through asking questions; literal, interpretive, critical, and creative questions.
The Role of Decoding in Reading Instruction
A Passion For Patterns
In his book, The Courage to Create, Rollo May says the human mind has a passion for form, a passion for patterns. In fact, the entire school of Gestalt psychology and schema theory rely on the mind's passion for patterns. Therein lies the durability of decoding (phonics) in reading instruction.
Almost everyone now agrees that decoding, especially in early reading instruction, plays a naturally important role in the child's pursuit of giving meaning to the printed page. Since many instructional materials contain decoding activities, a parent may want to develop a consistent strategy for using phonics.
A Strategy for Decoding
Since the function of all reading instruction is to build habits that guide the reader to make sense out of the printed page, an instructional strategy for decoding should build habits that guide a reader to respond automatically to difficult words. Decoding exercises are not aimed at developing a mechanical response to a letter or to a set of letters; they are directed at moving meaning forward. When a child is reading and comes upon an unknown word, his first question should be: "What makes sense in this context?"
Following that key question aimed at predicting a meaningful word, the reader tries to confirm his prediction through the application of the phonics generalizations that he knows. Often the initial consonant or the initial syllable will provide the confirmation necessary:
The space ship escaped into the far reaches of the g a l (galaxy)
Even though the word galaxy may not be recognized immediately, most readers today will be able to predict a word such as outer space in the trouble spot. As soon as they see that the unfamiliar word begins with gal, the correct word will probably come to mind, or at least they will see that outer space does not match the symbols that are there.
Quick and Simple
When readers try to solve an unknown word, they naturally want to use as few steps as possible to arrive at a correct decision. Almost all readers try to use their repertoire of phonics generalizations to confirm the meaning that they have predicted. The strategy emerges:
FIRST: Predict meaning.
NEXT: Test with phonics/ decoding in the first part of the word.
THEN: Try additional phonics generalizations across the rest of the word.
After testing a prediction through decoding, the reader has a good chance of quickly arriving at the unknown word. If not, he can ask for help.
Decoding in Reading Instruction
The Alphabetic Principle
If the digraph /th/ were to announce: "I am all you need," who would pay attention? Even though we use our little toes to balance, no one ever mistakes the toe for the body, and no one claims the little toe causes walking. Yet that toe and those sound-symbol associations are important because they aid smooth walking and reading. The twofold role of decoding generalizations, therefore, is:
a) to aid smooth reading, and
b) to create an attitude about the (the patterns) in English spelling.
By knowing how to use decoding principles, the reader gains a sense of control over printed symbols, and that will make him more secure in the act of reading.
English orthography is alphabetic; that is, symbols are designed to stand for the sounds of words. Because English has borrowed words from so many other languages, it does not always give us a one-to-one correspondence between sound and spelling. Nonetheless, a high percentage of English words follow regular sound-symbol patterns. By helping children see the regularity in the language instead of complaining about irregularities, parents will create a positive attitude for their children and give them useful associations for reading.
Children will gradually begin to see that knowing sound-spelling patterns will aid them in their search for meaning. Whether learning initial consonants in early reading exercises or learning more complex patterns such as suffixes in more ambitious words, children see that paying attention to soundspelling patterns will give them quicker confirmation of their predictions of what those unrecognized words actually are.
Making It Work
Graphic Similarities Besides the usual sound-symbol correspondences, there are more complex patterns that you can ask children to examine. For example, ask them to look at this list of words and decide what they all have in common:
more | foresee |
evermore | score |
foreground | explore |
This could lead to a discussion of the common sound and the common spelling (ore) for that sound in these words. Other lists could be used periodically to alert students to look for similarities in the spelling of sounds that they hear again and again.
behind | remind |
mastermind | mind |
mankind | hindsight |
various | furious |
glorious | curious |
serious | victorious |
Your child could then add more words that fit the illustrated patterns.
Decoding Through Cloze
By using a modified cloze exercise, children can practice the strategy for decoding on page 3. To build a cloze activity, cross out every fifth word in a paragraph and ask your child to figure out what word fits in that spot. For children in I" and 2nd grade, delete only every eighth or tenth word, so they have enough context to make a prediction. The point of this exercise is both to predict what word belongs in a paragraph and to use a decoding cue to determine what the word should be. Construct an exercise so the blank has the initial or final consonant of the words and nothing else, requiring the child to use the consonant to make an accurate prediction. Here is a sample paragraph:
Under a great tree in the w___, two boys saw a fine, large n___, and both ran to get it. (woods, nut) Jamie got to it ___st, and picked it up. (first) "It is m___," said John, "for I was the f___ to see it." (mine, first)
"No, it is mine," said ___ie, "for I was the first to ___ck it up." (Jamie, pick) They at once began to qu___ about the nut. (quarrel)
Spelling on the Job
"We use spelling to evaluate job applicants," said the personnel manager of a large Midwest utility. "Each applicant writes a statement of personal goals. Those that contain too many spelling errors are not considered for employment."
I have no idea how many businesses follow that practice. Though his statement was surprising, it demonstrated some of the social significance of conventional spelling. And isn't it gratifying that the personnel director evaluated spelling as part of a written communication? Spelling is for writing, of course. The purpose of teaching spelling is to promote more effective written communication, not to challenge a child's memory.
Three major principles for teaching spelling
1) Common spelling patterns should be taught early to give children control over a large number of familiar words.
2) The word list in spelling books should contain the words that children use most often in their own writing.
3) The target words should be used in context, that is, in writing messages.
1) Teaching Spelling Patterns
Since most English words fit one or the other spelling patterns, you will want to teach your children to make use of the major sound-spelling patterns. With only a little effort, you will give your children control over a large number of words, for example:
at | et | it | ot | ut |
bat | bet | bit | pot | but |
hat | met | hit | cot | cut |
sat | pet | mit | hot | hut |
What pattern do you see here? Each of these words has a single vowel which has the short sound of the vowel. Some linguists refer to it as the consonantvowel-consonant (CVC) pattern, a pattern that unlocks hundreds of words for the beginning speller.
Another group of words follows the CVCe pattern, that is, the consonant-vowel-consonant-e marker which indicates a long vowel in the middle. Common words that fit this pattern are made, bite, rope, cute, and so on. The silent "e" at the end of the word marks the vowel sound as long: hat/hate, rid/ride, cop/cope, cut/cute, etc.
Look for a spelling program that gives your children the power of these sound-spelling patterns.
2) Choosing a Word List
Over the past fifty years only two published studies have extracted word lists from a national sample of children's writing. These two studies provide a basis for most of the target words used in spelling programs. Other words come from the personal interests of the individual child. The personal words combined with the common word list give the child a useful base from which to write comfortably.
The words children use change for each generation. In a national study in 1945, the word computer did not appear. Comparing the 5000 most frequently used words in 1945 with the 5000 most used words in 1984, we found a difference of 1650 words.
A whole host of new words has entered the language even since 1984 and are used frequently by children in 1999. These words reflect the technology and sociology of the '90s: synthetic, cellular, laptop. Many words have been abbreviated, probably reflecting our fast-food, instant-gratification society:
1984 | 1945 |
ad | advertisement |
exam | examination |
cop | policeman |
champ | champion |
plane | airplane |
Encourage children to learn to spell the words they use in their own writing.
3) Writing Messages
When children write, they don't write words; they write messages. They write letters to grandma or to Uncle Harry and to their friends. They write stories to share in class, and they write reports for their teachers. In doing so, they ask for information, describe an event, or clarify a point they want to make, or they keep a log of events and thoughts to show their parents what they do from day-to-day. It is through these communication efforts that t children realize the value of learning how to spell effortlessly, a condition that is achieved only through writing and attention to the graphic patterns of the language. Therein lies the job of the spelling curriculum - identify the patterns, provide practice, help remember non-pattern words.
Certainly written communication, the message, is the central focus. The conventions of English spelling become important only because they make it easier for all of us to communicate easily with one another in writing. The more we can communicate an attitude of personal responsibility to our children, the more likely they will use a spelling program as a way of improving their writing.
The Write Approach - Personal Words
In addition to the formalized activities in a spelling text, ask children to keep a 3x5" notebook or card file of "Words to Know." These words may be taken from the messages that children write. Record the words with any notation that will help them remember the spelling. Each student develops his or her own reminders.
A words | Personal Notes |
Aggravated | 4 syllables, 3 a's, 1 e "2 g's aggravate me" |
Antidote | 11 "anti" means against |
The Role of Silent Reading
"...external activity cannot be confused with the inner construction of ideas that each person accomplishes when he or she reads. "
A beehive of activity seemed an appropriate image for the classroom. Several groups of children conducted their affairs under the direction of three adults: the teacher and two aides. Some children were drawing pictures, some were playing a game, some were reading aloud in a circle, and a couple were working on computers. "Isn't this a wonderful reading class?" asked my host, the principal. "Look at all this involvement."
I was indeed pleased to see children happily engaged, for I do believe that learning requires constructive participation. But the scene and the comment by the principal suggest an equation that is not necessarily accurate. Activity, movement, busyness: these things do not constitute reading. These activities may be ways to help children focus on some aspect of building meaning, but external activity cannot be confused with the inner construction of ideas that each person accomplishes when he or she reads.
Activities and the discussion contribute to the preparation for and the follow up to personal silent reading. Every child needs regular time to read silently, to contemplate ideas at his or her own pace, a private time to enjoy reading in a personal way. Most readers need to work privately before trying to share ideas with others. After focusing on the topic and gathering past impressions the reader deserves the opportunity to see the written message as a whole. After that, he can discuss questions, make comparisons, and highlight specific passages. Thus, silent reading acts as the central focus for a whole host of other activities.
Sustained Silent Reading
Sustained silent reading (SSR), allows students to self-select materials and read without interruption at a set time each day. Why not set a time in your house for SSR?
The success of SSR is largely determined by the modeling behavior of a "teacher" or parent. The parent must become engrossed in her reading so that she is not interrupted by minor disturbances, and she should be enthusiastic and spontaneous about sharing her reactions to the book.
"The reader deserves the opportunity to see the written message as a whole. Alone."
Persistence Needed
The research indicates that improved reading comprehension and word recognition begin to evolve after six months of SSR. To be effective, therefore, SSR must become a regular activity in your house.
Set up a weekly silent reading time. SSR seems to be more effective with elementary students than with secondary students. It appears that elementary students more easily model their parent's behavior and develop a positive attitude toward silent reading.
| NEWS ABOUT READING | ONLINE EDUCATION | WEB RESOURCES | BOOKS & BULLETINS | DIGESTS & BIBLIOS | FAMILY INFO CENTER | LESSON PLANS | Q & A ARCHIVE | DATABASE SEARCH | CHARACTER ED CENTER |The Clearinghouse on Reading, English, and Communication is an information repository of the Indiana University School of Education.Dr. Carl B. Smith, Professor | SysAdmin: Andy Wiseman
|
